I wrote this Chance the Rapper review like a month ago and forgot about it until now.

Chance the Rapper – Star Line [Self Released 2025]

This 32-year-old divorcee seems to be posturing for “return to form” hosannas, but he sounds tired. Reflecting on his Obama-era work there was always a youthfulness to it, even in its mature moments; a boundless feeling that anything was possible, the peaceful-yet-poignant ways that life can change, to say nothing of the earworm contagiousness of his actual hits. That loss of celebratory ebullience and radical gratitude – always comforted by the support of family and community in the face of tragedy, never disrespectful to those who have passed, never ignorant of the violence and poverty of Chicago – has made Chancellor Bennett sound like a cosplayer on many of his new Gun songs and as close to a parody of himself as possible on the Vibes songs that make up the rest of the track list. But we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

                That celebratory spirit of his was laid on a little too thick during 2019, a time when a combo of his features and solo singles had shown Chance the Rapper in top form and willing to get explicitly political. Expectations during the first Trump administration were that he might put out a searing work of defiance and community to remind his fans that hope was not worth losing. What we got instead was The Big Day,a record about his marriage (kind of) but mostly there were higher production values and more ineffective guest features than money could buy. At 22 tracks in 77 minutes he looked to position it in the legacy of those late 90s/early 2000s era hip hop records that had similar length but unlike The Big Day weren’t stuffed with filler. Only then the internet piled onto this man as if he had created a new form of super cancer. “How dare he love his life and wife!!!” was part of it but not all of it, since his song writing had also atrophied in the process.

                So now more than half a decade has gone by with only the occasional loosey showing that his technical skills were still there but none of the shit talk, jokes, or hope was. Just a combativeness that when he finally switched from fans just aimed at generic “ops”. At the same time the stress of such vitriol sent him running from music altogether to the fertile crescents of Quibi’s Punk’d (dead before arrival), Netflix’s Hustle & Flow (dead on arrival), and The Voice (abandoned after one season). 6 years is a long time to ask your audience to sit with something that they couldn’t stand and even though he lost most of his druggy crowd after finding god on Coloring Book, nothing was like The Big Day’s drop off.

So following in Open Mike Eagle’s playbook after he also lost his TV show and got divorced, Chancellor Bennett releases Star Line, a record prone to but not engulfed by bloat and whose “Put this gun in yo purse” commands seem far away from any kind of “Are you ready for your blessin’s” peace. It could also just be how the times we’re now living in are so inherently fascistic in this country. Chance knew Obama personally, his father is a Democratic organizer in Chicago, and he’s had to live through watching the right-wing in this country organize, stonewall, and pass destructive and divisive policy since 2010 with the rest of us. It’s enough to engender real bitterness, his lyrics now have this acidic edge to them: “Fuck ICE” or “I smell fire at the precinct/Small bit of heat for the streets, it was freezing” or “It ain’t shit to lynch a Dylan Roof”.

Let me be clear, this isn’t a pan. Chance’s emotionality and production choices, however familiar they may be can still move the spirit, after all who else could make “Speed of Light” or “Star Side Intro” feel like they mean something? Even if they are surrounded by throwaways like “Tree” or “Ride”. He gives us a watered down and fiercely militant Black version of himself in a Coloring Book structure in the finality. And it sounds nice, but in a world of so much potent musicality and the lesson centuries in the making that good artists can lose their vision, is it wrong to think that he’s run out of gas or that we as listeners could spend our precious listening time elsewhere? 3.2/5