Acid Rap is released

Why it matters

Acid Rap came out April 30, 2013, as a free mixtape. Chance the Rapper (Chancelor Bennett), then 20, was a Chicago MC who had been working out the mixtape circuit for several years and had released his first official mixtape 10 Day in 2012 while still in high school suspension. Acid Rap is the project that pushed him from Chicago underground to national attention. The mixtape leaned hard on Chance's stylistic distinctness: the squeaky-rhythmic vocal delivery, the jazz-and-gospel production samples, the deliberate refusal of standard mixtape structures. "Cocoa Butter Kisses" with Vic Mensa, "Juice," "Pusha Man / Paranoia," "Smoke Again" with Ab-Soul. Acid Rap was downloaded over a million times in its first month and would, eventually, become the first mixtape Billboard chart-eligible (after the streaming-equivalent-units rule change made free mixtapes count). Chance's 2016 follow-up Coloring Book would win the Best Rap Album Grammy three years later. None of that scales the way it did without Acid Rap doing the first arrival work. You should hear it. The mixtape sounds, in 2026, like the closest thing to a pure Chicago-Chicago rap record on a national release of its decade.