Chance the Rapper - The Big Day
Additional Editing by Anouska Liat
It’s difficult to fathom that Chance the Rapper, eight years into releasing music, is only just getting around to making his debut album. For someone who has grown into a hip-hop mainstay, he has spent the majority of that time rejecting the commercialism of music, instead paving the way for independent artists to make money and even gain nominations from the Academy. Away from music, his political and social activism has garnered him additional recognition, even buying out the Chicagoist newspaper “to run you racist bitches out of business” as quoted from one of a set of six singles released in 2018. Though the man has released scene-quaking mixtapes, Chance has been adamant that they are not albums, so with The Big Day he set out to prove himself.
Typically a Chance the Rapper project acts as a response to a major change in his life, be it his suspension from school on 10 Day, discovering LSD on Acid Rap, or finding religion and gaining a daughter on Coloring Book. This time, he comes as a married man.
Released almost five months after his wedding day, the event and its pertaining topics are what stick to his temple throughout this LP. Not just by title, but the backdrop to the sparkled CD on the album art is the location where he proposed to his now-wife; the topic is inescapable, and this is where the project’s problems begin.
So many moments revolve around this new marriage, around the same aspects of marriage, Chance incessantly hammers the topic into you like that one mate that can’t stop mentioning his new girlfriend. One only has to take a glance at the tracklist to find a song title like ‘Found a Good One (Single No More)’ - we get it, Chance.
But the real kicker is that despite basing such a huge portion of his debut album on a five month marriage, we come away knowing barely anything past the surface level. There is no detail, particularly when concerning his other half (a pretty large factor in such a commitment). ‘Sun Come Down’ sees Chance conversing about mortality atop a caressing Death Cab-like guitar and haunted vocal samples as though he’s cycling through his memories before he passes. This rare shimmer of thematic depth on the record is then inexplicably succeeded by a tedious dialogue with his wife about ignoring the outsiders that don’t co-sign their matrimony. Aside from being a wildly disjointed transition, this verse could have been revealing, but the writing is brief to the point of coming off as dismissive, as though it’s a matter of “blocking out the haters 😎”. The only thing we may learn about his wife is that she seems to believe some of his family members are unsupportive, a bad look that could have been avoided with even a hint of extra depth into her character. It may seem somewhat prying to ask Chance to let us know more about her, but how can we be expected to be invested in this Big Day otherwise? The result is us just being there to sample the buffet of sounds which, thankfully, delivers somewhat.
A great amount of these conjugal raps are presented in full-colour widescreen, thanks to individual pieces of pictorial production, such as the high-volume throwback R&B of ‘I Got You (Always & Forever)’, or the modernised chipmunk-soul beat that forms ‘Get a Bag’. Vocals are used to the advantage of both tracks, with Ari Lennox’s sensational performance (assisted by En Vogue) bolstering the 808 drums of the former, and the latter sampling a classic 80s soft-rock song from James Taylor to create a scorching beat that fits right at home with the likes of ‘I Might Need Security’.
Frequent collaborator Francis and the Lights, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon are scattered throughout the production credits, together carving out some spacey atmospheres for the record that go over nicely. Off-kilter vocal samples (‘Town on the Hill’), prog-like synth patterns (‘Roo’), and whispers of their cloudy electronics (‘Do You Remember’) turn up to grace several parts of The Big Day, yet feel like loose ends compared to the multitude of other sounds that Chance throws on here, like a child sticking together all the colour of a Play-Doh set.
Too many songs feel like unreasonable diversions designed not to introduce new sounds, but to push for the pop charts. Take the prosaic hip-house on ‘Found a Good One (Single No More)’, which slaps a juke freak-out at the end that sits way too close to the incorporation of New Orleans bounce music on Drake’s hits from Scorpion the year before. However the worst offender is ‘Ballin Flossin’, a latin-pop track that sees Shawn Mendes do his best 2000s-era Justin Timberlake impression, inadvertently making those mixtape tracks with Childish Gambino and Kanye West feel like an epoch away. Not content with this already, Chance has the nerve, the sheer goddamn audacity to spray ‘Peanut Butter Jelly Time’ into our faces in the year 2019.
With clumsily-imitated trap-rap standing next to Kanye rip-offs, The Big Day is unbearably fickle. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy for a purpose or not, the result is the same - an artless record whose flow and identity is non-existent. The only thing that is consistent in the project is that he is outrapped and outperformed by guest rappers at every opportunity. Be it Megan Thee Stallion (‘Handsome’), DaBaby (‘Hot Shower’), Nicki Minaj (‘Slide Around’), or his own brother (‘Roo’), whenever a rapper features, they incinerate the beat while Chance recycles mind-numbing lines. Not to say that these other rappers are not usually forces to be reckoned with, but when the lead artist is being lyrically dominated by Gucci Mane, fucking Gucci Mane, one has to question why he isn’t stepping up.
One shining moment to note though is the balladic ‘5 Year Plan’. Prophetically talking about the lesser-spoken parts of the future, Chance aims for the same heights as ‘Blessings (Reprise)’ and ‘How Great’; his personality and lyrics actually being up to standard to aid the song, a rare treat on the LP. In the second verse he trails off to ask nonsensical questions that are clearly rhetorical, as he giggles in between breaths. But to bring the track full-circle, he ends with “are you ready for the Big Day?”, signalling that this too doesn’t need to be answered - just live through it.
Sadly, nothing else on TBD comes close to this small point of wisdom, as Chance prefers to dish out writing that ranges from lazy to downright infuriating. To say tracks like ‘Get a Bag’ are even two-dimensional would be a hard sell, but others are only multi-faceted because random lines like “piss like urinal cakes” (???) show up and have zero connection to anything else Chance is saying. The majority of decisions are completely misguided, the most baffling one occurring on the title track, where a vocal seizure trainwrecks the otherwise pretty sweet electro-acoustic cut. Perhaps Chance wanted to mimic what Frank Ocean did on ‘Biking’, nonetheless this doesn’t save the moment sounding like T-Pain covering a Death Grips song.
This happens only nine tracks into a twenty-two song release. Chance willing let this thing string out to the running length of a feature-length film, yet there is such little concept to warrant this, serving only to completely bottleneck the impact of the more lighthearted tracks. Despite projects like Views and Culture II being noted critical failures by being so bloated and cynically long, The Big Day follows in their footsteps and sacrifices album flow and song impact for a perceived sense of grandiosity.
In terms of track ordering, the sequencing poses more questions than compliments. For one, a steady stream of introspective cuts just after the first skit is chafed by the Timbaland-produced ‘Big Fish’ and its surrounding party tracks. As well as being colourless pieces of pop-rap, this section (like many) doesn’t reinforce any tracks that come before or after it. A provisional tracklisting can be spotted in a promo video released a week before release that set the Gucci Mane collab to be the opener, which is an even bigger head-scratcher than the choice to make ‘Zanies and Fools’ the record’s conclusion. Although the song gets very thoughtful and vulnerable - especially on Nicki Minaj’s contribution, she raps what could be her best material since the iconic ‘Monster’ verse - for her to be the final voice on Chance’s debut album shows how little thought was actually put into the arc of the LP. It’s as purposeful as hitting the shuffle button.
On the road to release day, the pre-single ‘GRoCERIES’ was tossed out and worried many, being a dime-a-dozen trap-rap song that was as throwaway as they come. Ultimately, the final product confirmed those worries. After escalating from jazz rap on Acid Rap to the gospel rap of Coloring Book, The Big Day settles for tasteless pop-rap. All too often he resorts to the mimicry of other artists such as ‘Handsome’, which is clearly in Drake’s territory, and the Young Thug-plagiarising flow on ‘Slide Around’. In a year, where the likes of YBN Cordae and GoldLink are reaching new career highs, it should have been an easy slam dunk for Chance the Rapper to succeed if he had an inkling of his usual charisma and style. Alternatively, he elected to shake off his individuality and flair, leaving us with an almost unethical dirge. Despite claiming a seat on the council roundtable of hip-hop as the good samaritan, the path he seems to be favouring is that of Anakin Skywalker - “you were the chosen one!”.