Chance Three is For Me
I was complaining that I wanted a shaman.
Beyonce released Lemonade and became, well, what she’d always been, except more truly and more strange. She became every woman and the epitome of every woman. It’s not an exaggeration to describe Lemonade as a kind of epic. Yeah, it’s about the literal circumstance of Shawn Carter cheating like every other nigga, but the real subject of the film and the album is going into a dark place and coming back with something we all can use. She went all the way into the dark, into denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, into our history to find our accountability, into her soul to find forgiveness, out to her sisters to be resurrected in their eyes. In 2011, Beyonce was every woman but with a better voice and better moves and better swag and better speech and a better ass and a better career and a better husband and a better baby. She was flawless. In 2016, she is every woman, but she knows more, because she’s been there, and she’s come back, and she wrote down every step she took.
But I’m not a black woman, and Lemonade is first to the black women, then to the Greek. I learned from it, but it wasn’t for me, not initially. I loved it, but when she said, “them old bitches so wack/I’m so tough./What’s up?” I cried for her pain, not mine. (Maybe that’s why I prefer that line to the number one cry-line on Lemonade, “bitch I scratched out your name/and your face/what is it about you?/that I can’t erase?” My fav wasn’t even important enough to be on the visual album.) Lemonade is beautiful, Lemonade is healing, Lemonade is curse-breaking work and a survival kit for the meanwhile. But I’ve never been a black woman, I’ve never cheated or been cheated on. I’ve never been in a real relationship. I love Lemonade the way you love a mountain that towers in the distance. It is all the more beautiful because I know there is more to see than I can see. And if what I can see is breathtaking, the view from up close must be…
Still, when it comes to art, awe doesn’t fill the belly. It doesn’t stick to your ribs. I wanted something that was for me, something I could get close to, touch, feel, press against my skin. Something that would recognize me while I recognized it.
Certainly, strictly speaking as a black man, there’s plenty of art that’s designed to cater to the specific needs, whims, lives and imaginations of my identity category. There’s a whole genre for it, you might have heard of it… hip-hop? But I didn’t grow up listening to rap. I wasn’t street, I wasn’t backpack, I wasn’t in the yard while my big homies ran the street, I wasn’t even close. I didn’t need a playbook for hoes, I didn’t need a song to cry for me, I didn’t need to learn how to move my hustle from the trap to the boardroom (from the trap to the big trap). I didn’t need to learn to wear my tough face as I stalked down the streets, I didn’t need to never back down, I didn’t need to learn to be tough or learn to be tender. Those aren’t my concerns — I can’t even describe them right, just point in the direction — because that isn’t my life.
What I do know, though, is what it’s like to live in constant connection with something that seems bigger than you. I know what it’s like to look at the people around and see things you don’t think other folks see. I know what it is to look at yourself and see things you don’t think other folks see. I know what it is to be eccentric, to be out there, to march to a beat that no one else can hear, to move in strange wind. I know “wondrous unfamiliar lessons from childhood,” I’m “pre-currency, post-language, anti-label, pro-famous.” I speak to God in public. I wish I could be “the people’s champ,” and I wish I could be “all the people can’t be.” (There’s Queen Bey again.)
And because that was my life, that’s what I sought out in my art. And I found it: in Hamlet who could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space, beside Walt Whitman apart from the pulling and hauling, bending an arm on an impalpable rest, certain of myself. When Wallace Stevens told me to look across the roof as sigil and as ward, I clutched the corner of my pillow and pressed a bitter utterance out of my voluble dumb violence. I gave myself every Romantic name I could find. I was a sixteen year old Promethean.
The only trouble was, I was a black sixteen year old Promethean, trying to steal fire from other men’s gods, to bring back to… who? what? where? Who were my people? Then every screen was possessed of an image of men like me laying slain by the nation’s protectors, and I remembered quick who I was and who my people were.
By some fortunate turn, I had already begun to discover shamans closer to my experience. Stevie Wonder sang sometimes about his visions. I rediscovered the rhythm of his undying love on “As.” August Wilson did him one better, and gave me at least one shaman per play. I remember I wrote a note on my phone: “August Wilson locates Whitman in the African-American vernacular.” (I still talked like that then, maybe I still do now.) I found a link from the shamans I knew to the shamans I wanted to know, the ones who looked like me, and saw like me, and spoke like me, when I wasn’t giving a certain kind of performance.
August and Stevie, in their ways, opened me up to a whole nother world, not just of the shamans I admired, but of black men and women of all kinds, real and fictional. Art has always been my favorite way of understanding the world. So diving deep into art by African Americans gave me new ways of seeing people I know and love, new ways of seeing myself, new ways of seeing everything. That’s how I found myself mainlining Lemonade, driving my co-workers crazy by forcing them to suffer through four full play-throughs in a single day. (But whatever, everyone needs to hear Lemonade, okay?) Listening to Lemonade, I found myself wanting something as true to my experience as Lemonade seems to be true to the experience of many black women.
I was complaining that I wanted a shaman. Not just any shaman — I’d had plenty in the past. I wanted a black male 2016 shaman who believed in being decent to everyone, who tried to be obedient to something higher than himself, who be asking God to show his face, who walked, ran, and stumbled his way through those goals in the real world every day. Enter Chance.
A friend had been telling me to listen to Chance for probably a year before I listened to Acid Rap. I was stuck at work late one night when I finally hit the mixtape and It set my whole head on fire. I did the holy ghost club dance to Good Ass Intro (if you’ve never done the holy ghost club dance I dunno what I have to say to you.) I walked around singing the chorus of Cocoa Butter Kisses for hours. Then I heard Sunday Candy, and it was everything I could ever have asked for and more: working-class sacrament, ode to black church, ode to black grannies, PLUS musical theater. I felt like it was made for me in a way I had always felt about art and never felt about art. And then a couple days ago Chance 3 dropped.
I don’t really have a review of the album for you — I know it’s great, I know I love it, but I don’t have anything useful to say about it. Jay Electronica used the story of Simba lost in the wilderness better than anyone since the Walt Disney company itself, and thirty seconds later he said that a “fire in Cali’ll swallow a valley for every African village burned.” That song also consisted of three minutes of “How Great is Our God.” The album goes out on a mantra of Fred Hammond’s “Let the Praise Begin,” that I’ve loved since I was eight: “Are you ready for your blessing? Are you ready for your miracle?” Chance said that he was going to speak noble things as entrusted to him. The melody of Same Drugs is beautiful. I low-key cried on the train listening to D.R.A.M sing Special because it sounds like something my mama would’ve sung to me when I was four. I danced my ass off to All We Got and laughed my ass off to All Night because of course on the dance track Chance spends both verses rapping about how you can’t get in his car — and then the end of the chorus says “Get in!” Chance’s daughter couldn’t have a better mother. Nico’s trumpet is making brick and mortar fall like dripping water. I got angels all around me they keep me surrounded. The second Blessings is who I am and who I want to be.
I can’t really talk coherently about the album, I don’t have a Theory of Chance or a Theory of Chance 3, and I’m making peace with the fact that theory is about all I have to offer. What I have is a Theory of What Chance 3 Means to Me. To me, it is the story of a black male 2016 shaman trying to walk through the world, dance a little, have fun, be a good dad, be good to the woman he loves, be decent to everyone, be obedient to something higher than himself, think about the himself and the people around him, and till his talent so as to reap a harvest —he made it through, and everything he gave to you, he gave to you (to me). That’s the story I needed to hear.
I’ll wrap up with an anecdote: When I was sixteen years old, I paced around the front room of my father’s house and recited the first six lines of Wallace Stevens’ Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction until they meant something to me: “Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea/of this invention, this invented world/the inconceivable idea of the sun.//You must become an ignorant man again/and see the sun with an ignorant eye/and see it clearly in the idea of it.” I still couldn’t paraphrase those lines for you, and I’m not entirely sure they mean much of anything, really. But when I repeated those words to myself, over and over, I took them into myself. I made them part of me.
Those of us who are really into art, who will play the same album, or the same song, or the same verse until we know every inflection — what we’re looking for from our art is something like what you look for in love: someone you can take into yourself, someone who can become part of you. I’m not Chancellor Bennet any more than I am Beyonce Knowles or Shawn Carter or Stool Pigeon or Bynum or Stevie Wonder or Wallace Stevens or Walt Whitman or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. But what Chance the Rapper gives me in Coloring Book is something that I can bring close to me, something that I can make a part of myself. Something I can say to myself until the words sink into my tongue and into my brain and into my blood. That’s a gift, and I’m grateful for it. Thanks, Chance.
