He wears no cape. He doesn’t own a spandex suit (as far as we know). But he does fight evil under a secret identity. His name is Chance the Rapper, and he is here for change.
Chance the Rapper made his first appearance on the music scene with his mixtape 10 Day, inspired by a 10-day drug suspension. His sophomore mixtape Acid Rap, however, seemed to steal a spot in the music conversation in a year with so many well-established artists like Drake, Kanye, J. Cole, Jay-Z, and Eminem all releasing albums. Chance reminded us that talent and passion are all it takes to get recognition.
Chance’s music and personality both exude happiness. His latest album Coloring Book offers sentimentality and youthful optimism coupled with a matured and developed sound as well as a healthy dose of spirituality. He’s comfortable rapping about his faith and is glamorizing the idea of being a good person.
Chance is here to revolutionize how music is distributed. His undoubtably Grammy-nomination-worthy mixtape Acid Rap was declared ineligible because only music that is sold was Grammy-eligible. And Chance, being an up and coming rapper, released most of his music for free through streaming platforms like Soundcloud and DatPiff. But instead of selling his 3rd album on iTunes and other music markets, he released it for free, first through Spotify, then on Soundcloud; a move he hinted at a few months prior with his verse on Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam.
“I met Kanye West, I’m never going to fail,
He said let’s do a good ass job with Chance 3,
I heard you gotta sell it to snatch the Grammy,
Well, let’s make it so free and the bars so hard that there ain’t one gosh darn part you can’t tweet”
Now thanks to Chance the Rapper’s tenacity, coupled with his enormous musical talent, free music released on select platforms is now eligible for a Grammy. This is an enormous step for hip-hop, which has a vast population of new and talented artists starting on Soundcloud.
Chance isn’t just changing music distribution, however. Chance makes his live performances inexpensive to make them accessible to more people. And when “scalpers” attempted to take advantage of this by buying and reselling mass quantities of tickets, he and his team tracked down the tickets bought by scalpers, negated, and reclaimed the online tickets they had, and then resold them. All for the sake of affordability for the people.
Outside of his music, he’s been vocal about the election, #blacklivesmatter, and many other issues.
Dear God, the words law & order shouldn't strike so much fear in my heart as a law abiding citizen but I am so damn scared of Donald Trump
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) September 27, 2016
So with all that said, I’d like to congratulate Chance on his Grammy nomination and wish him luck for the upcoming ceremony. He earned it. He deserves it. And it looks like he’s here to stay.
