coloring book

Anybody in the market for positive energy should download Chance the Rapper'due south new mixtape without delay. Coloring Volume, out since May, delivers bright tunes, bright hooks, warm trumpet, sunny synthesizer, audacious works of popular songcraft, and everywhere what can but be called practiced vibes. If you're in a good mood information technology'll take you even college; if you're not information technology'due south sure to cheer you up a trivial. Only in rap's essential edginess category does it autumn short, and one thing that makes the record so powerful is its insistence that edginess merely doesn't thing right now.

Not since young man Chicago icon Kanye West's The College Dropout in 2004 has a rapper invented a totally new aesthetic so happy, so inspirational, so kind and funny and friendly and committed to making everybody feel welcome. Play Coloring Volume up against Dropout, however, and the difference is clear: Chance is fifty-fifty cuter and cuddlier than West, having taken West'south style as his ain, nicer model, merely every bit West took Puff Daddy and dozens of lesser crossover rappers as his own corresponding point of divergence. If the Kanye West on Dropout is a cheeky, somewhat infuriatingly smug teenager peachy dumb jokes behind the teacher's dorsum, Chance is his little brother, yelping and snickering in a voice also gruff to be a kid's but similarly innocent and unaffected. The music he raps over — largely courtesy of neosoul/jazz-fusion bankroll ring The Social Experiment — skips, hops, and springs with elements of gospel and children'due south music, while steeped in a similarly emotional tone. And while he'due south been known to rap about loneliness and anxiety besides as gang violence in Chicago, he generally puts an optimistic spin on things and keeps his chin upwardly. On Coloring Volume especially — more than than on 2013'southward Acid Rap, his breakthrough mixtape, or 2015's Surf, so much a grouping effort that Chance took his name off the project and instead credited it to Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment — the outcome is comically upbeat and, if not sappy per se, endlessly heartwarming and motivational, piling on the cushy hooks, the greeting-card slogans, the evocations of domestic elation and cozy community, until the sweetness becomes overwhelming and y'all either enter kiddie heaven or feel nauseous. Listen to "Wonderful Everyday," his 2014 cover of the theme song from Arthur on PBS, and know this is a rapper who wants to light up the world and put a smile on your face.

I wish I could say in that location was a flipside, some antithetical element whose presence would make all this uplift merely i symbolic component in a larger package. Indeed, Acid Rap's "Cocoa Butter Kisses" finds Chance in a heartbreakingly forlorn mood as he describes alienating himself from his female parent by smoking cigarettes, which she can odour on his clothes ("I miss my cocoa butter kisses"), not to mention "Paranoia," near gang violence and the conditions ("Everybody dies in the summertime/so pray to God for a trivial more spring") — a theme taken up past Coloring Volume's "Summer Friends," less terrified this time effectually and more elegiac. Just the basic impulse behind the music is escapist, an attempt at creating an immersive realm that can serve as a respite from what ails you. With the crucial exceptions of "Summer Friends" and "Angels," both of which accost impoverished Chicago neighborhoods, Coloring Book dwells on the dark side of the universe mainly by omission. Particularly in the context of hip-hop, the record'southward lack of anything resembling anger, or swagger, or contempt, or defeatism, or fifty-fifty skepticism is remarkable; instead, behold faith, empathy, outreach. Tagging the project as a deliberate corrective against the scary environment he grew upwards in and, by extension, the scary emotions that drive so much hip-hop, would be too simple, although certainly his communitarian ethos and radiant major-key choruses function that way. Rather, equally the honest result of his generous soul, it does all that and then some: having (aesthetically) escaped violence and anger, the record then dives down the ostrich pigsty away from burdens like ability and obligation as well. Every bit its championship all but announces, Coloring Book is an escape into babyhood, its true setting non the inner city just the inner kindergarten.

acid rap

Channeling childhood from the perspective of a parent, "Blessings," "All We Got," and especially "Fume Break" all reflect on the birth of his daughter and his newfound status as a family man, and "Same Drugs" looks dorsum on childhood from the perspective of having grown upward and moved beyond childish things. It couldn't be whatever other way; Coloring Volume's cornball re-immersion could only come from a place of adult responsibility and longing. Anyhow, the record's big advance over past work is musical — later on a bouncy opener featuring the Chicago Children's Choir, these songs buzz and spill over with jaunty pianoforte chords, mellifluous horns, rubberband synthesizers, marching-ring fanfares, rhythm violin plus soft string coloring, every now and and then a standard keyboard loop, tender lullabies and cocky-bodacious choirgirls, grandly sung gospel hymns, dinkily sampled gospel hymns, uplifting ensemble singing and the rich timbre of black soul voices, along with a rousing array of whoops and cheers and wails scattered throughout the tape to create an illusion of community, as if Chance were playing to an open audience whose members were gratis to pitch in whatsoever time they felt similar information technology, as strangers pass by in the background. An emotional stunner on par with previous triumphs like "Cocoa Butter Kisses" and "Sun Candy," "Same Drugs" is my favorite not just for the way its retrospective lyric contextualizes the record but for the skewed cord hook cycling through the song, the piercing guitar riff that illuminates the heaven at closing time, the melodic poetry/chorus progression that Chance sings then calmly and directly while barely rapping at all. "Summer Friends" stands out for its skippy electronic tunelet and a backup singer whose garbled moan splits the divergence between the Embankment Boys and church on Sunday. Every vocal furthers the artful, each contributing to a fun, welcoming, inclusive, family-friendly Dr. Seuss-inspired soundworld.

Chance has fooled around with utopian metaphors before; Surf, dominated by trumpet player Nico Segal, found solace at the beach, like dozens of California pop bands and a few eccentric rappers before him. But Coloring Book's imagined juvenile paradise, which suits Chance'south goofy, jittery flow exactly, is new for him and too for rap — about rappers care for childhood like something to escape, associated with slums and violence and other sources of anguish left, hopefully, in the past. And, ultimately, it'south hip-hop's musical form and social context that make Coloring Book's escapism refreshing rather than toothless. Chance's ambitious sense of rhythm, emphatic style of song chitchat, and rapping in general add together a sharpness to music that might otherwise audio sickly sweet, and the project's hip-hop tag marks its retreat into childhood every bit a way of rewiring, and cleansing, the genre's psychology at the root. Once its children grow up, they'll be a lot kinder, saner, and better-adapted than we are today, for this is a peaceful childhood, not a traumatized one; nor is information technology the romanticized/sexualized pre-clear infancy of indie-rock fantasy. Instead, the record invents a snug little corner of the world where sweet voices sing songs together, concord hands, and every mean solar day remind each other: "Yous are very special/y'all're special too/everyone is special/this I know is truthful when I look at you".

Cute, celebratory, rather beautiful and genuinely innocent, Coloring Book will soothe you and warm your heart. Just as Chance lauds and ponders the birth of his girl in song, so does the record reclaim what was once a trauma zone as a happy place in a radical act of parental love.

Lucas Fagen's favorite artform is popular music, and that means pop music—bland corporate trash and faceless functional product in addition to critically respectable touchstones and obscure... More than by Lucas Fagen