In 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy traveled to South Africa to deliver a speech to a progressive students’ union — a speech, it should be noted, that was only nominally opposed to apartheid. Kennedy’s visit was controversial on both sides of the Atlantic, and the white South African government refused its ministers permission to meet with Kennedy — the only reason he was even granted a visa was because of his prominence as a senator and former attorney general.

Kennedy opened his speech thus:

I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

Kennedy’s overwrought bait-and-switch was, at least, relevant to his audience. His speech was written and rewritten with input from South African students studying in the United States and the State Department’s Bureau for African Affairs, after an initial draft came disgustingly close to parroting the line of the South African regime rather than speaking truth to power (no surprise, given our country’s collective, shameful ignorance of the African continent).

(Kennedy’s speech, via US News)

Kennedy’s speech was far from flawless — he paused momentarily to recognize his anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, rum-running, child-lobotomizing father, and slandered Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as terroristic — but it conveys liberalism’s professed, if not actionable, sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed, and does so with an eloquence that’s alien to today’s politics.

This speech is one of the last great examples of the vapidly optimistic progressivism that defined John Kennedy’s election in 1960 and the years after, until the war in Vietnam became too divisive an issue to ignore for hypocritical Democrats. The Kennedys, McNamara, Rusk, Sorenson, and the rest of “the best and the brightest” were certain to change the country, our elders thought, to transcend partisanship and apply the best of their Ivy League educations and their knowledge of industry to the reformation of a sclerotic nation — but they fell depressingly short.

Stop me if that all sounds familiar, but it seems evident to me that few of those who predicted so brazenly that the election of Barack Obama heralded the arrival of a “post-racial” America had read their history.[i]

Obama during his ’08 victory speech, via StrangeRelationship on Wordpress.

That the Kennedys could not effect substantial change can be attributed to their assassinations in 1963 and 1968, but the reality is that the bulk of most administrations’ accomplishments come in their first 18 months in office, and even popular presidents like John Kennedy with majorities in both houses of Congress can struggle to quickly implement transformative change. Whence might your utopia have come, Jack?

In traveling between Missouri and my hometown in Eastern Iowa over the last four years, I’ve witnessed a change in how my two cities, Cedar Rapids and St. Louis, as well as the towns and villages in between, approach politics and perhaps life more broadly. Aggression and hate are now more common than I’ve ever seen, and I think more so than since the riots of 1968 and the rage that led Richard Nixon to resign. In the right’s response to the Obama administration and the left’s response to the Bush and Trump administrations (and Obama’s total flaccidity), passion and anger have been revived. Broadly, this has been interpreted as a bad sign for democracy, as street violence has erupted in Seattle (where a Trumpista shot and nearly murdered an anarchist for objecting to the former’s use of pepper spray on protestors), Berkeley, and elsewhere. Just last week, there was an attempted murder of Republican congressmen by a leftist with whom I’d largely, admittedly, agree (though, I want to be clear, not with the violence — see the endnote).[ii] Violence, perpetrated primarily by the state — that is, the police — in concert with far-right militants, has been borne most by those true patriots committed to equality and egalitarianism, and by random innocents just living their typical day.[iii]

Violence, whether structural or explicit, is inherent to most Americans’ lives. Wasn’t this one of then-candidate Trump’s most enduring depictions? Whenever he lacked an answer for his own absurdity, he defaulted to decrying Chicago as post-apocalyptic hellscape, barely redeemable and utterly devoid of any humanity. If violence is such a staple of the proles, why bother saving us at all, one might wonder? If we, especially the black folks among us hangers-on, can’t stop killing each other, and it’s our, or their, fault, how can we possibly possess any worth as humans? We can’t: welcome to the new class of worthlessness, the neo-lumpenproleteriat, comrades. Even we children of privilege, of which I am certainly one, have been cast off by our sociopolitical superiors as impractical or foolhardy, as if their complicity in the fruitless murder of countless Iraqis and Vietnamese, and in the villainization of kids here at home born in tough homes and ‘hoods, conferred some sort of intellectual gravitas. Give me a moment here to scoff.

Perhaps, instead of despairing at our social and economic dislocation, we should listen to the voices proclaiming from Hell Street the worth of those voices’ keepers. Any reasonable observer knows that the president’s perspective is one formed almost exclusively from the 26th floor of Trump Tower[iv] in Manhattan, no bastion of popular thought or truth. Rather than Fifth Avenue, why not look to 8 Mile Road in Detroit? Or the Delmar Divide in St. Louis? The Troost Wall in Kansas City? Let’s go with South Chicago.

Chancellor Bennett was born in April, 1993, and lived on 79th Street on the South Side as a kid. His neighborhood, West Chatham, was almost entirely black and generally working- and middle-class, and his father was a top Senate aide to Barack Obama (and is now, regrettably, a fixture of the Rahm Emanuel administration). He met Obama for the first time when he was eight years old, and performed “Sunday Candy” at the White House last December. Bennett is now known by his stage name Chance the Rapper, the twenty-four-year-old phenom who’s quickly become the musical face of Chicago, Kanye be damned. There’s no shortage of young artists on the scene lately — Rihanna (29), Lorde (20), Justin Bieber (23), Zayn Malik (24), and Maty Noyes (19) come to mind — but Chance’s music plumbs depths of a wholly different nature.

A little more than a year ago, Chance dropped Coloring Book, a mixtape that featured hip-hop icons Kanye West, T-Pain, 2 Chainz, Ty Dolla $ign, and others, and which took the music world by storm. Coloring Book earned Chance three Grammys, and I’ve been hard-pressed to find a legitimately critical review of the album. The only problem I have with Coloring Book is that it ends; I suppose that more folks haven’t grasped its message bothers me, too.

Coloring Book is Chance’s third album (to call it a mixtape, as Chance does, has the unfortunate side effect of cheapening the project’s brilliance), and conveys, in many ways, the story of his life and the lives of not just his South Chicago cohort, but our generation as a whole. The album opens with “All We Got,” a collaboration with Kanye that sets the tone for every note and word that follows. “This ain’t the intro, this the entrée” are Chance’s first words (besides “We back, and we back,” the reminder that he’s still kicking that opened Acid Rap, too), after which he dives headfirst, as an upright Christian, into giving thanks for his daughter, her mother, his success, and the blessings he enjoys: “Man, I swear my life is perfect, I could merch it / If I die I’ll prolly cry at my own service.”

Chance with his daughter, from his Instagram.

Merchandizing and touring comprise much of Chance’s income, divorced as he is from labels that exist to exploit artists young and old; that he brazenly refuses to sign with a corporation is an unrepentant middle finger to the extractive, privileged class that owns and operates parasitic music labels. After all, what do labels exist for but to pilfer artists’ intellectual property and promote it for their own profit, with whatever marginal benefit to the artist, brutally culled by label executives and granted as sparingly as possible, held up as the magnificent genius of capitalism? It’s wicked and it’s perverse, and Chance’s rejection thereof is only part — but an important part — of what makes him the scion of late millennials.

“All We Got’s” first verse concludes by introducing Coloring Book’s profoundly spiritual tone, casting the album as “for the kids of the King of all kings,” as the “holiest thing,” and as “the beat that played under the Word” and “the sheep that ain’t like what it herd.” If four lines could capture the essence of Coloring Book, it would probably be these. Wordplay is a staple of rap, from Tupac (“And since we all came from a woman / Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman / I wonder why we take from our women / Why we rape our women — do we hate our women? / I think it’s time to kill for our women / Time to heal our women, be real to our women”) to Lin-Manuel Miranda (Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir…It’s a blur, sir. He handles the financials? / You punched the bursar,”) but Chance, again, elevates the game.

I swear we locked eyes at the St. Louis show, and I reached to him and he reached to me. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t among the best moments of my life, so far.

He vacillates between historical, cultural, and biblical innuendoes, from “Good God, the gift of freedom / Hosanna Santa invoked and woke up slaves from Southampton to Chatham Manor,” to “Shabach barak, edify, electrify the enemy like Hedwig ‘till he petrified / Any petty Peter Pettigrew could get the pesticide / Seventy-nine, seventy-nine! / If I don’t believe in science, I believe in signs,” to “Found warmth in a black queen for when I get col’ like Nat King, I’m doing the dad thing / I speak of wondrous unfamiliar lessons from childhood / Make you remember how to smile good.” He levels violence of his own (“If one more label try to stop me, there gon’ be some dread-head niggas in your lobby”) alongside appeals to fraternity and love (“I don’t make songs for free, I make ’em for freedom / don’t believe in kings, believe in the Kingdom.”) If rap is poetry — and it is — then Chance is Walker or Brooks reincarnated.[v]

What Chance does most impressively in Coloring Book, I think, is to humanize Christianity. Since my childhood church split harrowingly in two over the right of gay men and women to preach the word of God, I’ve bitterly, even hatefully, eschewed faith; I still do, in fact, rather resent the hierarchicalism, misogyny, and economic and moral cynicism that have so chronically afflicted contemporary Christianity. In so many ways, modern Christianity has failed to adapt to cultures that change ever more rapidly, and it has little to offer those of us who doubt and who reject hierarchical expressions of power. The very essence of Christ’s teaching was that no man had any right to dominate another — so what changed?

Carl Bloch’s Sermon on the Mount, depicting Christ’s new preaching of compassion and humility, of a faith devoted to one’s fellow man, rather than oneself.

Just last week, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. had to agonize over whether to officially reject white supremacy — as if it were a taxing moral question, though they eventually did. A faith that dares reject that the least of us is, in fact, the best of us, is worth hardly naught to contemporary society, and I submit ought to be thrown in the trashbin with the rest of the sum of ideologies that make America shitty — like right-populism, neoliberalism, and neoconservativism. Proponents of our revolting, unequal status quo are complicit in the systematic deprivation of rights, privileges and status to low-caste Americans, and Chance doesn’t shrink from castigating it and them. “Jesus’ black life ain’t matter, I know, I talked to his Daddy / said you the man of the house now, look out for your family” is one of the album’s most breathtaking lines, and comes in what is arguably the best track on the mixtape, “Blessings,” which pulses with righteous energy at the very heart of Coloring Book.

Chance’s deft hand is evident in the liberty with which he crafts his lines. From rhythmically byzantine, syncopated patter-singing to Chance’s undeniable talent for figurative language, one cannot absorb Coloring Book’s depth on the first listen or the second, or even on the dozenth. Take, for example, the Rapper’s favorite song on Coloring Book, “How Great.” While the album was in progress, Chance’s grandmother died, and at her funeral, his cousin sang a rendition of Chris Tomlin’s boring 2004 contemporary Christian hit “How Great is Our God,” after doing the same at the christening of Chance’s daughter and his uncle’s funeral; Chance was so moved that he immediately began developing a song around the Tomlin hook. After three minutes of Francis and the Lights’ digital interpolation of Chance’s cousin’s voice and the Chicago Children’s Choir, Chance launches into his own praise, in the form of a tightly-executed verse whose best moment is difficult to pin down. In recognition of the Adversary’s grip on society, Chance raps “Devil will win employee of the month by the dozen / ’til one score and three years from the third when he doesn’t / My village raised ’em a child, come through the crib and it’s bustin’ / You meet anyone from my city, they gon’ swear that we cousins!” Coloring Book was released when Chance was 23 years old — one score and three years — and is his third significant musical project. The implication here is that Coloring Book would initiate a broader revival, not just of gospel rap, but of Christianity, and perhaps of broader fraternity, in America.

Chance leading folks to the polls in November, via Joshua Mellin on Instagram.

The church’s problems are not Chance’s. In fact, his obvious incredulity that a Chicago kid, whose consciousness has been so shaped by his exposure to, and dependence on, drugs like pot, acid, and Xanax, could thumb his nose at every music label in the U.S. and still be the highlight of the Grammys and perform on Saturday Night Live, is endlessly endearing. Coloring Book’s coda, a reprise of “Blessings,” approaches spoken word poetry: “I speak of promised lands, soil as soft as mama’s hands / Running water standing still, endless fields of daffodils and chamomile / Rice under black beans, walked into Apple with cracked screens / And told prophetic stories of freedom…I speak of wondrous, unfamiliar lessons from childhood / Make you remember how to smile good / I’m pre-currency, post-language, anti-label, pro-famous, I’m Broadway Joe Namath;” it ends with Chance, Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, Nico Segal, BJ The Chicago Kid, and Anderson .Paak celebrating Chance’s good fortune to have “Made it through, made it through, made it through.” The album’s last lines, “Are you ready for your blessings? / Are you ready for your miracle?” are repeated until the song ends, and demand that the listener recognize the blessings in their own life.

Coloring Book’s album art, in which he gazes down at his infant daughter, by Chicagoan Brandon Breaux.

Coloring Book does not end in fireworks or obscure profundity; it processes, instead, to its own finish line with the patience of an artist who understands his work flawlessly and, an hour after the listener began, leaves them wanting more. Chance’s triumph, as he proclaimed at the Grammys, reflects God’s glory, and Chance, in his humility and wisdom beyond his 24 years, is the very last person one would suspect of stolen valor or misplaced pride. Even as “Kanye’s best prodigy,” Chance has absorbed little of his mentor’s caustic demeanor or bullishness.

Even as a triumphant expression of hope and joy, Coloring Book has no shortage of devastating moments, either. One of the album’s most popular tracks, “Same Drugs,” laments the separation of two lovers or friends. The titular drugs are metaphorical, but may well be read as literal, too. The first interpretation of the song reflects that, as two people age, their interests and passions diverge and they grow apart. Chance addresses his song to Wendy Darling, the girl who finally decides to abandon Peter Pan in Neverland, asking his lost love “Don’t you miss the days, stranger? Don’t you miss the danger?” and looking back fondly on “The past tense, past bed time / Way back then, when everything we read was real and everything we said rhymed,” while still wondering “When did you start to forget how to fly?”

Wistful recognition that all of life’s joys are finite is universal; because so many artists have tried to capture the feeling, it’s nigh-impossible to write a song about it that does not devolve into cliché or sentimentality. “Same Drugs” is kept from that by Chance’s scattered lyrics, which parallel the emotional chaos that accompanies the loss, gradual or immediate, of a loved one, and by the plaintive, bare voice that Chance sings with on the track. It’s a rare listen of “Same Drugs” that doesn’t choke me up — if not for my own disintegrated friendships, then for all those I know I’m destined to ruin in the future, and those shattered loves that will undercut my friends and family and me in the years to come. Life can’t be lived without tragedy; that’s just a human reality, whether you’re an American blessed by fate or a Syrian damned by it.

And, although Chance has said publicly that the drugs in “Same Drugs” are metaphorical, a literal reading of the title is just as interesting. As we know, caffeine and alcohol are drugs just as much as LSD or methamphetamine, and the former more socially damaging, in total, than the latter. As I’ve grown up, I’ve seen friends and acquaintances consumed by addiction, and paced perilously close to that knife’s edge myself. A dear friend once asked me why I bothered to have a drink before a meeting with a professor, and the only answer I could come up with was “I’m afraid of him, because he’s better than me,” though I never said as much. I still wonder why I thought that, but I have some idea as to why.

Here, a line from the Aaron Sorkin series The Newsroom, addressed to a college student from a fictional offspring of Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, comes to mind: