Last year on the eve of July 26, 2019, I sat eagerly at my desk and continuously refreshed Chance the Rapper’s Spotify page, waiting for my opportunity to be one of the first to listen to his debut album “The Big Day.” When he had revealed the album cover on Twitter a couple of days prior, I remember honestly being pretty underwhelmed. It was a lackluster album cover, depicting a hand holding up a random jewel-encrusted disc. It was especially disappointing because I was a big fan of the vibrant portrait mixtape covers of “Acid Rap” and “Coloring Book,” but I brushed it off. Chance had proven himself to be an artist who rarely produced musical duds, so I had really high hopes for the album.
Little did I know that the album cover would perfectly encapsulate the essence of “The Big Day”: it was completely forgettable, and so aggressively mediocre that I honestly would have preferred a straight-up trash bag of an album to what he actually put out.
Why, you might ask? Well, it was so agonizingly frustrating at how average the album was because I knew that it had the capability to be great, but just completely reflected Chance’s slide into complacency.
Now just to be clear, I just want to preface by saying that I am a huge Chance the Rapper fan. His “Be Encouraged” Tour in 2017 was my first ever concert. I loved “10 Day” and “Coloring Book.” “Acid Rap” remains one of my favorite hip-hop projects ever, but that is why I was so let down. He’s shown that he is capable of creating compelling, honest introspective music like he does in “Coloring Book” or lyrically witty, jazzy R&B like from “Acid Rap.” But with his debut album, Chance decided to go a new direction: take all of the qualities of his previous music that propelled him to critical acclaim and appeal to mainstream audiences with a new pop-inspired sound. Let me be clear: becoming more pop-inspired is not necessarily an indication that the quality of the music is “worse” in any way. It’s a direction that so many artists go these days — and who can blame them? Trying to broaden your audience is what makes you a household name, and is what brings in the big bucks.
So, I really don’t blame Chance for wanting to adapt his sound in this way. There are plenty of artists who have been able to go this route and still maintain the authenticity of what made them popular in the first place, continue to produce great music, and continue to have amazing careers, with prominent examples being Drake and Kanye.
However, I think that the way Chance made the transition into more pop-rap with “The Big Day” lost a lot of the qualities that made his previous mixtapes so great. It was so much less compelling, in a million different ways. Just to create some context: “Acid Rap” is a mixtape that details Chance’s struggles transitioning from being a kid who barely graduated high school to the realities of adulthood, while also reflecting his experimental stage with different drugs and substances. There’s a sprinkling of social commentary as he raps about Chicago’s gang violence and as he spits of nostalgia and of the days when he had no worries. “Coloring Book” marked a pretty different vibe, as Chance underwent a pretty significant transformation in the three years between the two projects. He was now a pretty devout Christian, which was reflected in his new gospel-rap style and God-praising lyrics. The words “gospel-rap” honestly make most hip-hop fans pretty nervous; not many people agree with mixing gospel and hip-hop, which is traditionally full of imagery — of drugs and of careless sex — that essentially embodies the antithesis of what the church preaches. But “Coloring Book” was special in the way that it proved that you can have an album that is very spiritually focused, but still delivers good music. Even though the content was geared towards singing God’s praises, what made the album good enough to win a Grammy was Chance’s lyrical focus on his own spiritual growth, which combined with the really well-produced beats made for a compelling album.
Which brings us to “The Big Day,” and specifically the most common criticism of “The Big Day”: it’s just way too positive. Weird criticism, I know, but hear me out. “The Big Day” is an album celebrating Chance’s marriage with his wife and how God has blessed him in so many ways, and the overall vibe of the album is full of overwhelming positivity and cheer. Obviously, it’s great that Chance is at a place in his life now where he’s really happy and feels like he’s blessed. I think the issue was just that the album was so, so long and of so little substance (twenty two straight songs totaling an hour and twenty minutes). After the fourth or fifth song talking about how much Chance loves his wife and his life, I as a listener got to a point where I was like, “alright dude we get it.” Jay-Z once said that he thinks an album should be like a story: have a beginning, a middle, a climax and then a satisfying ending. When the “story” of your album is “I got married, things are great, I love my life, things are awesome” for almost an hour and a half straight, it’s no surprise that whoever is listening is going to get bored.
That’s probably the biggest problem with the album. It just has no substance, nothing particularly compelling. What connects a lot of people to hip-hop or music in general is a shared experience, most often a struggle of some sort that connects whoever is listening to whoever is rapping, singing, or talking. When Drake is crooning about heartbreak and jealousy on “Marvin’s Room” or when J. Cole raps about growing up in poverty in “Love Yourz,” that is something that we can relate to. I’m not saying that there aren’t songs that are uplifting and about positive things that aren’t good, but thematically as an entire cohesive album “The Big Day” just felt like it didn’t have anything compelling to bring to the table.
Connected to this too was the lyricism. “Acid Rap” had some bars that had inventive rhyme scheme, great imagery, and interesting flow (“What’s better than frolicking, follies, fallin’ in mud / Rolling in green pastures, wanderin’, followin’ love”); and “Coloring Book” had some well-written lines too. Chance always toed the line between cheesy and witty, but he pulled off a great balance in his first three projects. With “The Big Day” on the other hand, I guess he spent way too much time with his infant daughters because some of the lyricism in this album was stinkier than his toddler’s dirty diapers. Let me read to you a a couple of his gems:
“I got muscles like Superman’s trainer / Real real rare like Super Saiyan manga.”
“I need stock, and it gotta be Pippi Long / Can’t stop, won’t stop bopping like Diddy’s song / My text tour, it got eight legs like daddy long.”
Another issue was the pacing. Quite frankly, Chance has always struggled a little bit with the pacing of his projects, most notably in “Coloring Book.” That mixtape started with the uplifting song “All We Got” and then transitioned to “No Problems,” an upbeat track that got you hyped, but then followed it with four straight slower, more introspective songs — sixteen minutes nonstop of being in your bag, and which definitely could have been distributed throughout the mixtape more evenly. “The Big Day” suffers the same problem, except it’s the whole album. First off, I am of the firm opinion that twenty two tracks in one album is way too many. It’s just really hard to pull off that many songs in one project without it becoming bloated; listener fatigue will drag down the quality of the album as a whole. And especially with “The Big Day” which essentially is preaching the same thing for the entirety of its twenty two tracks, it just gets to a point where by the fifteenth song it becomes an absolute slog to get through.
It was sad to see Chance’s fall from grace after being vaulted into the mainstream with the success of his first couple projects, and even sadder seeing him cancel his tour for the album (he claimed it was to “be with his family”, but it’s pretty obvious that he canceled because of low ticket sales). The thing is, I know he’s capable of more, and when he drops his next project I have faith that he’ll cement himself as one of hip-hop’s current greats again.
