Photo credit: Katelyn Winski
Plenty of artists have sold out the Rave's Eagles Ballroom before, but Chance the Rapper may be the first who's ever done it without having sold a single album. On the strength of his vibrant mixtapes, Chance has emerged as one of the most prestigious independent rap acts of his time—though “rap” may be too narrow of a descriptor for his sound, which draws as much from the unrestricted spirit of jazz and soul as it does hip-hop. Collectively, Chance's breakout 2013 mixtape Acid Rap and his 2015 follow-up Surf, credited to jazz trumpeter Donnie Trumpet and their shared band the Social Experiment, are as close as any rapper has ever come to making his own Songs in the Key of Life.
Chance’s live show isn't as fully realized as his recorded output, but what it lacks in polish, it makes up for with spirit. With the Social Experiment backing him and given free rein to embellish the songs as they saw fit—especially Donnie Trumpet, whose horn worked its way to the foreground of nearly every song Friday night—the concert often felt more like a joyous jam session than a traditional rap show. At its best it was downright celebratory, with Chance playing his own hype man as he lead the crowd through merry, open-armed sing-alongs of Acid Rap standouts “Everybody's Something” and “Juice,” backed by colorful animations that underscored his early-'90s, happy-rap aesthetic.
At 80 minutes, however, the show sometimes dragged, especially when Chance drifted away from the jovial sun bursts he does best into more sedate territory. “Paranoia,” a nervy meditation on Chicago's violence epidemic, is a highlight on Acid Rap, but on stage it went on forever, leaving the audience with nothing to do. There were a few moments during the set’s second half when the thumps from an Owl City concert downstairs were actually louder than the show itself.
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It was easy to forgive the patchiness, though, because whenever Chance picked things up, as on his ebullient ode to his grandma’s spirituality “Sunday Candy,” it was uplifting like little else in hip-hop, and ultimately it was those highlights that lingered. Before the encore, a representative of Mayor Tom Barrett’s office appeared to deliver Chance a plaque commemorating Oct. 16, 2015 as “Chance the Rapper Day,” which he accepted gratefully. “I love Wisconsin, and I definitely love Milwaukee,” he said, repeating a word he throws around a lot: love. Even when the show was uneven, that love always came across.
