Hey, hi, hello, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd.

Let's take a second to talk about an album, not a new album, an old one, a pretty legendary one in its own right. I'm talking about the 2019 record from Chance the Rapper, The Big Day. A record I have had to take a second to reflect on recently due to my review of Chance's latest LP, Starline, an album that, while it was not perfect, I was pretty happy with how it came out.

It definitely surpassed The Big Day in terms of overall song quality and tolerability. It really restored my faith in Chance the Rapper as an artist and left me feeling that he could build from here and put out an even better album down the road or mixtape sometime soon. There have been a lot of longtime fans and hardcore hip hop heads who really got a lot out of the record, which is great, which is good. I'm glad that Chance is really starting to bounce back on this one because he just seems like too talented of a writer and a rapper to not be out here consistently putting out good stuff.

But all of this excitement and renewed interest made me curious to go back to The Big Day and see if it was really worth all the negativity that it drew at the time. I mean, it really has been years and years since I listened to it. I'm sure, as you can imagine, once you give an album a zero out of 10, it doesn't really lead to a lot of opportunities or passion for going back and listening to it. I thought maybe with some new ears and a new perspective, and also having enjoyed a lot of tracks on Starline, would this album actually click for me and mean more to me now than it did when it originally came out.

So I went back and listened to the album, and it was not a very positive experience. However, what I will say is that the shock of what made the record so awful in my eyes has worn off. I feel like now it's easier to approach the album in a way to where I can give it a more straightforward and measured critique, one that goes beyond all of the jokes and memes around Chance the Rapper talking about his wife and being married, which unfortunately still persists today on some level.

Even going back to my original review of the record, that was not my primary issue with the album, nor do I think it should have been for other people. So yeah, I went back to this record, and unfortunately, I found myself just going through skip after skip, after skip, after skip. I could barely sit through a single song.

Let me start with the first major issue that I have with this album. That's the production. Now, mind you, many of the instrumentals on this record I don't think are necessarily bad or the worst I've heard, but I just don't think a lot of them work for Chance the Rapper or a rap album in general. It's clear going into this LP with how expensive some of the beats sound and the massive tracklist, that Chance was just given a lot of options and probably a bigger budget. He was also showing a lot of ambition on this record overall, so he probably wanted to put out a lot of tracks, cover a lot of bases.

I feel like all of this culminated in a slate of beats that either I'm listening to the theme music of a wholesome '90s family sitcom, or again, just like certain musical styles and sounds that while fine in a vacuum or in another context, don't necessarily play into Chance the Rapper's artistic strengths. Like "Ballin Flossin", for example, which is a very cute, endearing, and admirable tribute to some old-school Chicago house vibes. And Chance being the type of artist who has a wide musical palate, who clearly has an appreciation for the musical history of his city, he's going to do a little house track. But that doesn't mean he's actually good at doing what he does vocally over a house instrumental.

So at the end of the day, that and many other songs on this project just come off musically like well-intentioned misfires. And part of the reason that this is, I feel like, has a lot to do with one of his biggest influences, and that's Kanye West. Who I also want to mention in the context of my next major issue with the album, and that's the features.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with the history of Chance the Rapper, you know this guy loves Kanye, you know he loves Chicago, you know he loves the musical history of Chicago, again. So of course, Kanye is an artist he's going to hold in high regard. He very much did, obviously, on this record. And while that doesn't necessarily come through in the way Chance the Rapper formulates his verses or writes his songs a lot of the time, I do think it comes up in the way he's obviously trying to position himself on this album as not just a lyricist, not just a songwriter, but like a director and a vibe curator.

Because often it is talked about how Kanye's talent set includes this capacity to just grab the right feature artists, the right rappers and singers and producers to help him along in creating this grand and epic vision that leads to him creating sounds and songs that are outside of his talent set, but he knows exactly who to grab to bring him to that place. And it feels like Chance is trying to do the same thing in a way, but none of it's working out well, whether it's CocoRosie or Death Cab for Cutie, or Shawn Mendes, or Randy Newman, even Gucci Mane.

There are a lot of unlikely faces on this album that for sure are surprising, but Chance doesn't really seem to know where to put them or how to direct them in order to get the best performances out of them or just put them in the best context on the album. And due to that, instead of a lot of good quality features, it just feels like you're getting this endless random gumbo of musical names that take away more than they actually add to the album much of the time.

I also want to address another major issue that I have with this record, and that's Chance's vocals. Now, even early on in Chance's career, vocally, he has been an artist who sometimes, the sound of his voice, the inflections he tends to favor, do get a little bit on my nerves. I find them grading. That has not kept me, though, from enjoying projects like Coloring Book and having a lot of favorite tracks off of his seminal Acid Rap mixtape.

But man, Chance is on another level on this record, and maybe it's because he was just feeling overly confident and excited about the album and how it was coming out and the point in life that he was personally. He sounds very excited and very amped and very just over the top on this album. This leads to a lot of performances and flows and vocal inflections that sound like I'm listening to my little brother stemming first thing in the morning, and I'm just trying to get some sleep.

And again, I do get where he is coming from once more with what feels like some inadvertent Kanye influence, because Kanye is also so known to be an artist who, while not the best singer, the ideas he brings to the table are so good or the level of charisma he has on the mic is so high that he just convinces you of the vision, even if he's not hitting every note perfectly. And unfortunately, despite the talent that Chance the Rapper very much clearly has, I feel like it's not quite at that level to where he can be so off key on a lot of these songs, and it just makes sense anyway.

Beyond that, there are the bars and the lyrics on this record, which I think is probably the element that is beat up the most on the album, especially when it comes to goofier cuts like "Hot Shower" or, again, all the "My Wife" stuff. On the former, I don't disagree because there are some really goofy bars on this project that, with every other element that I mentioned previous, to this being not so great are hard to tolerate. "I need stock and it got to be Pippie Long." Are we serious?

But in addition to that, I got to say, the moments where Chance is really waxing, poetic about the state of life that he's in and all the hope that he has for the future, tracks like "Five Year Plan" actually do portray Chance as a pretty nice guy who wants some very nice and normal things out of life, exudes positivity. But there is something about these moments that even at the time felt a tad bit too performative.

So sadly, again, even versus that do in a vacuum feel like, "Okay, I appreciate that he's saying this, and this is a cool thing to want and desire and express." Just knowing how hard of a left turn, Chance's his life and career took after this moment. It's...um...oof. So, yeah, unfortunately, going back to the big day and hoping to squeeze some enjoyable and exciting and some positive moments out of it proved to be a fool's errand. But I'm glad that Starline was much better and seems to have essentially put Chance on the right track once again, which I'm hoping he's just able to stay on going forward into the future.

Let me know what you guys think about all of this down below. I'm sure you will. And if you've gone back and listened to The Big Day at all, have your feelings changed on it since originally listening to it? Did you even dislike it when it first came out? Let me know. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano, Chance the Rapper, forever.