The Redemption of Chance the Rapper
When Chance the Rapper declared “I met Kanye West, I’m never going to fail” on “Ultralight Beam,” the opener from West’s 2016 album, “The Life of Pablo,” the sentiment seemed self-evident. West was at the height of his cultural influence and had handpicked Chance, a fellow Chicago native, as his protégé—the successor to the soul-drenched, worshipful hip-hop that West had popularized in the mid-two-thousands. Already one of the genre’s most vibrant young talents, Chance had established himself as a clever and perceptive lyricist who sang as dynamically as he rapped, his nasally, animated voice skirting and snapping over brightly colored beats that blended gospel and blues, jazz and R. & B., drill and funk. He was earnest and intelligent, a politically conscious rapper whose father had worked for then Senator Barack Obama and who wrote songs about going to church with his grandmother. Crucially, he also possessed a street-smart edge that complicated his cheery demeanor. He was a chain-smoking stoner who dropped LSD and drove around Chicago with a blunt in his mouth and a gun on his hip, suspended from school and not at all mad about it. His first three full-length projects—the 2012 mixtape “10 Day,” its landmark 2013 follow-up “Acid Rap,” and a collaborative album called “Surf,” made in 2015 with his band the Social Experiment—received near-universal acclaim. A few months after delivering his “Ultralight Beam” verse, Chance released “Coloring Book,” his third mixtape, which was immediately beloved and went on to win a Grammy. It seemed all too likely that Chance was never going to fail. How could he? At twenty-three years old, he was on top of the world.
As has become clear in recent years, an affiliation with West does not preclude failure; these days, it all but assures it. In the almost ten years since releasing “Pablo,” West, who now goes by Ye, has voiced support for Donald Trump and expressed admiration for Hitler; some of his newest songs glorify Nazism and have been banned from streaming platforms. Chance, on the other hand, has experienced his own, much different, fall from grace. Shortly after “Coloring Book” came out, his team pressured MTV News to pull a critical review of one of his concerts, a move that generated backlash from both the press and the public. A few years later, after West first endorsed Trump, Chance defended his mentor—“Black people don’t have to be democrats,” he tweeted—then retracted his defense and issued an apology. He became an ambassador for Kit Kat and Doritos, acting in commercials and writing jingles that sounded eerily similar to his actual music. In 2023, he débuted as a coach on NBC’s singing competition “The Voice,” where the judges are often older musicians who are past their prime. Although these missteps may seem quaint, especially compared to the situations some embattled entertainers find themselves in, they appeared to expose an inconsistency in Chance’s music, and perhaps even in his character. Chance had, throughout his catalogue, proudly flaunted his status as an independent artist, writing entire songs about not signing to a major label and not bending the knee to corporate interest. What had happened to this ethic? What, in fact, were his values?
Throughout his post-“Acid Rap” œuvre, Chance has often adopted the posture of a finger-wagging father, extolling the virtues of prayer, monogamy, and parenthood to an audience who first tuned in to his mixtapes because they, too, liked dropping acid. In 2019, he alienated much of this audience by releasing “The Big Day,” a concept album about his wedding. As Jia Tolentino wrote for The New Yorker just before the record’s release, in an essay about the rise of “my wife” humor, “If you want to avoid becoming a meme on the Internet, it is a mistake to display exorbitant possessiveness over a romantic partner.” Chance, not heeding this advice, became the subject of a devastating meme campaign that culminated in a parody track titled “I Love My Wife.” (This gag, like the Kit Kat jingle, had the effect of making Chance’s music seem one-dimensional and frivolous; it arguably did more damage to his reputation than anything he did himself.) Chance’s music had long toed the line between cringe and candor, cliché and creativity; he brilliantly interpolated the “Arthur” theme song, for instance, then not so brilliantly performed alongside “Sesame Street”-style characters at his concerts—the margin between being cool and powerfully uncool was razor thin. “The Big Day” veered headlong into uncoolness, boasting cartoonish gospel raps without the depth, edge, or provocations of his past work. The popular YouTube music critic Anthony Fantano gave the record a zero out of ten; Rolling Stone ranked it as one of the most disappointing albums of all time. “I’m getting this crazy feeling that people want me to kill myself,” Chance tweeted in response to his fans’ revolt. Flopping, of course, is a rite of passage for a pop star, not necessarily a career-ending—or life-ending—event. Chance’s comment, despite being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, revealed how unfamiliar he was with failure.
Six years later, Chance has quietly returned with a new album, “Star Line,” which came out last week. Since first announcing the project in 2022, he’s spent years slyly promoting it, steering his promotional strategy away from the spotlight and the discourse surrounding him. He put out a series of singles that had little commercial viability, organized a music festival in Ghana, and hosted intimate listening parties at museums and art spaces in cities such as New Orleans and Miami. Through it all, the lone headline that effortlessly entered the Zeitgeist and reinvigorated the internet’s obsession with Chance was an unfortunate one: he and his wife were getting a divorce. For a generation of fans, Chance is chiefly known as a wife guy who made a whole album about being a wife guy. His divorce, naturally, struck many people as a delicious twist of fate. Would Chance ever escape the clutches of this public cruelty? Could he rehabilitate his image and reëstablish himself as an artist worthy of respect? “Star Line” arrived under these pretenses, saddled with the difficult task of reacquainting the world with Chance after several tumultuous years.
If “Coloring Book” and “The Big Day” captured Chance’s overconfident, big-eyed entrance into adulthood, “Star Line” finds the now thirty-two-year-old rapper sturdier and wiser, navigating a strange new phase in his life with seriousness and purpose. Where he was once buoyed by an unshakable belief in God and in marriage, he’s now questioning everything, having been spurned by forces he once placed his faith in: fame, fans, friends, the church. This increased skepticism, though, should not be mistaken for cynicism; Chance is as lively as ever, finding silver linings even in the systemic ills he identifies throughout the record. (The album’s title is inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line, the steamship company rooted in Black liberation and utopianism.) On “Just a Drop,” he details the difficult living conditions in low-income neighborhoods—the lack of clean water and habitable homes, the impossibility of economic mobility—while also celebrating the solidarity that exists in spite of these realities: “We need enough land for the porches and stoops / So we can lean out the fortress and forge us a coup.” “Letters” critiques megachurches and the commodification of Christianity before ending on a call to action, a directive to “slay that giant” and “kill that tyrant,” to return to a faith that can’t be bought, sold, or controlled. These songs are reminders of the singular, ardent perspective that made Chance a star, how skillfully and precisely he can still relay messages of joy and resilience.
One of the foundational problems with “The Big Day” was how significantly it limited Chance’s subject matter, pinholing his dynamic point-of-view through a narrow lens. “Star Line,” however, grapples with any number of themes and ideas. On “No More Old Men,” an homage to elders and old heads, the ones who’ve spent decades fighting injustice and building community, Chance considers young people’s dwindling respect for these leaders: “They say Chi don’t dance no more / And the little kids don’t got a chance no more / They ain’t even trying to free the old man no more / One day there won’t be no old man no more.” Although a critique of the current cultural climate, the song finishes on a note of optimism, with Chance emphasizing the enduring importance of ancestral wisdom. Elsewhere, he recounts the advice his father gave him as a child—“These the kind of lectures out of Harvard or Yale,” he raps on “Speed of Love”—or proffers advice of his own, as he does on the self-empowerment jams “Speed of Light” and “Pretty.” There’s a sense of gravity to Chance’s personal-responsibility politics and community-oriented ethos: yes, the systems may be broken, but “there is a light that shines,” as the chorus on “Speed of Light” reminds us. That light, Chance seems to argue, can be found in God, in family, and in the traditions and values of Black life.
On an album with few skips or misses, it’s curious that Chance chose “Tree” to be the lead single. (The Joey Bada$$-assisted “The Highs & the Lows” was technically released first, in 2022, before “Star Line” was officially announced.) Centered around a sample of India Arie’s “Video,” the song, an ode to smoking weed that features Lil Wayne and Smino, is so close to working—it’s soulful, it’s catchy, and, like many Chance songs, has intriguing political undertones. Its commercial failure, however, is instructive, as the song exhibits two fatal flaws: a misguided chorus, where Chance atonally shouts the final bar in a bout of unintentional comedy, and a phoned-in Lil Wayne verse that grinds the song to a sluggish halt. Other attempts at hits also fail to achieve their full potential, such as “Space & Time,” which sounds distractingly like a song made for a children’s movie, or “Gun in Yo Purse,” which tries (and fails) to portray Chance as someone capable of murder. Still, over seventeen songs and sixty-seven minutes, “Star Line” is a remarkably paced, improbably consistent listen, a reminder that Chance’s greatest skill set is world-building. His sound remains specific, if not a bit outdated, a unique blend of gummy nineties soul and gospel, sample-based hip-hop, and Black diasporic dance music. He sneaks a Richard Pryor excerpt into the outro of a song, builds beats around choral vocals, and writes layered verses that reward repeated listens. In this way, “Star Line” is a splendid reintroduction to Chance’s multidimensional vision, a reminder of what made him such a promising, poignant talent in the first place.
It’s satisfying when Chance offers reflective insights into his internal life, applying his analytical mind to his own flaws and anxieties. On “Back to Go,” he details co-parenting difficulties, rattling off some of the album’s more inspired rapping: “Supposed to be two parents but now I’m across the globe / And screaming across the phone, the dog that just lost his bone.” It’s not until the closer, “Speed of Love,” though, that he examines his spectacular fall from favor. Structuring the song around an Erykah Badu quote—“Friends, fans, and artists must meet; which one are you? Which one are me?”—he asks a series of unanswerable questions: Was all that love he got early in his career real? If so, why did it vanish, and, when it left, why was it so painful? In classic Chance fashion, he doesn’t wallow for too long: “A hard-headed kid’s confidence is hardest to kill,” he proclaims near the song’s end. He has every reason to be resentful, and yet, somehow, he’s still smiling. ♦
