A Missed Chance
“Oh my God, this is the greatest day of my life. So glad you arrived, but the only way to survive is to go crazy”
Chance the Rapper is more boring than he's ever been, but that's not necessarily bad. Everything is going right for Chance right now; he's married with two kids and probably a white picket fence. He's Superman, the bastion of goodness, who always does the right thing, and he’s giving God the glory.
The Big Day is an album about sanctification, or it could be. Sanctification is the process of becoming holy, of becoming saints. In Christianity, it is becoming more like Christ in our attitudes and behavior. Salvation brings us into fellowship with God, and sanctification is the process of becoming like Him.
Coloring Book is Chance the Rapper’s album about salvation, and in it Chance identifies with Harry Potter. On Finish Line he raps "scars on my head, I'm the Boy who Lived." In his classic nostalgic style, he weaves together a childhood of hardship and struggle with a childhood allusion. He never should have made it, but by some miracle, he lived. This deep knowledge of salvation is what drives Coloring Book. It sees the sublime through the doubts of Acid Rap, and exceeds the trappings of both mainstream rap and Gospel rap. It is an anthem of victory, an extension of Chances exuberance for life and for God that shone through on an Ultralight Beam.
The Big Day, however, is Chance's album of sanctification, and Chance identifies with Superman. Or it could be. As he is often portrayed, Superman doesn't experience sanctification; he is already a saint. He is the unassailable hero for whom everything goes right, and who, in every case, does right. Chance raps more about God without reaching the ecstatic heights of Coloring Book, and the trap tracks feel more perfunctory than profound. He raps about his perfect wife, perfect kids, perfect God, and perfect life without ever conveying the irrepressible joy that infuses Acid Rap and Coloring Book. Chance feels settled in life and the tracks feel the same: occasionally brilliant but settled.
Dostoevsky, a Russian author from the 1800s, describes sanctification as a long, slow process. As such, the story of Superman loses some interest. Superman doesn't have to be boring, but it's a hard story to tell because it doesn’t have the challenges of a conventional narrative. His character arc is flat. Superman's challenge is to stay the same in the face of opposition, to remain good. Saints still struggle, but it’s a different story than those seeking redemption. It's a hard story to tell, Dostoevsky doesn't even try in Crime and Punishment. Harry Potter and Coloring Book are more straightforward: Chance beats the labels and the rap game, and Harry Potter grows and becomes stronger to defeat Voldemort. The series ends when the Boy who Lived is on top. It would be hard to make Harry Potter’s life as a dad as exciting as his boyhood. It’s a long, slow story of continuing to be a better man.
The Big Day, could about that long, slow process, a meditation on the work it takes to always do good, of the challenges and responsibilities that come with marriage and fatherhood. He's made it to the top. He wants to be a saint. Struggles don't go away, but they change. Similarly, in a beautifully humanizing passage in the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul grapples with the fact that the good he wants to do he doesn't, and what he hates he does. Chance could still revel in and celebrate the views from the top, while also acknowledging that staying good and staying faithful is a challenge he faces daily.
The closest Chance comes to acknowledging the struggles of Superman is the title track: The Big Day. He repeats over and over "Oh my God, think it's the greatest day of my life/so glad you arrived/but the only way to survive is to go crazy/Yeah, the only way to survive is to go crazy." Like Bon Iver's song Woods (Bon Iver's Justin Vernon is a writer and producer on the track), this mantra takes on new meaning with each repetition. As if each restatement is needed to convey just how much he feels this to be the greatest day of his life, or each restatement is needed to convince himself it really is. The middle of the song devolves into shouting down his vices while admitting that he still wants them: "Still wanna drink it, fuck it, drink it, drink it, fuck it, shoot it/I don't wanna just get it, get it, get it, get it."
The last statement of the theme has Francis and the Lights shouting "Oh Lord!" over Chance's placid sing-song. And they shout and sing the last two lines in unison, like a cubist painting showing multiple angles of one object to get a fuller picture. The two deliveries clash as if Chance the Rapper contains all of the depth of anger and frustration with his own imperfection that breaks through in the profanity laden center, and those two doubles fight for supremacy beneath the boring seeming Superman veneer.
The Big Day could be an album about the struggle of normality, the struggle of being a good man. The long slow process of sanctification is not inevitable, but the views from the top are breathtaking. He could explore the theme of doubles introduced in the song Roo. A double or his brother could be a symbolic exploration of the conflict within himself to stay Superman. He raps, "We can be cool, we can be cool/Me and my brother, we can be cruel." How does he overcome his propensity for cruelty? Or he could explore what it means to live not as Superman, but as a molecule in the Body of Christ, a much more theologically interesting possibility suggested at the end of the Big Day.
But Chance is just excited to be married. He’s excited to have kids, excited to live the dream. He's at the top. He wants to be Superman and most of the time he feels like Superman. Understandably, he’d rather be Superman than the Boy Who Lived, and doesn’t seem to have much interest in questioning what it means to be a Man who Lives.
