No Better Blues

Album: Single Release Only (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This satirical song finds Chance the Rapper supposedly listing everything he hates from "carrots, peas, asparagus" to "optimistic smirks on the face of children." The Chicago MC's band, The Social Experiment, supplied the jazzy instrumentation for the track.
  • The song title is most likely a reference to the 1990 Spike Lee film Mo' Better Blues about the life of a fictional jazz trumpeter.
  • Chance penned the song just after he'd released "Wonderful Everyday: Arthur," his rendition of the "Arthur" theme from the PBS cartoon about an aardvark and all his friends. The rapper's cover received a lot of backlash. "Whether it was that they were hating the monotony or repetitiveness of the music they were hearing and trying to put my music in contrast, I dunno," he told Billboard magazine. "I was just wrapped up in this idea that anybody could dislike a song that was positive. And positivity is something that's almost a joke at this point. So I think certain people couldn't really understand it."

    "I was talking with the guys trying to make a song about things that I actually hate, and then it became more of a satirical thing where it was to a point where I was like, 'I'm going to write about things I couldn't possibly hate,'" Chance continued. "At a certain point I realized the best way to write it would be to attack it from a standpoint where it's not necessarily obvious satire."
  • The song is basically Chance poking fun at people hating anything. "There's so much positivity in the world and your day-to-day life that to go as far as to say that you hate something or you wish it didn't exist and all the bad things in the world happen to you and only you, it's a joke," he explained. "It's not real to have that much hate in your heart."

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