Chance the Rapper is reflecting on a difficult time from his past. In celebration of the tenth anniversary of his Acid Rap project, the rap star opened up to Complex about his struggles with substance abuse during his early career days.
During the interview, Chance was asked how his life would’ve looked like if he hadn’t grown beyond Acid Rap: “I probably would’ve died, to be honest,” he responded, saying that people view the record as only entertainment but “it takes away the humanity from the people who make it.”
“The way that I was living at that time. I had everything in excess,” he said. “Right after I dropped the project, I went on a few tours where I really didn’t make any money. Then I went on my headlining tour, where I made some money.”
Chance explained that he rented his own “crib” and, for the first time, was living on his own in a different city with a lot of money. He said he quickly found himself “doing a lot of drugs. A lot, a lot, a lot of drugs.”
“Too many Xans. And just becoming a different person, a lesser, lesser person than I am now. I think if I hadn’t had my spirit tugged on, literally, and a calling to become a better version of myself, then I would’ve died,” he said. “And then I would just be the representative of acid, and I’m so much more.”
Chance’s new interview echoes what he told GQ in a profile in 2016, where he said he was “Xanned out every fucking day” while having a luxurious lifestyle. (He also rapped, “Last year got addicted to Fans/Started forgetting my name and started missing my chance” in “Finish Line/Drown.”)
“I was just fucking tweaking. I was a Xan-zombie, fucking not doing anything productive and just going through relationship after relationship after relationship,” he told GQ. “Mind you, this is six months. So think about, like, how could you even do that?”
Rap released Acid Rap in April 2013. It featured songs with Childish Gambino, BJ the Chicago Kid, Noname, Vic Mensa, among others. Chance explained that when he was making the album, he faced a lot of judgment for “rapping about doing LSD and other shit that wasn’t weed.”
“I had to deal with that and also realize that my projects described experiences that I had already been through. But they were not the sum of me or the whole exploration of who I am as a person,” he said. “I stopped doing acid probably less than a month after the project came out.”
“I was like, ‘I’m done with this’ after too many bad trips and just weird shit happening to me. But I had to deal with it for the next year and a half. Having everybody that met me trying to either offer me acid or ask me interview questions about acid and having to be basically the spokesperson for drugs,” he added. “But I had to come to myself and realize and remember that I was not making those songs off acid. I may have found some beats I liked off of acid, but it was me making the songs. And I think that was probably the key thing that I learned from that experience.”