So far in life my biggest claim to fame is that I once got to go backstage at a Mighty Mighty Bosstones concert in Atlanta. I know ladies, try to keep it in your pants. It was a really great experience. Well, honestly, there really wasn’t much to it. There the band was, sitting on a dingy old couch chilling out before the show doing much of nothjing. But for an old ska-core kid like myself, it was still pretty neat!
It couldn’t remember exactly when that was off the top of my head, but thanks to the depths of the interwebs it turns out it was the foul year of our Lord two thousand and twelve. I was working for Creative Loafing Atlanta at the time, and while that old rag’s website is now in shambles, you can still read the Q&A I did with Bosstones’ bass player Joe Gittleman.
On the charts the Bosstones are best known for their 1997 radio hit “The Impression That I Get” — which is super catchy — but as any scene kid might tell you, these guys were around long before and long after their blip of commercial success during the high water mark of Third Wave Ska in the late 1990s.
One of the cool things the Bosstones started doing back in 1994 was hosting a Hometown Throwdown each year in their native stomping grounds of Boston. It was a 5-day fest held with the Bosstones and some of their favorite bands at the Middle East in Cambridge, and that’s where the album Live From The Middle East was recorded and released in 1998.
Around the same time I transcribed the interview with the Bosstones’ Joe Gittleman, buzz about an up-and-coming rapper out of Chicago made its way across my desk at Creative Loafing Atlanta. Chance the Rapper released his now critically-acclaimed mixtape Acid Rap in 2013. The free download on DatPiff catapulted the young rapper into the mainstream spotlight — and for good reason. The mixtape was and still is a goddamn masterpiece. It’s art, pure and simple, from the individual songs to the narrative arc of the album as a whole.
Acid Rap has since been downloaded more than 1.5 million times, and enough people even paid for it on iTunes and Amazon Music to land it a place on the Billboard charts in 2013. And the following year we saw him named among other rising stars in XXL’s Freshman Class of 2014, which back then seemed like a pretty big deal and helped put numerous artists on the map.
Chance has gone on to enjoy pretty wide commercial success and is known for incorporating elements of Christian gospel in to his work. Honestly, those more refined later-career sounds weren’t the strongest performances for my taste, which seems to hold true for many bands and artists who stick to their signature sounds once they find their voice. More power to him. And with all do respect he has produced numerous bangers since his early success including “Hot Shower” with it’s Georgia shout out and “No Problem,” which has a staggering 179 million views on YouTube.
If you’re looking to explore more the Chance’s catalog, the you can download Acid Rap and his debut mixtape 10 Day for absolutely free on a now-archived DatPiff.com website.
