Chance The Rapper’s ‘Surf’ Album Gives Birth To A New Musical Genre

Chance the Rapper’s Surf Album is extremely hard to describe. And that’s not a bad thing. Chance the Rapper’s Surf is like nothing else out there today. Chance is the rapper, but it’s hard to say this is a rap album. It’s a collaborative project with the group he formed and that has been playing at his live shows. If you want to hear Surf now, it’s free on iTunes.

Surf is properly credited to Donnie Trumpet and The Social Experiment. The group consists of five members. Donnie Trumpet leads the group and names himself after his main instrument. Peter Cottontale serves as the band’s keyboardist. Nate Fox is the band’s recording engineer. There is also the group’s live drummer, Stix. So where does Chance fit in with all this? He’s the vocalist, of course, also producing, and just another member of the group.

People will come to this album because of Chance. They want to hear more Chance the Rapper after his earlier internet mixtape fame, but they will stay for the ingenuity of Social Experiment. Chance is going to make his friends famous, and he indeed sounds better with them than without them, at this point.

But the main creative force here is Donnie Trumpet. Chance told Fader how Donnie Trumpet, real name Nico Segal, is the leader on Surf.

“Surf is Nico’s project. He was working on it when we decided to be The Social Experiment, so we decided that his project should be first.”

Surf is full of guest artists from the hip hop and R&B world. Look out for Busta Rhymes, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and Big Sean, among others. The result is a fusion of jazz, funk, rap, soul, and something newer spawned from all of those. You can picture a big outdoor summer jam session of artists all taking turns offering distinct musical seasonings into a pulsating sonic brew. But here that band sound definitely dominates the sonic picture.

Fader accurately describes the difference between this and Chance’s earlier work.

“In some ways, it’s a logical extension of what Chance was doing on Acid Rap, with the most organic elements of that album teased further out of the typical rap production framework and blown out to their most grandiose extremes.”

Chance the Rapper’s sound and approach have developed in a good way. Many fans find Surf more pleasurable than Acid Rap. Perhaps it’s because the collaborative work structure they instituted is well balanced. But if you only came to hear Chance the Rapper, don’t sweat. Chance is scheduled to drop a solo release later this year.

[Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Anheuser-Busch]