The Big Day - Chance The Rapper: Review

Chance The Rapper

is a Chicago based rapper who blew up earlier this decade with his gospel inspired style and youthful energy on his 10 Day mixtape. The very next year after this debut mixtape Chance dropped his second tape Acid Rap to universal critical acclaim and it became his breakout project. With numerous marquee features and an unmistakable style the mixtape turned Chance into an overnight sensation and is considered by many to be one of the best rap records of the entire decade. Chance took his time crafting a follow-up record, ultimately dropping "Chance 3" Coloring Book in 2016. The album featured a historic list of features from acclaimed and popular artists across the board and was met pretty positively from critics. After another three year wait Chance spent most of 2019 teasing his upcoming "debut album". He dropped the single Groceries earlier this year but the track doesn't land on the record and ultimately the album was released with no singles at all. With high expectations coming from past successes and the long three year wait many anticipated The Big Day would be one of the best albums of the year. 

Review By Lavender:

Acid Rap is one of my favorite albums of 2013 and will almost certainly make my top 100 albums of the decade list in January. It is a highlight of the mixtape era that I'll remember fondly among records from artists like Joey Badass, Earl Sweatshirt and Flatbush Zombies. It was when Chance took a nose dive for the commercial in 2016 with Coloring Book that I was much less pleased, the album was so loaded with features that nearly every song was dictated by the quality of the featured artists that shared it. This made some tracks like No Problem, Angels and Finish Line/Drown among my favorite tracks of the year, but far too many good artists and solid performances get wasted in songs that don't live up to the expectation. While The Big Day doesn't suffer in the same kind of way it is hard to say that Chance has learned from any of his mistakes, as Big Day is one of the biggest let downs I've had all year and makes Tyler, The Creator's IGOR look like only a minor disappointment. With absolutely dreadful inconsistencies and a number of the worst choruses I've heard all year it's hard to imagine a project falling any further below my expectations in 2019. 

The album gets off to a really rough start with only one of the first six full tracks really being at all worth the time it takes up. The opener All Day Long gets off to a fine and bearable start that reminds me of a weaker version of the opening track from Coloring Book. It doesn't have the most creative lyrics or the best singing but what really drags the song is an absolutely abysmal hook from John Legend, one of the many talented guests on this record that end up sounding awful. Not only is the hook itself absolutely terrible but Legend sounds so shrill and annoying with the bustling dizzy instrumental that shows up in the background, but only for the hook. More disastrous hook work comes up in Eternal a song with a tight message of commitment and not much else going for it. Smino features on this song and while I typically like his appearances on Saba or Noname records this is not a highlight for me and he should have stopped his verse long before he had to sing in the latter half. The real killer for Eternal is once again an absolutely terrible hook that sees Chance flanked by ugly and garish chants of "Eternal" between his singing that completely disrupts what flow the hook may have had otherwise. There are a lot of choruses that I would have to file through to pick out which one was the worst on this album but Eternal is an early contender listening to the album in order.  

Hot Shower is a song that I'm sure is gonna stir a lot of controversy, with its goofy but catchy hook, jangly instrumental and playful attitude it is a song that conceptually sounds like it would be easy to like, but in execution the track rubs me the wrong way badly. The rattling trap beat gets annoying pretty quickly and while Chance's bars are so stupid that they're almost charming, the same can't be said about a nauseating feature from MadenTYO. The most unfortunate elements of the track is that Da Baby actually gives a pretty good verse that I like a lot at the tail end of this track, I've been following his career for a little bit now hoping that he would represent my home town of Charlotte well and hearing him in a much more casual and fun context is really interesting and I like it quite a bit. There is plenty of more wasted feature potential across the record but first there are two more snoozers in the front half of the record. We Go High is a song that's fine in concept but at nearly five minutes long the snails pace of Chance's delivery, the terrible hook, and the lack of anything important being said at all makes it a difficult song to sit through. I Got You opens up with Chance rhyming Twister with Twister and pretty much keeps that level of quality throughout. Chance's sing-songy flow is incredibly annoying and it is pretty unfortunate because Ari Lennox actually delivers a bearable chorus where she rips off Posh Spice hard, but it's honestly a big improvement. The whack bars and even more whack flows here make the track even less tolerable. 

While the middle point of the record contains some solid track in a row there is much, MUCH more to hate in the second half. Handsome sounds like a computer generated Chance The Rapper song with some ugly vocalizing and a barely there theme. Megan Thee Stallion drops a pretty great verse at the tail end of the track but once again the song at its core isn't good enough to make the wait for her feature worthwhile. Big Fish has Timbaland on production and a Gucci Mane feature but manages to reduce the entire song into one boring slog, its placement on the album is unfortunate too as on another project there is some potential here. Ballin Flossin is a track that comes from Chance clearly trying to copy Kanye West's Fade without really understanding what made it great. He replaces Ty Dolla $ign and Post Malone with himself and Shawn Mendes but their performances aren't nearly enough to make up for the absolutely horrible, aimless and seemingly completely random songwriting that makes this one of the most taxing and least rewarding songs I've heard all year. 

5 Year Plan is a good song for the first fifteen seconds its on but after that there isn't really much worth hanging on to. Randy Newman features on this song and I can't believe that he let this track be released in the state it is. Both Chance and Newman's singing is absolutely nightmarish and this song is one of the best examples of how clearly Chance was able to put whatever he wanted to on this album, and probably didn't listen to anyone giving him advice. Get A Bag may be the worst song on the album, its kind of hard to tell honestly, the track has absolutely no creativity and the awful choppy flows are constantly interrupted by adlibs when Chance couldn't come up with lyrics and the nauseating lacking of any structure is more than enough of a reason to never hear it again. Slide Around has a bearable hook, a pretty solid understated instrumental from Pi'erre Bourne and a decent Nicki Minaj feature. I teeter on the border of whether or not this track is above or below average and then after I had already written my notes on the track we got to the absolutely atrocious Lil Durk feature right at the end and decided that I never wanted to hear this track again. Found A Good One is technically a "song" that Murda Beatz technically "produced" but you wouldn't be able to tell that from the obnoxious repetition Chance delivers on the hook and the absolute beating he puts on a pretty solid instrumental fusion of hip hop and gospel. 

So that's all the tracks that were outright not good but there are still plenty that are bearable, with some huge mistakes. Roo is a song with cute lyrical themes of family and fittingly Chance invites his brother Taylor Bennett onto the song. CoCoRosie actually has a very brief but impactful appearance on the track that I wish had more time because it is pretty captivating. The main problem here is that Chance doesn't really bring his sharpest performance and as far as lowkey Chance verses go this one doesn't really blow me away, on top of this Taylor Bennett is just doing a weaker version of Chance's typical sound and his rip off approach makes the song a little bit of a slog. Despite this it does stick to a tight lyrical theme that I enjoy and neither of the verses are necessarily bad. Lets's Go On The Run is actually one of the best performances from Chance on the entire record, the really boring and effortless keyboard instrumental is a disappointment but I was so satisfied hearing Chance really give his all that this track stuck out to me. Sun Come Down is one of the most genuine and heartfelt songs here and was very close to being one of my favorites. The first verse features a tight flow and many of my favorite lyrics on the album as Chance gets personal in an incredibly vulnerable way that makes the song more personal than many of the others here. Unfortunately there is a passage in the second verse of the song that features some loud and incredibly annoying squeaky vocalizing that is absolutely intolerable, so if you take a deep breathe and cover your ears for 20 seconds or so this is a very solid track. Town On The Hill is a decent song that really should have been amazing given that both Francis Starlite and Justin Vernon, of Francis and The Lights and Bon Iver respectively, are involved in the track. The tune is well written and features some very compelling personal lyricism but given that Chance isn't really rapping at any point in the track I can't help but think about how much better it could have been with a more capable vocalist like Justin or Francis really giving the track their all instead of being delegated to side shows. 

Part of what makes this album such a taxing listen all the way through is that there are only three songs I really enjoy and they come at the beginning, middle and very end of the record. Do You Remember is the second song here and a huge improvement over anything in the albums first half. The track features an amazing appearance from Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service who delivers one of the most gorgeous hooks on the entire record and one of the only ones that really matches the grand encapsulation of Chance's gospel aesthetic. The instrumental is a fantastic soulful piece with swelling choral vocals and a warm layer of backing keys and Chance proves to be effective lyrically in numerous flows across the song. One of the lone lyrical highlights on this record for me comes when Chance dives into his obsession with "The 27 Club" of musicians dying at 27 and now that he is turning 27 how it has changed and effected him. The song just has a very cute and overall great sentiment that really grabbed me as soon as I first heard it. 

The closing song Zanies And Fools is a solid track with a change of pace right at its starting point into these really wild tribal congo drums that drive the track and while the song has another terrible chorus that is incredibly underwhelming there is enough great lyricism and unique flows from Chance to save the track given how brief the hooks are. The song and album close off on a verse from Nicki Minaj that may literally, literally, be the single best verse on the entire album as she hits with tight flows and great lyrics which is refreshing and very out of character for Big Day.

Much like the last track Chance is rewarding when he is pushing the envelope and not afraid to experiment, the only real track that I think holds up to many of my favorite Chance tunes to date is The Big Day fitting as it is the title track and that hearing Francis Starlite's vocals on this song my first time though the record made me actually cheer out loud. Both Francis and Chance come at this tune with the absolutely amazing singing we know they are both capable of and doing it all over one of the most unique and incredible instrumentals on this entire record. The music here builds and drives the track through it multiple passages in absolutely fascinating ways and Chance takes the opportunity on this track to deliver an absolutely wild yelpy almost screamed verse that has more energy and charisma than anything else he does on the entire record. This is the true example of what Chance and his collaborators can really do when they set the bar high and really think through to making a great song, but unfortunately it's the only one here. 

The Big Day is what it sounds like when you leave absolutely nothing on the cutting room floor, some of these tracks are so appallingly underwritten and poorly produced that it was obvious somebody in the process must have tried to stop them from being released. I can't speculate on what it was like behind the scenes in the creation of this album but it is clear that the quality standard was set as low as any record I've heard all year, and hearing some of these songs be released on an album from the man who made Acid Rap just six years ago is stunning. At well over an hour Big Day chooses to throw anything it can find at the wall and see what sticks and unfortunately in its case, so little sticks. But that almost makes it sound like the album is bad because it takes risks that don't pay off but in fact pretty much the only time this record is ever rewarding is when it does something completely out of character. The rest of these songs are mediocre versions of things that Chance and his contemporaries have done hundreds of times before that feature consistently uninspired hooks, disappointing lyrics and painfully average song structures that make listening to this entire record one of the most taxing slogs I've heard all year. Even compared to some overblown albums like Future's The WZRD or Migos' Culture II, Big Day features even less highlights and much more repetition as where those other artists fully understand what makes their styles so compelling, Chance can't seem to find what he wants to settle on, and much less do whatever sound he chooses well. 

This is one of the worst albums I've heard all year and I just had to say that out loud because just a week ago this was seriously one of my most anticipated releases. And not only was I excited about it, I was anticipating it being good, like really good, even though I gave Coloring Book a 6.5 years ago that came from its inconsistencies, because there are probably six to eight tracks on that record that are better than anything on Big Day. This is by far the weakest project Chance has ever been attached too and I hope he takes a long time and uses it wisely before dropping a follow-up because he is clearly running short on ideas and needs to find some people who will help him hone them. 3/10

For more hip hop check out my review of Jaden Smith's ERYS here.