Chance the Rapper, if you didn’t already know, is ready to ascend to the top of the rap hierarchy. The runway is clear for takeoff this year. Drake’s gone inert andput out an album of 20 songs, most of which doggedly pursue a sound he perfected almost five years ago (and if you want to talk about character, he’s a 29-year-old who is unwilling to give a naked romantic partner their privacy—if his lyrics are to be believed). Kanye West has become a kind of fantastical Borges character, forever tinkering with shoes and small embellishments on a musical project that, by design, will never be completed. Kendrick Lamar doesn’t seem to be interested in a winning personality and the mainstream success it could bring;he’s got jazz he should keep on making, and everyone knows the best jazz artists are grumps. If Nicki Minaj goes into the booth instead of the courtroom with her spiteful ex, Safaree Samuels, she could take the title, but there’s not enough recent musical material to suggest she’s interested in the crown—especially when there’s Kmart money and fragrance money and ABC Family money to stack.
Here is Chance, then, the kind of person your mother wishes you were friends with, the guy who makes music for “grandmas and babies.” He is very, very good at rapping, can find rhymes in unexpected places and pull his voice like taffy—baby babbling one moment, then singing the next, then mimicking Young Thug’s flow in a kind of self-effacing gesture of flattery, like he does on “Mixtape.” You can hear him smiling around the majority of his words and the feeling is infectious. Unsigned, he’s beholden to no one but his friends, the ones the labels won’t stop shaking down. “Labels told me to my face that they own my friends,” he raps on “Finish Line.” (Lil Wayne and Jay Electronica use their verses to dismiss labels and the false promises of streaming, respectively.) Chance can do whatever he wants right now. The world is his, if he wants it. CHANCE CAN DO WHATEVER HE WANTS RIGHT NOW. THE WORLD IS HIS, IF HE WANTS IT. Of course, the idea of ownership is antithetical to Chance’s project. It sounds absolutely sinful, the way he describes it. His last album, Surf—which was credited to his collaborator Donnie Trumpet and their band the Social Experiment, not Chance—was offered free of charge on iTunes. For Coloring Book, he must have some sort of arrangement with Apple Music that surely compensates him for his music but doesn’t seem to tie him to an old-fashioned 360 contract requiring multiple albums delivered, etc. He's found a new way to realize his vision. Independence is a recurring theme on the album— “How can they call themselves bosses/When they got so many bosses?” he wonders on “Mixtape”—but it wouldn’t be correct to say that Chance is proud of his independence. It’s more like he can’t imagine boundless creativity and happiness without it, which is a contrast to the somewhat bitter flavor of, say, ‘90s rap crew Company Flow and their antagonistic battle cry of “independent as fuck.” It’s not like he’s claiming underground status and is opposed to working with artists attached to labels. He’s not cutting himself off from anyone or anything. It’s the opposite—his arms are open wide enough to, say, make room for a solo song from D.R.A.M.(This kind of generosity is discrete from Drake’s method of sharing the spotlight through remixes and remakes.) “Give Donnie a trumpet in case I get shortness of breath,” he raps on “Blessings.”His selflessness, soundtracked by choirs of angelic voices, feels religious. What matters here is the work, not the worker. Should any given person fail, another must take up the mantle. Anyone could pick up an instrument and contribute to this creation, or just open their mouth up and sing. Except this isn’t true when it comes to art (though maybe it is true of proselytizing—I wouldn’t know). The artist matters, especially because not everyone is this talented.
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