Chance the Rapper’s “Juice” Absent on ‘Acid Rap’ Streaming Re-Release, Replaced by Charity Message
Written by Tara Mahadevan for Complex. Check out the original article here
The popular song “Juice” is missing from the newly widely available version of Chance the Rapper’s breakout mixtape Acid Rap due to a clearance issue.
Chance shared the news on the song’s placeholder, delivering a spoken-word explanation where he clarified the song’s absence. “I really wanted ‘Juice’ to be on the mixtape, but I couldn’t get it cleared in time,” he says. He’s referring to the Donny Hathaway “Jealous Guy” sample that was originally written by John Lennon and which appears in the beat for “Juice,” track 4 on the original tape. According to Billboard, after Lennon died in 1980, his work has seldom been approved for sample clearances.
Instead of leaving the song out altogether, Chance capitalized on the moment to encourage his listeners to take charitable action: all streaming proceeds from the alternative version of “Juice” will go to his nonprofit SocialWorks, which he founded in 2016. The charity’s goal is to empower Chicago youth through the arts, education, and civic engagement. The replacement is exactly 30 seconds—but because Spotify considers a counted stream as “a song [that] is streamed for over 30 seconds,” listeners must play the song again for any funding to accumulate. “So run this back, and play it all the way through,” Chance says.
While the sample could get cleared at a later date and the original version of “Juice” could appear on streaming services, right now, the omission of the song prevents Acid Rap from surfacing on the Billboard charts for the first time, per Billboard.
Chance the Rapper added 2012’s 10 Day and 2013’s Acid Rap to streaming platforms on Friday, to correspond with the pre-order date of his upcoming debut album, slated for a July release. 10 Day boasted appearances from Vic Mensa, Nico Segal, Alex Wiley, and others, while Acid Rap featured BJ the Chicago Kid, Childish Gambino, Action Bronson, Ab-Soul, and more.
“I think it’s just time for the access to be real access,” Chance told Beats 1. “That’s always what I’ve been about…I wanted everyone to have access to it and I don’t like having things be blocked by the sale. At that time, the climate was different,” Chance said, referring to uploading his projects on SoundCloud and DatPiff.