<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"A few weeks ago, I had the AMAZING opportunity to go see (and interview!) Chiddy Bang at the San Francisco stop of Chegg.com&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Textbooks and Tickets&amp;quot; Tour. The concert was awesome for so many reasons! First of all, I LOVE Chiddy Bang. They&amp;#039;re a hip-hop duo from Philly \u2014 Chiddy is the emcee, and Xaphoon Jones is the DJ/producer \u2014 who combine rap with indie/electronica elements to make really awesome songs. (Check out &amp;quot;Opposite of Adults&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Pass Out&amp;quot; - those are my faves!) They met in college at Drexel University, and after a year, they dropped out to pursue musical careers \u2014 and their careers are really taking off.   Chiddy Second, the concert was free! That&amp;#039;s because it was part of Chegg.com&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Textbooks and Tickets&amp;quot; Tour, and all the shows on the tour are free for college students. Chegg is a textbook rental company, which helps students save money on the cost of school books, which are super expensive. With that money-saving theme in mind, Chegg created this awesome event specifically for college kids. Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Chegg, was kind enough to give me his perspective on the decision to create the tour: &amp;quot;With two daughters, Rachel who is headed to college and Samantha who is two years away, I can fully appreciate both the cost and the stress on today&amp;#039;s college students and their families. If students are working hard and trying to save themselves and their families money by renting from Chegg, they deserve some fun! College is hard enough. Sometimes you just need to party (except, of course, my daughters... Keep studying!)&amp;quot;   Xaphoon I had so, so, SO much fun at the concert. I went with my four best friends, and we managed to wrestle our way to the very front of the crowd. It was so awesome. What was even more awesome was my trip backstage after the show to interview Chiddy and Xaphoon. I asked them what their plans for life were when they entered school, how they got their careers going and what advice they have for college students. Check out the interview below!  Before you met at school, what were you planning on doing with your lives? Xaphoon: Exact same thing. Chiddy: Yeah, I was planning on doing the exact same thing, but I had to satisfy my parents&amp;#039; expectations, so I had to make myself believe I was gonna be a business dude. Xaphoon: I didn&amp;#039;t know if hip-hop was gonna be what I was in. I was producing rock bands and doing Motown/soul DJ nights and stuff, but I loved all of it... I went [to college] because I figured there would be other people trying to do what I wanted to do, and luckily I met Chiddy, so it worked out. Did you think when you left college that you would reach success immediately? Had you already come out with some tracks that had received good feedback? C: It was a weird transition. X: We did a full year, started in the fall and finished in the spring, and we dropped out in the spring. But there was a period in the summer where the whole world thought that we had dropped off the map. I went and got a job as a chef \u2014 and knocked out my tooth and lost my job, that was wild... And Chiddy went on tour with De La Sol. But there was no real plan. And then Chiddy got a manager in New York when he came back in the fall, and the manager was like, we wanna get the kid who was originally making the beats. So, they found me and we teamed up and we released a mixed tape. So it&amp;#039;s not like we dropped out after everything was set. We dropped out at a point where - I wasn&amp;#039;t even in the band... But we did drop out after we had played a couple of shows that weren&amp;#039;t at our home college and the kids knew the words. C: We had been doing shows at these colleges out of state. X: Yeah, so for me, seeing kids sing the lyrics back to you at a show was enough for me to be, like, all right, I can drop out and even if I don&amp;#039;t get to be in Chiddy Bang, I can figure something out. But I did get to be in Chiddy Bang! C: Yeah, definitely. I think another turning point was one of our first times coming to California. We performed at USC, and shot a video - there were actually two videos for Opposite of Adults, and that was the first one we did, we shot it at USC. And it&amp;#039;s just us at this frat, a live-show performance. At that point I was like... I guess people know what&amp;#039;s up, people know what we&amp;#039;re doing. We went to the west coast, that&amp;#039;s far from home. Where is home for each of you? X: Philadelphia. C: Mine&amp;#039;s currently in the Poconos of Pennsylvania. Do you have any advice \u2014 on any topic \u2014 for the readers of Seventeen&amp;#039;s Freshman 15 College Blog? X: I would say the best advice I can give is, in a world where everybody wants to rap and everybody wants to make songs and everybody wants to follow their dreams, you need to figure out what makes you unique. You need to figure out what makes you different from everybody else and you need to expand upon that and you need to do you. C: And I would also say to aspiring musicians who are coming up in the college world: try to use the college as your platform. Try to build up a little following there. Even when we were at Drexel, we had a solid 300 [person] fanbase. X: Rappers want to skip the college and go straight to the club and pick up a fat check... C: You gotta build it \u2014 grassroots. X: Yeah. If you wanna be a rapper or in electronic music or anything that&amp;#039;s maybe not very &amp;quot;grassroots-y&amp;quot; or punk rock, you still need to have that mentality. You need to go play tours where you lose money, and you need to go live in dusty vans, and you need to go put in that sweat and build a fanbase. C: Our first shows we played in our boys&amp;#039; basement. X: We couldn&amp;#039;t even stand up, the ceilings were so low. C: That&amp;#039;s how we started. X: I&amp;#039;d DJ for an hour, he&amp;#039;d play one song, I&amp;#039;d DJ for another hour, he&amp;#039;d play the second song. We&amp;#039;d have two songs and that&amp;#039;d be it. So, yeah \u2014 think like punk rock, but do you. C: Do you.  HUGE thanks to Seventeen and Chegg for this awesome opportunity! It was a fantastic experience :) XO Casi "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/life/school/advice/a13846/chegg-chiddy-bang-tour/>