On December 22, Chance the Rapper dropped a surprise collab mixtape with fellow rapper/singer Jeremih. To surprise us even more, the mixtape is chock-full of Christmas songs. Yes you heard that correctly: a Christmas mixtape by Chance the Rapper and Jeremih.
Now normally, I would be singing Chance's praises as his work up until now has been nothing short of fantastic. However "Merry Christmas Lil' Mama" does not quite hit the standard set by his previous tapes.
What makes Chance so good, and what earns him such laurels and acclaim is how optimistic and just different his raps are. He is one of the happiest rappers in the game right now, and he just exudes sunshine and rainbows. So, on hearing he dropped a Christmas mixtape, I expected something joyful with maybe some gospel influences like on "Coloring Book."
What I got was disappointment. "Merry Christmas Lil' Mama" is a jumble of weird samples paired with an overabundance of autotune. Jeremih is not a good singer, period, and the amount of autotune they used to mask his voice is almost grating.
The first track on the tape is "All the Way," and features samples from the movie "A Christmas Story" and the song "I'm Gettin' 'Nuttin for Christmas." Simply put, there is just too much going on at one time. Jeremih singing over the song sample proves to be a headache, and it is arguably the worst track on the mixtape.
Not all of the songs on the tape are as bad as the first one, and "Stranger at the Table" is one of the better ones. The autotune is gone, with Jeremih singing along to the tune from the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" for the hook. Chance handles the verses, and he shines just like we expect him to. The beauty of this song is the simplicity of it, they aren't trying to do the most here and it works so well.
Half of the songs on "Merry Christmas Lil' Mama" aren't even bad. They're just mediocre and forgettable, which is not what we have grown to expect from Chance the Rapper. Tracks like "Joy" and "I'm Your Santa" are not bad, by any stretch of the word. But they also aren't good, and that is a problem.
While the majority of the mixtape is very mediocre, there are some very big misses one of them being the song "I Shoulda Left You". It has the slurring, mumbling chorus you would expect from the new "catchy over quality" trap-rapper such as Lil Uzi Vert or Kodak Black. The song is vaguely reminiscent of "No Problems" from his last mixtape, but does not even come close to the level of its predecessor.
Two decent songs does not a good mixtape make, and mediocrity will not pass for this Chance fan. In the words of Chance himself, he "shoulda left this in 2016".
If you want to listen and judge for yourself: https://soundcloud.com/th3plugradioooooooo/sets/me...
