Chance The Rapper is releasing his "first" "album" this month, which of course in contemporary hip hop terms means that he's already made several full-length records of original songs that have been classified as mixtapes. But I was pleasantly surprised when he made his first 2 mixtapes, 10 Day and Acid Rap, available on subscription streaming services (and on vinyl) after years of being available mainly on gray area mixtape sites like DatPiff.com. I never thought I'd be able to easily drop most of these songs into a playlist, so it was fun to finally be able to do that.

Chance The Rapper deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Paranoia featuring Nosaj Thing
2. Mixtape featuring Young Thug and Lil Yachty
3. 14,400 Minutes
4. Good Ass Intro featuring BJ The Chicago Kid and Lili K
5. Familiar with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, King Louie and Quavo
6. 65th & Ingleside
7. Finish Line / Drown featuring T-Pain, Kirk Franklin, Eryn Allen Kane and Noname
8. Cocoa Butter Kisses featuring Vic Mensa and Twista
9. Windows featuring Alex Wiley and Akenya
10. Windows with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, BJ The Chicago Kid and Raury
11. The Man Who Has Everything
12. Juke Juke
13. Smoke Break featuring Future
14. Pusha Man
15. Wanna Be Cool with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, Jeremih, Big Sean and Kyle
16. Blessings featuring Jamila Woods
17. Prom Night
18. Rememory with Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment, Erykah Badu and Ady Suleiman
19. Juke Joint featuring Justin Bieber and Towkio
20. Lost featuring Noname

Tracks 3, 9, 12 and 17 from 10 Day (2012)
Tracks 1, 4, 8, 14 and 20 from Acid Rap (2013)
Tracks 5, 10, 15 and 18 from Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment's Surf (2015)
Tracks 2, 7, 13 and 19 from Coloring Book (2016)
Track 6 from the "65th & Ingleside" single (2018)
Track 11 from the "The Man Who Has Everything" single (2018)

It's been over 3 years since Chance's last full-length project, and I can't help but wonder if the next record's reception will suffer for that. I was impressed with how well he stayed in the public eye in the 3 years between Acid Rap and Coloring Book, with a lot of great features and a major role on his Social Experiment bandmate Nico Segal's album Surf (under the alias Donnie Trumpet that he, understandably, didn't feel right about continuing to use after the 2016 election). Lately it feels like Chance is just this overexposed pop culture guy that people are rooting against, whether because of his Super Bowl ad with the Backstreet Boys or that regrettable sequence events that led to the actual Donald Trump thanking Chance on Twitter. 

The most significant music Chance released in the last few years was the 6 singles he released in 2018, 4 at once in July and then 2 more in November. And I think that was probably the worst way for him to put that music out, the songs were excellent but probably would've gone over better as an EP. The biggest of them, "I Might Need Security," didn't make all that much noise, and I wanted to spotlight a couple of the other ones, "65th & Ingleside" is one of my favorite songs he's ever done and I'm assuming none of that stuff will be on the album.

His influences have always been right on his sleeve, but Chance has really created his own sound, to the point that all the dozens of guests on this playlist largely feel like they're on his sonic turf. And I think he kind of subtly shifted the nature of rap stardom in cool ways. There have been a lot of semantic arguments about Chance -- whether he's a "Christian rapper" or just a rapper who's Christian, whether his releases were "albums" or "mixtapes," whether he's truly an "independent" artist. Yes, releasing a record exclusively through Apple Music is not the most indie thing in the world, but Chance doing one-off deals that are beneficial to him is still a huge step up from guys with similar huge mixtape buzz getting locked into 7 album deals with major labels.

I hope Chance's new stuff is great and kind of turns around the current mood about him, I think re-releasing the old stuff was smart to remind people of how they felt the first time they heard Acid Rap. I shouldn't say first time -- it took me a couple months for it to really grow on me, I found some of Chance's odd vocal tics kind of annoying, but after a while I started to really like how he combined the impish adolescence with spirituality and writerly erudition.

But yeah, Acid Rap really holds up for me, probably a top 3 mixtape of this decade. One thing I really like about the new release of it is that it finally separates "Pusha Man" and "Paranoia" into 2 separate tracks where they once ran together. "Paranoia" is still a really powerful song, maybe the best thing he's ever made, it was always awkward that it was basically a hidden track on another song, and it felt good to let it stand on its own as the opening track here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 09, 2019 at 8:51 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.