The first part of the song is about how success is threatening his relationships (“I think my little cousins want their cousin back. The automatic quarterback who doesn’t rap.”). Then it changes mood with each verse. There’s his love-hate relationship with his own ambition, his ambivalence about his own complacent fans. The chorus is: “The day is on its way, it couldn’t wait no more. Here it comes, here it comes, ready or not.”

Sometimes that sounds like a hopeful Martin Luther King dream. Sometimes it sounds like an angry warning about final judgment.

If you watch the video from the show, you see Chance just sitting on a stool, with his friend Daniel Caesar on guitar and some ordinary-looking backup singers behind him. There’s no superiority here, just an artist humbly baring himself before his audience, trusting them to understand, sympathize and receive his bid for intimacy. There’s always something multilayered when people tell you a story about the ground that they have honestly walked.

It’s interesting to compare Chance’s song with Taylor Swift’s new song, “Look What You Made Me Do,” which is also about a young star coping with celebrity. The former stands out from the current cultural moment; the latter embodies it. Swift is a phenomenally talented and beautiful songwriter who has lost touch with herself and seems to have been swallowed by the ethos of the Trump era.

The video to that song, which has been watched 478 million times on YouTube so far, contains a string of references to Swift’s various public beefs — with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, and so on. If Donald Trump or his political enemies made a video about their Twitter wars, it would look like this.