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Concert reviews Music

Chance the Rapper at the Danforth Music Hall

CHANCE THE RAPPER at the Danforth Music Hall, Monday, November 4. Rating: NNNN


Screw face? What screw face? A few minutes into Chance the Rapper’s Danforth Music Hall show on Monday night, the entire floor had their right arms straight in the air, bobbing forward and back to the beat – the kind of audience participation that usually takes half a show and a few hit singles to muster.

Chance brought that crowd seduction from the get-go, sprinting – not running – onto the stage to the strains of Good Ass Intro, the opener on his mixtape Acid Rap, impetus for his Social Experiment Tour.

Not yet 21, it looks like Chance has spent some time in his native Chicago’s famous blues and jazz clubs. Backed by a three-piece band (trumpet, keys and drums), the emcee often crossed genre lines. Chance is definitely a rapper, but he’s a great singer with the onstage swagger of a soulman, and the positivity-fuelled charm of a gospel singer. (Especially over the organ of Interlude (That’s Love) – one of my favourite songs of 2013.)

He’s also great at seamlessly going from zero to 60, and his show was one of extremes: the very high highs of Favorite Song and Juice, or lovely downtempo moments like Acid Rap’s slow-burner Lost and feel-good track Everybody’s Something, and a surprising, beautiful rendition of Coldplay’s Fix You, sung while the lyrics flashed in LITE-BRITE font behind him. (He completely sold the song’s melodrama.)

On his second encore, he whipped out a dance-move hybrid of Carlton Banks, Roxie Hart and Michael Flatley, before finishing with a hyped jumping-jacks version of Good Ass Intro, adding a nice element of symmetry to the show, and making it an even better ass outro.

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