10 Day

This is where it all started: the first-ever project from Lil Chano from 79th, recorded during a 10-day suspension from Jones College Prep High School and released as a free download on the mixtape sites of yore. Even if you hadn’t yet heard of the ambitious Chancelor Bennett back in the spring of 2012, it was clear that <i>10 Day</i> marked the arrival of someone special. A soulful, thoughtful journey through an 18-year-old Chance’s Chicago, it's full of wide-eyed ruminations on life, loss and memory, set to the kind of shuffling soul beats befitting a kid who’d grown up on <i>The College Dropout</i>.<br /> “I think back to being in fourth grade listening to the whole album where these kids are telling me, 'Don't get a degree,'” Chance told Apple Music's Nadeska in 2019. “I'm going to a college preparatory school in downtown Chicago, which looks completely different than 79th Street in Chicago, and just experiencing all this stuff I haven't accessed in a crazy way.”<br /> Chance had come up in the city’s youth-focused poetry and open mic scene, but here it felt like he’d emerged from thin air with the intricate lyricism of a seasoned pro: Bars like “Here’s a tab of acid for your ear/You’re the plastic, I’m the passion and the magic in the air” on “Brain Cells” made you sit up straighter and take note. More than anything, though, the tape feels like a love letter to Chicago from one of the city’s most instantly beloved new voices: It exploded with references to Oak Street Beach, the Low End, Connie’s Pizza, juke jams, Crucial Conflict, The Cool Kids. It was the beginning of a new rap movement, not just in his own city but worldwide, and it sounds just as crucial today as it did back in 2012.