Your everyday consumer has a better understanding, I think, of what bots are, what marketing campaigns look like, what smear campaigns look like, what everything looks like. - Chance The Rapper discussing the commercial failure of The Big Day

Okay, look, from the outset, this all reads as very weird to me, honestly. The Big Day was a bit of a landmark moment in terms of popular media consumption on the internet and the fact that social media discourse and memes and hate and negativity and all of a sudden the social media dislike of a certain album is enough to deflate an artist's career entirely.

The Big Day is definitely the most shining example of that for its time period. But with that being said, Chance the Rapper is obviously pushing the narrative here that there was some kind of active smear campaign going on, or that the hate for The Big Day was orchestrated in some way.

Well, then why? What's the motivation there? What's the thread? Who is out here conspiring against Chance? It's hard to swallow what he's putting forward here because it makes no damn sense.

I'm sorry, but people genuinely did not like The Big Day. It wasn't because they were told to dislike it on the internet.