One big day led to years of big disappointments for Chance the Rapper. Since the release in 2019 of his debut studio album, which reveled in wedding reception bliss, the one-time Chicago golden boy has lost much of his luster. The term "wife guy" (pejorative) had just entered the zeitgeist, and he'd put himself squarely in the crosshairs of those who might wield it as a cudgel. The response was immediate and resounding, and the week of the release, he noted emergent backlash on Twitter: "I think I just wanted to say out loud that I see the vibes." A tour was postponed, then canceled. He and his former manager exchanged lawsuits for breach of contract, with the latter claiming an outsized impact on the rapper's career and citing "fan disappointment" in The Big Day, calling Chance unproductive and undisciplined, and the album "a freestyle-driven product of sub-par quality." By 2022, he was firing back at claims that he'd fallen off on hip-hop's gibbet The Breakfast Club. The announcement that summer of a comeback album, Star Line Gallery, only exacerbated the turbulence when it kept failing to materialize. Even as he traveled to Ghana and opened an exhibit at his city's Museum of Contemporary Art, the opprobrium lingered. "I have not grown out of worrying about the opinions of flies," he told Complex. "I'm still learning how to get past that, but I've learned how to listen to the voice of God and do what I'm supposed to do."
It's easy to forget just how hot Chance was before he was written off as a washout. During the mid-2010s, he felt like a generational talent and one of modern rap's great independent success stories, catapulting himself to fame with the blog-era classic Acid Rap. His self-sustained conquest was also a rising tide for a wave of post-Kanye musicians in Chicago — Nico Segal, Jamila Woods, Vic Mensa and Noname, to name a few. Rare is the star who is both immensely gifted and easy to root for, and by 2016, his life was perfect: The mixtape he released that year, Coloring Book, a vibrant yet mellow meditation on the activating power of faith, was an Apple Music exclusive that became the first project to chart off streams alone, and the first tape to win the Grammy for best rap album. He was nominated for an Emmy, and seemed to have all but moved into the Obama White House. As he and his friend Donald Glover threw around the idea of making a mixtape together, you could see the pair of indie-rap personalities as a two-horse race for where the entire culture was headed. Knowing now what was in store for both, it feels absurd to say, but smart money would have been on Chance at the time.
The Big Day quickly (and unfairly) eroded much of that goodwill, and the burden mounted for Star Line Gallery to break the curse. In December 2023, he said it would be out the following spring. April 2024 came and he was still teasing it. That June, he joked he was 82.7% done. He dropped more than a dozen singles; nothing really seemed to stick. Anticipation and apprehension were building in tandem, and with each extension the stakes got higher. Throughout, the rapper was adamant that whatever he put out next, whenever he put it out, would be bigger than just him alone. "I think what fans can always expect is for it to sound like Chance," he told XXL in 2022. "But it is very influenced by a culture and a lineage and a legacy that precedes me. You can expect it to be very Black."
That record, now finally released as STAR LINE, takes its title from Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line, a shipping operation with plans to bring goods and Black Americans back to Africa, and was inspired by Chance's trips around the world, the one to Ghana most prominently. But STAR LINE is not about globetrotting, or returning to the motherland; it's about the lessons learned on the journey, a fitting career metaphor. Not only is the 32-year-old Chancelor Bennett on personal quests of reclamation and rediscovery, he is reevaluating his private life, after he and his wife announced they'd split last year and are co-parenting their two children. In its songs, STAR LINE scans as a roving pilgrimage bringing the rapper back home — to Chicago, to family and friends, to gun violence, to the church, to face the man in the mirror. If the ride is a bit rocky, that's to be expected; most adjustment periods are. But, true to his word, Chance's reintegration isn't really about him — it's about mobilization. In keeping with his last two records, he is still guided by faith, but faith without works is dead, and boy, does he get to work, taking aim at the man-made forces that beset his community. In the process, he begins to recapture the spry perspicuity that made him a boy wonder.
The washed allegations always felt overblown to me — misrepresentative of The Big Day itself, and of Chance's potential to bounce back — but any nagging questions about his acuity are laid to rest here, as the "boy from the premature burial" shrugs off challenges to his competency, including insinuations that doing acid was some kind of performance-enhancing drug for his screwball lyricism. Remarkably (or maybe not, given his abiding persona), the album is not bitter or defensive but reinvigorated and perceptive, less intent on proving his capabilities than on using those powers for good, and its phoenix-from-the-ashes feel comes largely from that directive. "Fresh out surviving the coup d'état / The music stopped, you just might lose your spot / No fairytale endings if you lose the plot / It's written in the notebook if you forgot," he spits on the intro track. So much of the album is about remembering, with the notebook as a living record of all that has transpired. "Back to the Go," "Link Me in the Future" and "Space & Time" feel like flipping through those pages; the titles all hint at a heightened spatial awareness, and the verses are imbued with an impressive, almost mournful knowingness. It can often feel like all the things he's lost have clued him into the things worth preserving.
Chance has always done business by committee, and one of the charms of STAR LINE is how its community-driven ethos seems to apply to its own creation. Woods and Mensa reconnect with him here, and he is joined by hometowners across the album: Do or Die, BJ the Chicago Kid, Smino, BabyChiefDoit. Several out-of-towners (Lil Wayne, Young Thug, Jay Electronica) return from previous Chance records, popping in like recurring guest stars. As if to stick it to the Big Day haters, one of that album's producers, Dexter "DEXLVL" Coleman, is the primary this time, working in conjunction with members of the Social Experiment band, including Segal, Peter CottonTale and Nate Fox. The songs often feel like an extended-family affair.
That familiarity makes sense as a way to activate the rapper's muscle memory, yet this album isn't nearly as joyful or chirpy as most Chance projects. There are noticeably fewer of his squawked ad-libs; the flows are less nasally. His music has always been earnest and urgent, but the spirals of an acid trip, or the elations of spirit worship and fatherhood, are much different stimulants than the driver here: rising to the occasion as a free-spirited yogi crusader. Chance has often been a happy-go-lucky character, but STAR LINE finds him in an aggressive posture somewhere between Sundial Noname and G Herbo — at times even brandishing guns, to which he appeals by name and caliber. On Acid Rap's "Paranoia," he spoke of firearms as a scourge on his community, easier to find than a parking spot. Here, they are his accomplices: a .38 Special he calls Noisy Cricket, a SIG Sauer called MC Hammer, a 9 millimeter called Thug Life, a Hi-Point he calls Hard to Find and an Mk 12 called Hard to Miss, all used to engage with the police state.
Since the days of N.W.A, cops have been antagonists in rap songs, though primarily in the form of standalone officers or departments. Rappers often write about militant policing as something they, specifically, are experiencing — which is the most natural POV, especially in the first-person shooter that is gangsta rap. ("Strong hand of the law got me feeling oppressed," Vince Staples raps on "Hands Up," emphasis on the "me.") Chance has a fresh angle, confronting the institution of policing rather than the activity of being policed. He channels the language of Black riot on the rumbling "Burn Ya Block," his voice reaching a cleansing falsetto when he sings, "I smell fire at the precinct / Small bit of heat for the streets, it was freezing." After lamenting the ramifications of overpolicing on "The Negro Problem," he grows more billigerent on "Drapetomania," which feels like bursting through a wall of riot shields, and leads a call to action on "Just a Drop," gathering the pitchforks, torches and troops.
At a glance, Chance's militancy may seem at odds with his spirituality, but a song like "Letters," which reads like a series of one-star Yelp reviews for religious institutions, treats the two as complementary. Almost all of the bars are about community activation, informed explicitly by a well-intentioned service of those in his flock. "I say a little prayer when my hand on my heater / You reachin' and I'm slayin' off your ear like I'm Peter," he raps, invoking Martin and Malcolm and Aretha as pillars at various intersections of devotion and soul, and citing the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the 2015 Charleston shooting. Black spirituality is a part of the history of Black activism, but Chance is insistent that faith alone won't save you. His philosophy can be boiled down to a single line from "No More Old Men": "God the Father may love you, but the world doesn't / That's how I learned to put my dukes up and play the dozens." There is a sense across the album that freedom-fighting requires both fortitude and engagement, and that each is found in communion with the other. "Trust, you gon' be alright, we gon' bе alright," he says on "Ride," hat-tipping Kendrick. "But if they wanna fight, it's gon' be a fight / Just get your brothers right, and they gon' ride."
For all its messaging on the benefits of the collective, this sweeping manifesto could not be as effective without the distinct brushstrokes of its author, who arrives willing to point his penetrating wit inward. As the rapper suggested to XXL, the album sounds like Chance — which is to say, soulful and omnidirectional, smearing gospel and juke and drill across a canvas consolidating Chi-Town's rich creative history. His herky-jerky flows are so instinctive and lived-in, possessing the looseness that comes from both tremendous aptitude and painstaking practice. STAR LINE, fittingly, is an album of accumulations — accumulated mistakes, accumulated keepsakes, accumulated advice, all with the intention of learning from forebears and honoring their legacies. Maybe that's why the verse that moved me the most is saved for the very end, as an epilogue of closer "Speed of Love," which reminisces fondly about days scrawling on CDs burned with his dad at night, the elder Bennett imparting wisdom Chance still holds dear to this day. Among those proverbs: "If God need a boat, do yo' part and you build." There is a sense that maybe Chance wasn't really hearing him before and is now, that to build you must first have a blueprint, and that it takes walking the path and stumbling to see the grand designs. A march through the valley of the shadow of career death led him to fear no evil.
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