Synopsis, cast and crew, and user comments. Directed by Susan Glatzer. With Hilary Alexander, Evita Arce, Kimberly Clever, Sharon Davis. Alive and Kicking gives the audience an intimate, insider's view into the.

The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1. CREDENTIALS: Coloring Book, “Ultralight Beam,” live performances on Saturday Night Live and at the ESPYs, Magnificent Coloring Day Festival, staying independent. The good guys are supposed to be boring. Chance the Rapper opens Coloring Book with a declaration: His life is good.

He’s got a girl, and a child, and he’s happy. He bellows, almost embarrassingly earnest, about what he has to be thankful for. It’s triumphant and euphoric, over brass backing and the cooing of mentor Kanye West. This shouldn’t work. Great art, we’re told, is rarely made by the good guys, the happy or the content. Ambition isn’t measured in what you have, it’s striving for what you want.

Hip- hop is for those strivers, and braggadocio is rarely applied to things so pedestrian. Unless you’re Chance. I’m not pointing this out to suggest something as anodyne as Chance’s potential importance as a role model, or the part joyous music can play while the world burns around us. Instead, Chance’s persona is impressive because Chance has created a world for himself, out of the unlikeliest of parts, and 2. He went from outsider to the center of the rap universe. He had the best verse of the year (on “Ultralight Beam”), arguably the best full- length—I mean, “mixtape”—and seems committed to a level of artistry few can match time he performs. And he did it while remaining his own goofy, good- hearted, Christian self—an archetype we haven’t seen in hip- hop before, and an innovation in and of itself.

The sound of Coloring Book—and of Chance the Rapper, writ large—is one of openness. He’s excited about his life, and wants you to be excited about your life, too. But, more than that, he’s trying to bottle up that feeling. He’s trying to evoke exactly what his particular brand of happiness—one colored by empathy and nostalgia as much as pure moment- to- moment joy—feels like musically. And over the past few years, he’s come thrillingly close. He’s carved a sound—major chords and warm keyboards and stuttering drums—that’s entirely and recognizably his own. Coloring Book didn’t arrive fully- formed; Chance has been shaping his unique brand of music since 2.

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Day, refining what his artistry means and sounds like with his close- knit band the Social Experiment for years. This album, though, was where everything cohered. His rapping is instinctual, bounding from carefully measured measured bars and wordplay to rapturous and guttural expressionism. Not since Kanye West has a rapper so plainly attempted to put every feeling they had into their music. In the process, he’s emerged as one of the savviest music industry players in an unstable environment. In 2. 01. 6, several artists used the still- nascent streaming economy to their advantage, getting ahead of the sea change the music industry’s long been struggling with.

Drake signed up with Apple Music, getting millions of dollars and billions of streams in the process. Frank Ocean, with some deft maneuvering that’s remained largely under the table, slid his way out of his label contract and released Blonde independently, for which streaming accounted for most of its listens.

Chance, too, is at the forefront of a new kind of music industry—but he was the only one to predict it first. For likely close to half a decade, Chance has been fending off label offers, even when the career path seemed hazy and the potential for failure seemed, to everyone but him, great. Instead, he was the first to figure out how the artist succeeds with the internet, rather than in spite of it. His other releases were completely independent, and his latest came with a partnership—like Drake’s and Frank’s—with Apple Music, which in its ambitions to corner the streaming market has begun operating as a de facto Medici family for artists like Chance. If that deal were to dry up tomorrow, though, Chance has proved he is nimble and inventive enough to handle any changes, and has a rabid fanbase that will follow him anywhere he chooses to go. It’s not Jay Z- style moguldom; it’s something more modest than that. Something we haven’t seen before.

Q- Tip rapped that “the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.” He delivered the line in the same verse, on “Jazz (We’ve Got),” that saw him explain “the aim is to succeed and achieve at 2. Twenty- five years later, at 4. Q- Tip brought the members of A Tribe Called Quest together to record a new album. During that process, in March, founding member Phife Dawg passed away. But Tip and Jarobi and Ali Shaheed Muhammad didn’t forget their jobs, and in November they released We Got It From Here.. Thank You 4 Your Service, the final Tribe album.

They resurrected the dead. The album is a miracle, in large part because of Tip’s rapping. In his post- Tribe solo work he explored the possibilities of a more jazz and scat- inflected style, and the results sounded less written and more like tossed off freestyles than the brilliant displays of rhyme found on those early Tribe albums. Not here, though. He obviously had things he needed to say—about his country, about music, about aging, about friends, present and lost—and his lyrics sounded more deliberate and calculated than they had in years.

This focus resulted in finely crafted verses like his contribution to “Lost Somebody,” in which he memorializes Phife and tries to explain the sometimes coarse texture of their long relationship. As youth- driven as hip- hop is, Tip’s performance in 2. Kendrick Lamar didn’t release career- defining work in 2. To Pimp a Butterfly and good kid, m. A. A. d city, respectively. Instead, Untitled Unmastered, a rough collection of apparent studio leftovers, felt of a piece with the storm of jazz and American turmoil that produced Butterfly. Many of the songs were studio- cemented versions of live late- night performances; many of those songs were brilliant.

They left no doubt that Kendrick is one of the best rappers in the genre’s history, but they didn’t deepen his story or lead the listener down a new, surprising path. Elsewhere, he contributed verses to songs from Beyonc.

Of those, “Really Doe,” “Goosebumps,” “No More Parties in L. A.,” “Holy Key,” and “Wat’s Wrong” were most deserving of praise, but none felt essential.

It’s hard to imagine that he’d perform any of them during a show of his own in five years, the way certain guest features of, say, Jay’s have penetrated his solo catalog. In some ways, Kendrick Lamar was in cruise control in 2. But what was startling is that his cruise control output now matches other rappers' career- making years. Young Thug may never be the best rapper alive for as long as he raps, but that’s in keeping with his artistic mission. Unlike Kendrick Lamar, who raps at a scholarly level, armed with history and precedent, Thug raps to complicate the act itself. What he does under the banner of hip- hop—toying with song structure, exploding his voice—prompts critics and listeners to coin words and subgenres.

Still, in 2. 01. 6 he released some of his most streamlined projects to date. Cult Comedy Movies Hyena (2015). Slime Season 3 and Jeffery in particular are compact machines, with so many strange twists and turns jammed into eight or ten track releases, like the exposed motherboard of a pocket- sized device. Songs like “With Them,” “Drippin,” “Webbie,” “Kanye West,” and “Pick Up the Phone” are crammed with creative turns of phrase, off- the- wall flows, and brief moments that would be hooks for less adventurous artists. There’s no telling if this year will go down as the first sign of Thug trending toward more steady, stabilized musical output, or if his focus and stability last year was itself an anomaly. That sort of unpredictability is very much keeping in the spirit of Young Thug.