You’ve got some Florida on your face…
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[7.00]
Jonathan Bogart: If a smart, creative person had only read Lil B’s twitter feed without listening to any of his music, they might imagine it was a lot like this. This is a good thing.
[7]
Anthony Easton: The message is good, but the production seems ragged, and the flow isn’t quick enough for imparting all the information he wants to convey. It comes across a bit like making sure to eat your vitamins.
[5]
Alfred Soto: With his verbal shrugs and aw-shucks foot pawing, Chance has made one of the more charming debuts in recent years. In the most fully realized track on the Acid Rap mixtape, Chance ambles through professions of self-reliance, dismissals of FOX News, and the night music introspection of Slum Villages Fall in Love.
[7]
Patrick St. Michel: You think, “OK, finally, Chance The Rapper is going to show his age a little bit.” He’s grabbed Slum Village’s “Fall In Love” but at the start he’s fixated on the part about fucking and comparing microphones to penises. You think, “this is the stuff teenagers can get obsessed with, even if said kid has spent the bulk of his mixtape out rapping and out thinking anyone else in 2013.” Then, after Chance has a little bit of fun, he delivers a song touching on everything to identity, religion and politics that is among the year’s most thoughtful songs. Even more incredible is that, even though he flips off Uncle Sam and rolls his eyes at The Rolling Stones, this song is a simple declaration that everybody is worth something to someone. You think, “this is not your typical teen.”
[9]
Crystal Leww: In “Everybody’s Something” Chance trades in fun raps, compelling stories, and interesting production for this snoozefest of a production that culminates with a chorus that’s gratingly inspirational. The good stuff still exists in the verses, but that “hook” is so toothless that it’s annoying. There are a lot of great songs on Acid Rap: shame that he’s chosen the wrong singles to highlight what’s made him a breakout star.
[5]
Brad Shoup: Love the second verse, where he picks up a gear and stretches images into murals, a technique perfected by Eminem — and Kendrick Lamar. I dunno if it was the Dilla beat, but Chance came loaded for bear, going political and personal and cultural without pushing a path too hard. He holds everything down so calmly. He’s still young — note the silence-breaking “nigga” and “Wu-Tang” tags — but it’s the brave kind, where you get pretty next to BJ the Chicago Kid and you can drop couplets like “I used to tell hoes I was dark light or off white/But I’d fight if a nigga said that I talk white.” Slowed, the Dilla beat has a summery feel, a modest lope like “What’s Up Fatlip?” But it’s nice to hear something north of laceration.
[8]
David Lee: In Lauryn Hill’s tautological “Everything is Everything,” the word “everything” spans both stubborn hope and the frustrating reality that “the ones on top won’t make it stop.” Folded into the song, the two truths, seemingly at odds, fall into place within a greater framework that dictates an ultimate progress toward the good. “Everything” is a sweeping pronoun; that’s why it works so well as a descriptor for an overarching law of nature. It’s true that words like “somebody” or “everything” are often a writer’s enemies — too vague to show anything or too absolute to establish a solid argument. Like Lauryn, however, Chance demonstrates the power of the non-specific pronoun when used in universal contexts. Who is “everybody”? What defines “something”? And that’s the point. Still, with sweeping statements like these, the risk of clich exists, too. But Chance pulls it off, refracting the white light of “everybody is somebody’s everything” through his own prism of gun violence and doubts about G-d, only to reflect it back at the listener. More than a feat of writing the personal into the general and back, “Everybody is Something” also reads as a sly response to the media’s reporting of Chicago’s murder rates. Whereas coverage of Chicago violence sums human beings into anonymous body counts, Chance takes impersonal diction and breathes humanity into it.
[8]