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Turning life lessons into a Korporate Bidness Donovan Price turns to YouTube to hilariously highlight what #BlackChicagoBeLike. By TYRA NICOLE TRICHE
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hen you were in high school, did you ever sneak into a girl’s house after school? And did her dad happen to come home, after being fired from work, in the midst of the action? So you hid in the bathroom, only for him to come in there and poop while you’re hiding behind the shower curtain? Well, Korporate has. “Aw, you wanted to know how I got up out the jam?” he asks. “I channelled my inner Spidy senses, fuck you talm ’bout.” This is a scene from #BlackChicagoBeLikePart49, and at this point Korporate has somehow wedged himself between the shower walls and pressed himself against the ceiling. But he makes it out alive. And the moral of the story? “If her pops ain’t part of the union at his job, don’t fuck with her.” You might recognize Donovan Price, better known as Korporate, from your Facebook time line or YouTube feed. He considers himself an all-around entertainer, much like Childish Gambino, but began his career as a rapper. While starting to post his music to social media, he noticed that established artists he followed often posted funny content from across the Internet in between posts about their careers. “It pretty much came to me, What if that content that I was dropping in between dropping music was me?” he says. The idea
16 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 21, 2019
prompted him to start uploading short skits to Facebook in April 2015. It wasn’t until January 2016 that he released the first #ChicagoNiggazBeLike video and began posting on his YouTube channel, Korporate Bidness. He later made the decision to change the title of his videos to #BlackChicagoBeLike. The name, he says, is not a reference to race. Rather, he has the Black market in mind. “#BlackChicagoBeLike is meant to show life in Chicago on the other side of Michigan Avenue,” he says. The goal of his YouTube videos is to accurately portray life on the city’s south and west sides, areas that are often disregarded or inaccurately depicted in the media. He believes uplifting Chicago is “one of the most important jobs” that he has, so he’s made it a point to partner with fellow Chicago creatives and consistently promote local businesses in his videos.
His #BlackChicagoBeLike videos are typically short, between two to four minutes long, and they act much like diary entries as he narrates the tales like memories. He writes the scripts, records the videos, and edits them himself. “I remember what video I posted to YouTube that triggered the algorithm and allowed me to have a consistent flow of subscribers and views,” he says. “I had a young man playing me as a child, and I told a story about when I had my first fight.” That was #BlackChicagoBeLikePart44, which now rests at 7.2 million views. The video is a two-minute-long skit in which a young Donovan gets hit in the eye by another kid, Pooh Man, while walking home after school eating Frooties that he refuses to let Pooh Man have. When Donovan gets home, clearly injured, his older brother asks, “What the fuck
happened to you, boa?” After hearing about the incident, he proceeds to force Donovan to go back outside and defend himself, saying to him, “If you don’t beat his ass, Imma beat yo ass.” The lingo and mannerisms of each of the characters is so quintessentially Chicago it’s hard not to laugh if you’re from here. It’s been two years since that video was posted, and the momentum it created has yet to be interrupted. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for different people to capture Chicago correctly,” Price says. “I.e., that Chiraq movie. No shade to The Chi, but they don’t capture it well either. Not to take away from it being a good show with good story lines and shit, but if you gon’ call it The Chi, it’s got to be Chicago. And it just ain’t that.” Seeing shows and movies present such a flawed portrayal of the people, places, and things that make Chicago what it is inspired #BlackChicagoBeLikeTheSeries, which Price started in February. The first season follows Donovan as he seeks revenge after a family member gets shot. These episodes are longer than his #BlackChicagoBeLikeVideos, typically about seven minutes each. Price says that he’s always had a passion for storytelling and teaching, and each of his #BlackChicagoBeLike videos as well as #BlackChicagoBeLikeTheSeries season one concludes with a life lesson. Some of the lessons are lighthearted—at the end of the video recounting his first fight, he says, “Moral of the story, bro, and I learned this at an early age: Mu’fuckas that do the most usually ain’t on shit. On God.” Other videos have more profound takeaways, like the lesson that runs throughout #BlackChicagoBeLikeTheSeries’ first season about gun violence and handling the aftermath, contemplating whether retaliating against the initial shooter is really worth it. Since Price started his YouTube channel it’s amassed more than a million subscribers, and he’s quickly gaining recognition in the city. During our time chatting at the Starbucks on the corner of 71st and Stony Island, it felt as if everyone knew him—several people stopped him to shake his hand and congratulate him on his success. It’s proof that the authenticity of his videos has captured the hearts of his viewers and allowed him to truly impact his audience. He mentioned a comment he’d received on
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