May 17, 2016

think Narsh beat me to the punch on linking it but



@WPGHive
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Is Chance the Rapper okay? A year ago, he cancelled a string of shows, word spreading via an eerily sterile third-person post on his normally tic-riddled Twitter account. Almost a year to the day before that tweet, he pulled out of Coachella and cancelled a couple of satellite shows. Last week, his scheduled set at a charity concert in New York had to be covered by Joey Badass, Mark Ronson, and Anderson .Paak as Chance checked into a local hospital.

Four days after that third hospitalization, Chance’s third solo mixtape,Coloring Book, was released exclusively on Apple Music. On the cover he’s smiling–beaming–while he looks down at his daughter, who was born to his longtime girlfriend last July. On his hat is the number 3, a reference to his roundly acclaimed verse on “Ultralight Beam,” the opening song from Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. (“He said, ‘Let’s do a good-a--- job with Chance 3/ I hear you gotta sell it snatch the Grammy/ Let’s make it so free and the bars so hard that it ain’t one gosh-darn part you can’t tweet.’”)

Kanye billed Pablo as an experiment in gospel, and while “Ultralight Beam” defines that album to some, it’s really only joined by the West-less sermon on “Low Lights” and the Biblical reckoning on “Wolves” in exploring that world. (A generous reading might include songs like “Waves,” “Highlights,” or even “FML,” but those mostly grapple with the same pop-morality that’s marked Kanye’s work since the beginning.) As it turns out, it was the protege who dove headlong into the church. Coloring Book is, with a few notable detours, an hour-long act of praise.

But first we should talk about those detours. They’re usually not telegraphed: “Finish Line” is the album’s climax, and it’s supposed to be bright, joyous, redemptive. And sometimes it does sound like a victory lap, like when he raps–at the tail end of a record that features half the industry–”I’ve been getting blocked just trying to make songs with friends/ Labels told me to my face that they own my friends.” But look at this passage from the first verse:

“Scars on my head, I’m the boy who lived
The boy love playing when the boy too sic
Reclining on a prayer, I’m declining the help
I’ve been lying to my body, can’t rely on myself
Last year, I got addicted to Xans
Suffocated my name, started missing my chance”

That’s not the only point on Coloring Book where he mentions pill addiction; on the first “Blessings,” he says “I know them drugs isn’t close, ain’t no visiting heaven.” So despite how bright and breezy it sounds, it’s hard, at least for me, to consider those lines and the hospitalizations, imagine the pressure of being a father, and not pause to worry about Chance when T-Pain sings “All my days, I prayed and prayed, and now I see the finish line.” On the “Blessings” reprise, which is separated from “Finish Line” only by Noname Gypsy’s excellent “Drown,” a chorus of Anderson .Paak, Ty Dolla $ign, and BJ the Chicago Kid singing “Are you ready for your blessings?” has the same effect.

Of course, fear of death isn’t the only reason someone might dive into their religiosity, and Coloring Book is not necessarily a meditation on Chance’s mortality. The converted might argue that praising God when things are good is even more important than pleading when times get tough. The cynic might look to Chance’s political pedigree and wonder if he isn’t just shoring up the base. In any event, the 23-year-old Chicagoan is probably fine, and I’m probably filtering his record through my own neuroses when I think it’s weighed down by his. And unfortunately, I feel comfortable arguing that last point because most of Coloring Book is so blandly, boringly happy.

Acid Rap was about a well-meaning kid being pulled apart at the seams by house parties and shootings and funerals and his first acid tabs. Chance was desperate for answers, desperate for direction–or on a song like “Paranoia,” simply desperate to be heard. On Coloring Book, he has all the answers. From the first song, he’s giving Satan swirlies and making Earl Grey tea. He opens the first “Blessings” by rapping “I don’t make songs for free, I make ‘em for freedom”–a nice enough thought if the ghost of Steve Jobs wasn’t holding the record hostage for two weeks. Too often, the tape makes me feel like I’m being sold something, like I’m on Hollywood and Vine being shouted at by a street preacher.

The overbearing sunniness is seldom given any context or born from any friction. Take the Future-featuring “Smoke Break,” which is a disorganized collection of platitudes and folksy nostalgia. Take the moment in “All We Got,” where he calls his life perfect, then realizes he could probably “merch it.” Maybe it’s a question of worldview; I can’t wrap my head around being this upbeat in the face of death, or even in the face of a long flight or a dentist’s appointment. It’s flat, and despite Chance’s earnest, eager vocals, it’s usually unconvincing.

It’s also, without doubt, a creative problem. There’s certainly nothing wrong with happiness, and while most great rap records put joy of some sort front and center for a couple of songs, there’s a reason Kanye’s verse on Honest was so bad, why Future’s life had to fall apart for him to hit his creative peak, why songs about peaceful domesticity don’t strike any lasting cords. You have to hold the good days in opposition to something–as our Curtis Jackson would say, joy wouldn’t feel so good if it wasn’t for pain.

And in fact, Chance is at his most interesting when he pulls in the conflicts he explored more thoroughly on Acid Rap. “Summer Friends” is about the epidemic of violence (and overfunding of the police) in his hometown, and the excellent, Saba-featuring lead single, “Angels,” references the same phenomenon. On each song, Chance finds a way to be moving in a way that few rappers working today are able to. He’s always been an astute, effective writer when he turns to the outside world and the people in it, and Coloring Book would be markedly better if he spent more time outside himself.

On the album’s B-side, there’s a two-song suite that should have Chance on the radio through the summer’s dog days. “Juke Jam” carries the torch for songs-about-dance-songs, and while Justin Bieber sounds like he misses the warmth of Diplo’s letter jacket, but Towkio gives us the flip of R. Kelly’s “Feelin’ on Your Booty” that we desperately need. “All Night” has an unfortunate, J. Coleian line about farting, but is first to market as an undeniable club song about fake friends trying to crowd your Uber. On each song, he puts the evangelizing on hold and the record flows much more smoothly. There’s also a bit of grit to each, which is sorely missed in all the celebration; I’m much more ready for songs about the night before than the church-and-brunch combo from the next morning.

Chance watches Young Thug float on “Mixtape” while his own nod toDa Drought 3 only serves to highlight how toothless his own record is by comparison. Then Chance, Thug, and the rest of us are forced to grit our teeth through another interminable Lil Yachty cameo. I saw Lil Yachty perform last night, and his hypeman wore a Mike Richards L.A. Kings jersey, which is a pretty damning thing to do, and which you understand if you’re a part of #MemeRapAndAllegedDrugDealingHockeyPlayersTwitter.

There are cuts that never really get off the ground for more technical reasons: “Same Drugs” is a concept with a ton of heft, but the writing is too anonymous to really cut through. Once it gets going, “How Great” has some superb lines (“You meet anyone from my city, they gon’ say that we cousins”) but hears them mostly overwhelmed by Chance’s Jay Electronica impression, and by Jay E’s middling verse. “D.R.A.M. Sings Special” opens like it might be an even more psychedelic version of Makonnen’s “Trust Me Danny,” but ends up being a buttoned-up Debra Laws update. Not my thing, but I hope he got his publishing.

There’s little doubt that the best song on Coloring Book is “No Problem,” the Brasstracks-produced, Lil Wayne- and 2 Chainz-featuring single. For once, the brightness is colored by frustration–”If one more label try to stop me, it’s gon’ be some dread-head n----s in the lobby.” But it’s also buoyed by the guests; the former Tity Boi invokes Petey Pablo and says “Inside of the Maybach look like it came out of Ikea.” and Wayne’s verse is transfixing, arriving by way of a flattened-out, dead-eyed delivery. Yet even within those confines, it packs more emotional weight (“Hold up–get too choked up when I think of old stuff“) than nearly anything Chance raps on the album.

This is the irony about Chance’s work that Coloring Book reveals. He’s an incisive writer when it comes to external forces, and has figured out how to communicate mood in his vocals. But he’s not yet to the point where he can articulate the bluntest feelings–sorrow, joy–in memorable ways. It’s a blind spot in his writing that could, in theory, be colored in, but for now it seems he has little incentive or desire to do so. The Chance on Coloring Book spends a lot of time trafficking in recent-nostalgia signifiers, because they’re neat placeholders for the real thing.

When I was a kid, I would have described my parents as passively religious–we were Anglicans in Calgary, Lutherans when we moved to Minneapolis and the Anglican church didn’t have covered parking. I haven’t been to church except for weddings and funerals in a handful of years. But I was annoyed with my Jewish girlfriend last month when she said she had no plans for us to celebrate Passover. It thought it was a bad omen, and then I went back to WebMD.

For the past few months, I’ve been convinced that I’m dying. It’s the kind of compulsion that leads me down symptom-checker k-holes but keeps me from making all my doctor’s appointments; I’ve been through four- and five-night stretches where I have recurring dreams about hospitals and hospices. I’ll be able to distract myself for a few hours, but that anxiety starts seeping back in, then turns quickly into a sort of paralysis that keeps me from doing anything constructive, or even imagining what that might look like. My mind starts to reel with all the things that might be killing me, then it shuts down completely.

What I’m saying is that I want to believe: in something bigger than me, in an afterlife, in a happy, talented kid from the Midwest. But Coloring Book is too thin, and at points too trite to confront any of the existential questions that it pretends are already answered. So even if unquestioning praise can be hard to critique–who wants to rain on communion?–it’s not quite enough to win any new converts.


http://www.passionweiss.com/2016/05/17/ultra-light-bland-chance-the-rappers-coloring-book/

 

May 17, 2016

 

May 17, 2016

Actually my favorite thing ive read from you in a minute, great job man

and lol yeah i saw jeff post it on twitter and had the other thread open so i linked it

 

May 17, 2016

Good write up

What would you give the album @WPG?

I'm feeling a 7 or 8

 

May 17, 2016

if i had to pick between 6 and 7, probably 6, but on a pitchfork scale something like a 6.4

 

May 17, 2016

And acid rap? That's on my to listen list

 

May 17, 2016

Acid Rap was great honestly, think you'll like it more than CB

 

May 17, 2016

Acid Rap is a lot better, to me. High 7s, low 8s--its highlights ("Juice," "Chain Smoker," etc) are absolutely astonishing, but there's definitely some middling stuff on there too. It might be more accurate to call it a great resume for a rapper than a great rap record in and of itself. 10 Day isn't fully formed in any way but has some great songs in its own right. I'm not big on Surf.

 

May 17, 2016

Good read

 

May 17, 2016

yeah there is definitly not a song on CB as good as Chain Smoker.

 

May 17, 2016

featured

 

May 17, 2016

I would say my thoughts on the album are pretty dead in the middle of this and all the annoyingly positive reviews the album has gotten. It's definitely a tape that I'll really enjoy having on rotation this summer, and that's bc I don't think a lot of it needs the grit your article suggests for it to be throughly enjoyed. But I do agree it could use more substance outside of Chance's personal, sometimes vague happiness, and all the hype and praise it's gotten have taken away from the album for me at least. Like honestly most of these reviews seem blinded by what a likable guy Chance seems to be and haven't tried to bring up any actual criticism, which is very annoying to keep on reading. It'll be a fun album to play this summer, but it's definitely not the masterpiece many are making it out to be. In some ways it almost feels to The College Dropout what The Force Awakens is to A New Hope, if that makes any sense haha

 

May 17, 2016

yeah nothing worse than people appreciating music

 

May 17, 2016

lol I usually share this sentiment but when things are acclaimed on this level, they actually do have a palpable effect on rap, insofar as they dictate who gets money, PR pushes, etc.

 

May 17, 2016

100% agree. Don't mind the 'church n brunch' tracks but wouldn't have minded if there were a few less.

Nice tape, definitely not better than Acid Rap.

 

May 17, 2016

Haha I obviously don't care people appreciate and enjoy the music, I've already said I think it's a really good album actually, but imo when a major publication it reviewing something the critic should be able to balance their personal enjoyment of the project with the how good they think the project holds outside of it. I just think most of reviews that have come out so far have been more caught up on the former. And I'm glad the reviewers really like the music I'm actually a huge chance fan I just think most of the reviews I've read have either chose to ignore some of the albums weaker parts or are just still blinded by the excitement of the album to recognize them yet. so ya seeing a lot of sites do that can get kinda annoying

 

May 17, 2016

It thought it was a bad omen, and then I went back toWebMD.

Wat

 

May 17, 2016

Damm that was a great piece. There are some spotty moments (see Yachtys "verse", Same Drugs being a snoozer) but there's something warm about this project that struck a chord with me. I find the calls for salvation endearing and I liked the ebullient tone in most of the songs like Angels, No Problem, All Night.

 

May 17, 2016

did you read literally one sentence past that lol

 

May 17, 2016

Shouldn't it be "I thought it was a bad omen,"?