Pitchfork, Chance The Rapper - Chance The Rapper - Acid Rap: #12 on Top 50 Albums of 2013 lyrics

At a passing glance of a Tumblr
Timeline it'd be easy to
Mistake Chicago's Chance the Rapper for
Any number of new jack
Blog-savvy revivalist rappers struggling
Their way around
High-pitched Pharcyde chatter and "93
Til Infinity" instrumentals and certainly the
Production on Acid Rap
With it's sampled nods to J
Dilla and Tribe Called Quest, leans
Towards that sort of single-minded throwback
But as a rapper, chance's
Nostalgia is immersive
Not constructed it's telling that
He openly cites
The influence of under heralded West
Coast crew Freestyle Fellowship
A collective that emphasized
Perpetual stylistic
Reinvention on a micro level
(and provided the big bang for both
Pharcyde and Souls of Mischief's elastic
Flows) so where the A$APs of today
Pick up hand-me down and
Watered down cadences and beat at them
Repeatedly and the Joey Badasses struggle
Through existing patterns that are usually
Far above their competency level
Chance is going back to the point of origin
And rebuilding the old styles
From scratch every track here is kicked in
A different cadence usually
Jazzy and always frantic and it's striking
To hear that model applied by a young rapper
Whose raw foundational material is Kanye and
Eminem he's using the same toolbox as the
Greats but drawing on
Very different blueprints

Chance's writing takes a similarly expansive
Approach to history for a
20-year-old, Chance's point of view is
Oddly melancholic and sentimental
But this perspective only strengthens
His narratives he writes
With a vivid sensory memory you can
Smell the blunt guts or hear the fireworks
And mistake them for gunfire in his
Words it's a paradoxically level
Headed approach on
An album where the performance is
So unhinged and the second line is
"the acid made me crazy"
But maybe the title and Chance's whole
Woody Woodpecker meltdown rap style is
A bit of a misdirect acid
Rap isn't about the trip
It's about the flashbacks Andrew Nosnit'sky