Chance the Rapper’s Musical Playground
Not since fellow Chicago icon Kanye West’s The College Dropout in 2004 has a rapper invented a totally new aesthetic so happy, so inspirational, so kind and funny and friendly and committed to making everybody feel welcome.
Anybody in the market for positive energy should download Chance the Rapper’s new mixtape without delay. Coloring Book, out since May, delivers bright tunes, vivid hooks, warm trumpet, sunny synthesizer, audacious works of pop songcraft, and everywhere what can only be called good vibes. If you’re in a good mood it’ll take you even higher; if you’re not it’s sure to cheer you up a little. Only in rap’s essential edginess category does it fall short, and one thing that makes the record so powerful is its insistence that edginess just doesn’t matter right now.
Not since fellow Chicago icon Kanye West’s The College Dropout in 2004 has a rapper invented a totally new aesthetic so happy, so inspirational, so kind and funny and friendly and committed to making everybody feel welcome. Play Coloring Book up against Dropout, however, and the difference is clear: Chance is even cuter and cuddlier than West, having taken West’s style as his own, nicer model, just as West took Puff Daddy and dozens of lesser crossover rappers as his own respective point of departure. If the Kanye West on Dropout is a cheeky, somewhat infuriatingly smug teenager cracking dumb jokes behind the teacher’s back, Chance is his little brother, yelping and snickering in a voice too gruff to be a child’s but similarly innocent and unaffected. The music he raps over — largely courtesy of neosoul/jazz-fusion backing band The Social Experiment — skips, hops, and springs with elements of gospel and children’s music, while steeped in a similarly emotional tone. And while he’s been known to rap about loneliness and anxiety as well as gang violence in Chicago, he generally puts an optimistic spin on things and keeps his chin up. On Coloring Book especially — more than on 2013’s Acid Rap, his breakthrough mixtape, or 2015’s Surf, so much a group effort that Chance took his name off the project and instead credited it to Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment — the result is comically upbeat and, if not sappy per se, endlessly heartwarming and motivational, piling on the cushy hooks, the greeting-card slogans, the evocations of domestic bliss and cozy community, until the sweetness becomes overwhelming and you either enter kiddie heaven or feel nauseous. Listen to “Wonderful Everyday,” his 2014 cover of the theme song from Arthur on PBS, and know this is a rapper who wants to light up the world and put a smile on your face.
I wish I could say there was a flipside, some antithetical element whose presence would make all this uplift merely one symbolic component in a larger package. Indeed, Acid Rap’s “Cocoa Butter Kisses” finds Chance in a heartbreakingly forlorn mood as he describes alienating himself from his mother by smoking cigarettes, which she can smell on his clothes (“I miss my cocoa butter kisses”), not to mention “Paranoia,” about gang violence and the weather (“Everybody dies in the summer/so pray to God for a little more spring”) — a theme taken up by Coloring Book’s “Summer Friends,” less terrified this time around and more elegiac. But the basic impulse behind the music is escapist, an attempt at creating an immersive realm that can serve as a respite from what ails you. With the crucial exceptions of “Summer Friends” and “Angels,” both of which address impoverished Chicago neighborhoods, Coloring Book dwells on the dark side of the universe mainly by omission. Especially in the context of hip-hop, the record’s lack of anything resembling anger, or swagger, or contempt, or defeatism, or even skepticism is remarkable; instead, behold faith, empathy, outreach. Tagging the project as a deliberate corrective against the scary environment he grew up in and, by extension, the scary emotions that drive so much hip-hop, would be too simple, although certainly his communitarian ethos and radiant major-key choruses function that way. Rather, as the honest issue of his generous soul, it does all that and then some: having (aesthetically) escaped violence and anger, the record then dives down the ostrich hole away from burdens like power and obligation as well. As its title all but announces, Coloring Book is an escape into childhood, its true setting not the inner city but the inner kindergarten.
Channeling childhood from the perspective of a parent, “Blessings,” “All We Got,” and especially “Smoke Break” all reflect on the birth of his daughter and his newfound status as a family man, and “Same Drugs” looks back on childhood from the perspective of having grown up and moved beyond childish things. It couldn’t be any other way; Coloring Book’s nostalgic re-immersion could only come from a place of adult responsibility and longing. Anyway, the record’s big advance over past work is musical — after a bouncy opener featuring the Chicago Children’s Choir, these songs buzz and spill over with jaunty piano chords, mellifluous horns, elastic synthesizers, marching-band fanfares, rhythm violin plus soft string coloring, every now and then a standard keyboard loop, tender lullabies and self-assured choirgirls, grandly sung gospel hymns, dinkily sampled gospel hymns, uplifting ensemble singing and the rich timbre of black soul voices, along with a rousing array of whoops and cheers and wails scattered throughout the record to create an illusion of community, as if Chance were playing to an open audience whose members were free to pitch in any time they felt like it, as strangers pass by in the background. An emotional stunner on par with previous triumphs like “Cocoa Butter Kisses” and “Sunday Candy,” “Same Drugs” is my favorite not just for the way its retrospective lyric contextualizes the record but for the skewed string hook cycling through the song, the piercing guitar riff that illuminates the sky at closing time, the melodic verse/chorus progression that Chance sings so calmly and directly while barely rapping at all. “Summer Friends” stands out for its skippy electronic tunelet and a backup singer whose garbled moan splits the difference between the Beach Boys and church on Sunday. Every song furthers the aesthetic, each contributing to a fun, welcoming, inclusive, family-friendly Dr. Seuss-inspired soundworld.
Chance has fooled around with utopian metaphors before; Surf, dominated by trumpet player Nico Segal, found solace at the beach, like dozens of California pop bands and a few eccentric rappers before him. But Coloring Book’s imagined juvenile paradise, which suits Chance’s goofy, jittery flow exactly, is new for him and also for rap — most rappers treat childhood like something to escape, associated with slums and violence and other sources of anguish left, hopefully, in the past. And, ultimately, it’s hip-hop’s musical form and social context that make Coloring Book’s escapism refreshing rather than toothless. Chance’s aggressive sense of rhythm, emphatic style of vocal chitchat, and rapping in general add a sharpness to music that might otherwise sound sickly sweet, and the project’s hip-hop tag marks its retreat into childhood as a way of rewiring, and cleansing, the genre’s psychology at the root. Once its children grow up, they’ll be a lot kinder, saner, and better-adjusted than we are today, for this is a peaceful childhood, not a traumatized one; nor is it the romanticized/sexualized pre-articulate infancy of indie-rock fantasy. Instead, the record invents a snug little corner of the world where sweet voices sing songs together, hold hands, and every day remind each other: “You are very special/you’re special too/everyone is special/this I know is true when I look at you”.
Cute, celebratory, rather beautiful and genuinely innocent, Coloring Book will soothe you and warm your heart. Just as Chance lauds and ponders the birth of his daughter in song, so does the record reclaim what was once a trauma zone as a happy place in a radical act of parental love.
