It wasn’t always this way. I saw Chance The Rapper three times in 2015, and each show was better than the last. He closed out that summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival by bringing out original pop-gospel star Kirk Franklin, an early sign of his soon-to-be-public Christian awakening. A Fader Fort set that fall had an intimacy that I quickly treasured, now that Chance’s mainstream crossover was clearly a question of when, not if. The third time I saw him last year was an artifice-free affair where he and his band The Social Experiment superbly performed highlights from 10 Day, Acid Rap, and Surf, along with numerous SoundCloud one-offs. That Beyoncé and Jay Z were beaming from the VIP section only further confirmed that we were all living in Chance’s world now.
Then, this April, Chance released Coloring Book, his long-awaited follow-up to Acid Rap. Only three human years separate the projects, but where I had aged from 21 to 24 in that time, Chance appeared to have accelerated, skipping from his early twenties straight to middle age. His new music, along with the interviews he granted, showed that Chance had found a spiritual and religious calling. God is not a new presence in Chance’s work, but previously he had spoken of the Lord with trepidation, as on Acid Rap’s “Everybody’s Something”: “And why’s God’s phone die every time that I call on Him? / If His son had a Twitter, wonder if I would follow him.”
A few years down the line, Chance seems much more sure of his convictions, even working a rendition of Chris Tomlin’s “How Great Is Our God” into Coloring Book. The sweeping track is in many ways the album’s peak. My own black Baptist upbringing never brought me into contact with that song on Sunday mornings — my introduction to Tomlin’s pale praise song was at my Christian high school, where “How Great Is Our God” and others of its ilk were performed by unengaging bands that slowly unwound my years of Biblical texts and the water I was baptized in. That the Southside Chicago native chose Tomlin’s maudlin song instead of any number of other, better gospel standards should have been an early red flag indicating the emotional disconnect I was starting to feel with Chance’s work.
The other obvious change in Chance’s life since his Acid Rap days is fatherhood. Back in February, on Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” Chance introduced this new version of himself to the world: “My daughter is just like Sia / You can’t see her.” The wide-eyed optimism of Coloring Book sounds like a man whose priorities have shifted away from himself and toward his child and his new family. This is a necessary pivot in life, but in Chance’s case, the change closed off some of the ways I had into his music. Where before it felt like we were on a similar path, wrestling with taking friendships into adulthood and the role that parents play in one’s life as an adult, suddenly Chance’s accelerated life priorities had created a noticeable gap between artist and listener. This divergence became even clearer with his childhood-themed stage production, evoking a nostalgia for life’s earlier days that I’m fine allowing to remain in the past.
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