Few rappers have such a natural knack for syllabic strokes and rhythmic rhymes.
Review by David Feltman
Few rappers have such a natural knack for syllabic strokes and rhythmic rhymes as Chance the Rapper and his second mixtape, Acid Rap, demonstrates this with inarguable finality. The Windy City’s finest, Chance embodies the ideal of the street poet. Not content with standard Shakespearian or Seussian ABBAC rhyme schemes, Chance the Rapper is more comfortable with ABBACACCCCABBACACAABBA, complete with symmetrical sentence structures.
The strangest aspect of Acid Rap is Chance’s indifference to the seriousness of his messages. The stories capture growing up in the city from every conceivable angle. Chance raps, “They American kids. They murder kids here. Why do you think they don’t talk about it? They deserted us here,” just as easily as he raps, “Swallow those synonyms like cinnamon Cinnabon. Keep all the sense of them down to a minimum.” Chance is a veritable whirlwind of rhyming stream of conscious.
Acid Rap, despite Chance’s nimble tongue, is long and languid. Not afraid to stretch a track to seven minutes just as quickly as bite a rhyme off in two-and-a-half-minutes, Chance unwinds his tracks like a ball of string. They are only as long as they need to be. In speed, in cadence, in scheme and subject matter, there’s no one else out there that even comes close to Chance the Rapper. The man is peerless. For any hip hop fan hungry for someone to take it to the next level, Chance the Rapper is already here and just waiting to be discovered.
