video review: 'coloring book' by chance the rapper

So yeah, trying to catch up on my schedule has been insane... which means Ariana is probably going to be next before White Lung and ANOHNI - either way, stay tuned!

album review: 'coloring book' by chance the rapper

Let's talk about faith.

Now before I blow open this can of worms, let me start by saying that I'm not talking about religion here - my own personal faith is private and complicated and probably would extend over more than just one video, and entangling it with religion doesn't make things easier. But that's not to imply that faith doesn't inspire art - often times it can inspire better art than religion itself, see the vast majority of the Christian music scene! Good art arises from conflict, and a crisis or conflict of faith is often times one of the most potent anyone can have, especially when there's no concrete answer to the questions presented.

But what about Chance The Rapper, the eternal bright-eyed optimist in modern hip-hop who has ignored major labels with aplomb to release free album after free album? Yeah sure, it's been called a 'mixtape', but at this point I doubt Chance is going to release anything outside of 'mixtapes' like these, so if I want to cover him at length, it'll involve me breaking my mixtape rule and talking about this. A rule, by the way, that I'm happy to break here: my experience with Chance The Rapper might be uneven - I really liked Acid Rap, Surf reveals itself as even more messy with every subsequent listen - but if you get him on a straightforward project he can spray colourful and relentlessly fun verses like no other - his verse on Kanye's 'Ultralight Beam' proved that and outshone nearly everyone else on the project. What did worry me was that, again like Surf, this project might have too many hands in the pot, with an overloaded guest list and many that you would not expect from reportedly a hip-hop gospel record! But hey, maybe Chance had managed to tap into the spiritual side of artists like Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, Future, Young Thug, and Justin Bieber - at the very least, it would force them out of their comfort zone. So I picked up Coloring Book - what did I find?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 23, 2016 (VIDEO)

Man, this took WAY too long to finish. Long episode too, so I hope you all enjoy!

Next up... hmm, time to take care of some unfinished business, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 23, 2016

And to think this week was going to be busy enough. The chart instability is only getting more pronounced, we've got a healthy list of new arrivals - including what looks to be bad signs coming from Drake's lead-off to Views From The 6 - I thought things would be mostly stable. So of course here comes Kanye West with eight new songs from The Life Of Pablo, an album I covered nearly two months ago with one of the most confused release strategies I've ever seen play out. Of course, such is the transcendent power of Kanye's fame and fanbase that the album went to #1 on streaming alone, regardless of middling quality or the fact that it's been out for two months already.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 30, 2016 (VIDEO)

Well, this was a fun week. Always nice to find a world hit I like, too, I've been struggling for that the past while. In any case, hope to have that Randy Rogers Band video up some time later today, and then Brothers Osborne, Savages, and Ty Segall - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 30, 2016

So yeah, Billboard BREAKDOWN is late again, and while it might have been late regardless thanks to a blown lightbulb that I couldn't replace last night at the right wattage and luminescence, in this case the charts were delayed because of Martin Luther King Day, which is a holiday in the United States. And that's fine, the holiday is very relevant, but the fact that this happened and will continue to happen throughout the upcoming months - the delays of charts because Billboard shifted their timelines last year - is just another example of how Billboard doesn't think before they make changes. Remember when they added YouTube streams in the middle of the Harlem Shake, or the absolute disaster that were the charts in the late 90s? In comparison with that this is a minor inconvenience, mostly for folks like myself, but it's still exasperating.

video review: 'surf' by donnie trumpet & the social experiment

Oh, I can predict this review will piss off a lot of people... eh, it happens.

Next up, not quite sure yet, either Sun Kil Moon or Algiers. Stay tuned!

album review: 'surf' by donnie trumpet & the social experiment

Oh, I've been getting a lot of requests for this one.

And I'm not surprised either, because if we're looking for rappers who many have asked that I cover in some way, shape or form, Chance The Rapper would be near the top of that list. With an off-kilter, free-flowing style and wordplay that seemed to skitter across rhymes and concepts with effortless ease, Chance built a ton of buzz with his breakthrough mixtape Acid Rap in 2013, and while I didn't love that tape, I did appreciate his boundless personality and off-kilter brand of wordplay. The odd thing is that Chance The Rapper tends to get in the way of his best material - either it would come from his production being a little overmixed or his actual content not always adding up to as much as I had hoped.

But then again, when I heard he was teaming up with Donnie Trumpet and several of the producers he had worked with on Acid Rap to create the collective The Social Experiment and they were going to be dropping a record called Surf, I figured it might be a interesting experiment, especially considering this is really Chance The Rapper's first official "album". Something lightweight, fun, and with a frankly stupefying list of guest stars that spanned from Big Sean and Jeremih to Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu, I knew I had to give this record my due consideration. So how did it turn out?