The reason why Chance The Rapper quit acid: “I’m done with this”
Chance The Rapper made his breakthrough in 2013 with Acid Rap. The mixtape was inspired by and even named after acid, but shortly after the project came out, he was done with taking the psychedelic drug.
With the tape, the Chicago rapper took the hip-hop world by storm alongside guests such as Childish Gambino, Twista, Action Bronson, Ab-Soul, BJ The Chicago Kid, Vic Mensa, Saba, and Noname. Chance believes he was in his own lane when it came to rapping about LSD rather than weed, although he never wanted to glorify the drug.
“I think Acid Rap was a good example of me just trusting myself and being OK with being who I was,” he told Complex. “I don’t ever want to sound like I’m taking credit for shit, but druggie culture, like n*ggas rapping about doing LSD and other shit that wasn’t weed, was not happening in 2012. So in 2013, coming out with this Acid Rap project, n*ggas were calling me a weirdo and all types of shit.”
He continued, “I had to deal with that and also realise 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.”
Chance decided to quit acid following the release of Acid Rap due to the number of bad experiences he had with the drug. Despite going cold turkey, he couldn’t fully escape it due to the success of his mixtape. People would offer him acid and ask questions about it, as much as he was trying to distance himself from that lifestyle.
“I stopped doing acid probably less than a month after the project came out,” he explained. “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. But I had to come to myself and realise 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. It was like, you could dress up something to be one thing and draw inspiration from one thing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the main ingredient to it.”
Fans were attending Chance’s shows on acid and attempting to hand it to him, but he didn’t want people taking it in that environment. This is coming from someone who made and broke relationships while taking the drug, even on his own, in public.
“Motherfuckers were giving us bags of a hundred tabs, or literal liquid acid, and we was like, ‘Just chill. It is not that serious,'” he said. “But I also understand it because Acid Rap took me a year to finish. And it was a lot of studio sessions where I was just listening to other people’s music off acid or traveling to other places.
“You’re supposed to do acid either by yourself or with a group of people you trust, in a small controlled setting, and just trip and chill in that space. And I was like, shit, I’d take two or three tabs and just go downtown.”