If you are even vaguely a member of the hip-hop listening community, by now you've probably spent at least some time with Chance The Rapper's recent mixtape release, Acid Rap. The tape is rich with detail and multiple meanings, so in this episode of MTV Rapfix's "Mixtape Daily," the young rapper/song singer/suspended subpoena for misdemeanors dreamer gives you a small dose of access into his lyrical thought process.
In this personalized close reading of the song "Everybody's Something," Mr. Bennett reveals that one of the bars was actually an allusion to a Lil Durk lyric. Chance's line, "I used to tell hoes I was dark light or off-white" can be traced back to a Durk line in which he refers to cutting off his dreads, calling himself Jamaican. Chance goes on to explain his ambivalence toward the fact that he used to want to be seen as mixed (which he is not), then raises questions about perceptions of racial identity in general.
It's a bit daunting to realize how much weighing and considering went into this one lyric, especially once you begin to extrapolate to the project as a whole. But as Chance says himself of the mixtape, not at all facetiously, "[Acid Rap involves] critical discourse analysis that invokes on people to, you know, analyze words and rhetoric." Watch and learn above.
[via MTVRapfix]
