Put money on it: by the end of the year, you\u2019re going to hear Chance The Rapper earworms on commercials and in all places where catchy and cool musical segues are needed.\u00a0 It\u2019s a Moby 1999 kind of album in which every single song has an obsession-inducing hook.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s a lot more.<\/p>\n
This is hip-hop that\u2019s not East Coast, South Coast, or West Coast.\u00a0 Nor is it beholden to the Chicago rap and hip-hop scene of Chief Keef and the drill scene. Chance \u2013 Chancelor Bennett of Chicago, a 20 year old wunderkind<\/i> kicked out of one of the city\u2019s best private schools who turned the experience into one of the most sought after mixtapes of 2011 \u2013 is creating a sound all his own, and it is summed up by the album\u2019s title, which is not metaphoric: this is rap written with the help of a lot of LSD, by a young man experiencing both it and adulthood for the first time.\u00a0 Think Wayne Coyne, if he\u2019d grown up on the South Side of Chicago in the 2000s.<\/p>\n
But this album also represents a kind of hip-hop Holden Caulfield moment.\u00a0 Except that Chance is actually likeable, funny, and fresh.\u00a0 He swaggers, then giggles at his own swagger.\u00a0 He self-inflates, then pops his own bubble. \u00a0He tells raw tales of friends gunned down, and couples them with an \u00a0irritating, childish, yet haunting verbal tic that reproduces itself across most of the album\u2019s songs, continually morphing, repeating, and burrowing into your brain:\u00a0 na na na na\u00a0 na na na na.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n Na na NAH na na, na na NAH na, na.<\/p>\n Nyah nyah nyah nyah NYAH nyah.<\/p>\n Put the accent on different syllables.\u00a0 Stretch the vowels in Goldberg Variation manner.\u00a0 Bring them to the foreground here, bury them in the background there.\u00a0 Add yips, Buddy Holly hiccups, and over-emoted falsetto intakes of breath.\u00a0 Turn them into aural riddles, or knock-knock jokes, predictable in their premise but always surprising with their punch lines.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While the album\u2019s recurring motif is this ever-changing group of nonsense utterances, what attracts is the album\u2019s insistence on the analog.\u00a0 There are few electronic gimmicks, or mixology magic.\u00a0 Instead, most songs are built on sounds that could have been produced in the 1970s:\u00a0 flutes, pianos acoustic and electric, old-school bass guitars, and wah-wah guitars that hark to Nile Rogers or smooth \u201870s soul.\u00a0 There are more than a few resemblances \u2013 homages \u2013 to Dungeon Family, OutKast, and Goodie Mob.\u00a0 Chance\u2019s voice resembles that of Lil Wayne, and the nasality may put some listeners off.\u00a0 Yeah, sure, there are the usual (if unpredictable and still riveting) samples that one expects in this genre, the headline collaborations (Childish Gambino!\u00a0 Action Bronson!\u00a0 <\/span>Wu Tang!), the machismo.\u00a0 But what sets this album apart is the sheer joy, freshness, and wonder of discovering one\u2019s own power to capture and hold the world through narrative.\u00a0 That emerging understanding that describing the world through words is more powerful than bombs, drones, or guns permeates every song.\u00a0 At one point, Chance laughs as he makes a meta-commentary about how crisp the lines he\u2019s just delivered really are.\u00a0 Like us, he can\u2019t believe how good his words can be.\u00a0 He\u2019s as surprised, and naively delighted, as we are.<\/p>\n On this album, Chance is growing up, and he\u2019s letting us in on the process. Songs range from silly, to angry, to lovely. <\/i>\u201cCocoa Butter Kisses\u201d taps into the universal love that kids have for grandmothers.\u00a0 It\u2019s warm and soothing, until the pace quickens and Chance\u2019s bitterness surfaces on a rapid fire rap:\u00a0 \u201cDeadbeat dad, enough of that jazz, asshole, absinthe up in that class \/ Are we there yet? Ice cubes in a bong, we’re brain dead, take a tug and then pass.\u201d\u00a0 The next song, \u201cJuice\u201d (the first single) is lyrical joy, with Chance scanning across rhymes in profoundly pleasing and smile-inducing ways, and a big pumped up chorus that will be playing out of fraternity windows for the next few years. But the guts of this album are three songs that come in succession later.\u00a0 On \u201cFavorite Song,\u201d Childish Gambino offers a cameo verse over some seriously acid-induced beats and interestingly allusive lyrics, including a hilarious dis of Harlem Shake aficionados.\u00a0 \u201cNaNa,\u201d strung across a bass line that will infect your dreams.\u00a0 It segues immediately into \u201cSmoke Again\u201d featuring a terrific appearance by Ab-Soul, sounding like Darth Vader two feet below the ocean\u2019s surface.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>Chance devotes the song to a litany of reasons to enjoy a variety of mind-altering substances, in rhymes and verbal rhythms intricate and perverse, with shout outs to Drake, No Doubt, Trayvon Martin, and the Dukes Of Hazzard.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Acid Rap <\/i>is almost too catchy for its own good.\u00a0 But should you pay attention to Chancelor Bennett? \u00a0Absolutely.\u00a0 Music may end up being too constrained a medium for his creativity.\u00a0\u00a0 Enjoy it while it lasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":31508,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[9161],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-43209","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-chance-the-rapper","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43209"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}