Over the last twenty days of December (and obviously 2013), I’ll be writing about my favorite twenty albums and songs of the year, one a day. Not best. Not most influential. Not most likely to land on a Complex slideshow. Just my favorite, ranked in order.
2. chance the rapper – acid rap, “juice (prod. nate fox)”
Chance the Rapper skips and darts across horns and drums like he might a stage; his animation bleeds through his words. In that respect, “Juice” is Chance’s attitude crumpled up into one song. His idea of a proper rapper’s sixteen seems to revolve less around structured lines than it does around stringing together words that slot into each other’s niches and cracks and half-singing his verses: it’s repetitive, somewhat illogical, and not to mention highly unorthodox. It’s also very awesome. He dips into a Russian accent for a couple lines before he engages in some wordplay (“Acid addict, costly avid actor”) and triumphantly name drops, well, Kevin Costner. The hook is him hunkering down in a back-and-forth with a few unnamed backups where he yells “juice” at them a bunch of times. Half of his lines don’t seem to make really make sense: at the end of his second verse, his words kind of just devolve into random shout outs and rhymes.
But that’s part of the fun of Chance’s music – because that’s what it really is, fun. While fellow Chicago compatriot and frequent collaborator Vic Mensa seems eternally determined to demonstrate to you just how many multisyllabic rhymes he can stuff into a four-bar sequence, Chance raps like someone who’s just learned how to string together a couplet. It’s slightly off-kilter (you can practically see Chance grinning and staggering as he slings out his lines), and very engaging. It’s hard not to get swept up in the enthusiasm infused into the song, built in the spaces between the guitar lick skeleton – you don’t need to know English to enjoy the melodic nature strung between Acid Rap’s songs.
And maybe it’s because we’ve become so acquainted with Chance’s background (the prep school, the ten-day suspension, the Childish Gambino nods, etc.), but his music reads as genuine and piercing in a way that Vic Mensa’s never is. “Interlude (That’s Love)” is a legitimate R&B song that could easily have gone over as trite (“But when it looked you in the eyes it ain’t nothing you could say but that’s love”) if Chance didn’t plunge himself into it and sell the delivery. He’s even pulling off “nostalgic” even though he’s probably not even old enough to grab a beer at a bar. Chance’s self-awareness shines even when he’s being playful. It’s always lurking dryly somewhere behind his words, like the hook to “Cocoa Butter Kisses”: “Cigarettes on cigarettes, my momma think I stank/I got burn holes in my hoodies, all my homies think it’s dank.” Chance, evidently, isn’t the type of rapper to put on facades and masks.
Take the album as just one massive jam session, armed with live bands and orchestras and entire choirs. That doesn’t mean Chance is afraid to delve into his fears and insecurities, or that he won’t turn up the bass and pound out a screwed-hook banger – it just means that it segues into itself, looping, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It explores ideas without fleshing them out too far (like the summery anthem-feel of the Gambino-featuring “Favorite Song”, or the lay-down-a-groove-and-let’s-trade-bars cyphery “NaNa” alongside Action Bronson), and then he’s drawing us right back into his world and music.
It’s easy to talk about Chance’s music as a foil for the gun-toting aggression of his Chicago hip-hop drill counterparts, because that’s the frame it’s been shoved and adjusted into ever since Chance hit the big time – Chance’s zeal, at first look, couldn’t be more at odds with Chief Keef and King L’s brash portrayals of Chiraq. But here’s the thing: Chance is just as rooted in his hometown as the rest of the Chicago newcomer scene. It’s just that while most of his fellow Chicagoans choose to immerse themselves in their city and lay it all out for their listeners to be judged and evaluated as they will, Chance is far more willing to engage his audience. When he asks bitterly, “Funerals for little girls, is that appealing to you?/From your cubicle desktop, what a beautiful view” on “Acid Rain,” it takes you by the collar in a way that Chief Keef’s music never does. Sometimes Acid Rap is accusing, sometimes it’s an escape, sometimes it just avoids the issue altogether. But ultimately Chance isn’t trying to escape the shadow of Chicago’s skyline, he’s just shining a light back up at it.