Hip-Hop and Rap music have always had a knack for reppin’ their hometown. From Jay-Z, 2Pac, Mos Def, Nelly, Ludacris, Outkast, Wu-Tang Clan, Macklemore and countless other artists are always looking for a way of paying homage to their hometowns. But in the last year and a half there have been major projects that are not just about reppin’ their hometown cities, but about going “home.” We tend to think of home in just the place where we spend time with family or lay our head at night but sometimes home is more than that. The most recent project that brings this affinity for home to light, is Chance the Rapper’s project Coloring Book.
This project has been the topic of conversation in the music world for the last couple of weeks, heck I’ve already written about it. An album full of Gospel, love songs, and party anthems is divinely inspired by the place that raised Chance, Chicago. It’s as if the project is not even for the mainstream, but in fact for the city of Chicago and its inhabitants. It’s partly a thank you letter to the City for raising him the way it did: taking him to church, giving him the friends he has had, and most importantly always standing behind him. In fact in a recent interview on Beats1 Radio he spoke on how living in Los Angeles for four months showed him how much he missed Chicago and its people and that it was in that emptiness he wrote a lot of this music. In the song Same Drugs, which Chance quickly stated is not about drugs and about him and a girl growing up. There is some serious wordplay that most are missing out on here,
When did you change?
Wendy, you've aged
I thought you'd never grow up
I thought you'd never...
Window closed, Wendy got old
I was too late, I was too late
A shadow of what I once was
While Wendy is a name for a girl, I think Chance is taking notes from the Chicago rappers before him Common and Kanye West and using a girl to explain something even greater. Because last time I checked, Chicago was the Windy City.
Chance isn’t the only rapper to have done this in recent memory. On his critically acclaimed 2015 project To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick is constantly talking about going “home.”
He isn’t just looking to go to Compton, but maybe the place of origin, where it all began for him. It’s spoken clearly in his now ever so famous poem “Another Nigga.”
The evils of Lucy was all around me
So I went running for answers
Until I came home
Kendrick might exemplify this idea that home is more than a place to get a free meal and hug our mom’s but maybe it is the mental and spiritual place of peace. Because maybe to truly discover who we truly are we need to go back to the place where it all began, home. Home can mean so much more than just the house we lived in. In fact according to Rap Genius, there are three meanings to Kendrick’s reference to returning home.
Kendrick’s mention of returning home can be interpreted in many different ways at the same time:
1. Kendrick literally returning home to Compton (recall from the outro on GKMC’s “Real” that Kendrick’s momma asked him to come back and tell his story to the kids in Compton)
2. Kendrick returning to Africa, aka the motherland (he actually went to South Africa in 2014, a trip that inspired much of this album)
3. Kendrick returning to his former, pre-fame self
Home means so much too so many people. Drake has been trying to give us Views from his home city and J. Cole even invited us to his home address.
As consumers we are internally fascinated with this idea of going home, because at some point in our lives it’s something that we strive for. Ask a college student in the middle of a semester the one thing they want to do, and the first thing they will say is that they want to go home. Even if home is not the safest or most comforting place, it in some way is still a place of solace. Hip-Hop has only solidified that concept for me. The more I listen to these projects, I find that my heart is truly longs to be “home.” Not necessarily wanting to go back home, but think back on the people and events that have helped shape me into the person I am today. So maybe to find out where we may be tomorrow we need to go home first.
