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<\/a> In June 2016, the Recording Academy quietly <\/span>amended<\/a> its eligibility rules so streaming-only projects could compete for Grammys. That didn\u2019t come from nowhere. A month earlier, a 23-year-old from Chicago\u2019s West Chatham neighborhood had dropped a fourteen-song mixtape on Apple Music (free to stream, impossible to buy) and watched it hit number eight on the Billboard 200 off 57 million streams. Nobody at the Grammys said the rule got bent for him. Nobody had to. Chancelor Bennett, who raps under the name he\u2019s had since grammar school, had been dodging labels since <\/span>10 Day<\/em> in 2012 and blowing past them since <\/span>Acid Rap<\/em> in 2013. <\/span>Coloring Book<\/em> was the thing that made the rest of the music industry rearrange the furniture.<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s what\u2019s weird about <\/span>Coloring Book<\/em>, though. Chance\u2019s cousin Nicole opens \u201cHow Great\u201d by <\/span>singing<\/a> \u201cHow Great Is Our God\u201d for three straight minutes. No rapping. No one cuts in. Just Nicole and a hymn, as if she wandered into the wrong studio and nobody stopped her. Kirk Franklin full-on preaches on \u201cFinish Line\/Drown.\u201d Jamila Woods is praising God on the first \u201cBlessings.\u201d A children\u2019s choir from Chicago is on the hook of \u201cAll We Got.\u201d And none of it ever comes off as a bit, or a genre exercise, or some rapper\u2019s church phase. Chance told Zane Lowe he wasn\u2019t trying to make new gospel or pretend to be the gospel. Just music from a Christian man. On \u201cBlessings (Reprise)\u201d he says he speaks to God in public, that God thinks his new music jams, that they\u2019re mutual fans. He\u2019s cracking up about it. He also means it completely.<\/span><\/p>\n