A review of 2014’s Spring Weekend from the Brown Daily Herald describes the concerts as “primarily successful.” 11 years later, and I can only chuckle at this subdued summary of a series headlined by one of the most prolific DJs ever and arguably the greatest artist of all time whose sound pioneered the sung hip-hop that dominates modern charts today. Still, the showstopper for me was not a headliner, but instead the middle act of a “chaotic and rave-like” Friday evening.

Chance the Rapper is a rapper from Chatham, Chicago and my first musical addiction.

?

My musical DNA starts in the car. On a road trip to Connecticut, I registered the first song in my collection, Five for Fighting’s “Superman (It’s Not Easy).” This memory exists in images, not scenes: a four piece Chicken Selects from McDonald’s and a mini jug of 1% milk with Ronald on a surfboard, a life sized replica of a tyrannosaurus fossil made entirely out of Legos, the plastic border of the playground that I interpreted to be a balance beam, the pillowy crash of my knee on the pavement, the sting of rubbing alcohol on a fresh wound. The soundtrack to this slideshow is my dad replaying the same song again and again until my mom tires of it and puts on her own, Boston’s “Peace of Mind”.

I’m still on the road, but I’m now ten years old which makes my brother thirteen. My dad has already dropped him off at middle school, and we’re heading down the main road to elementary school. He’s singing along to “A Horse with No Name” by America. I remember having nightmares about this song, about a man walking into the desert with the titular horse, and the decay of nature around him. There’s some conflating of the Horse with No Name and the Headless Horseman in my head, so I ask him to turn it off, and he plays some of Harry Chapin’s 1976 album Greatest Stories Live. Those stories played me off to fourth grade, inspiring dreams of future love, loss, and all of the in between as I pretended to learn about simple machines.

And then I’m in the car again, headphones in, when I first hear “Ultralight Beam.” In the opener to the artist formerly known as Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper takes the stage for himself, delivering a verse that continues to hold as much significance in his career as it does in my mind. It was prophetic, predicting his Grammy victory and the success of his third mixtape months before its release—delivered with the kind of confidence and assurance of a true veteran. Despite the bravado, his verse remains humble, reserved, and vulnerable. It reminded me of the Americana that I was raised on from the CD console of our family CR-V—a story and a dream for all that he would become.

?

When I listened to Chance the Rapper’s verse for the first time, I saw myself at college in just five years time, dissecting the brilliance of double entendres, going bar-for-bar with my friends, geeking out over our favorite songs and our favorite verses from those songs and our favorite lines from those verses. In my head, that university was filled with students who shared my obsession, who knew his features as well as his main discography. 

To my friends, it’s no secret that my favorite word in the English language is serendipity—the chance that the stars would have aligned in just the right way, the possibility that the college I envisioned in my head would have already hosted Chance years before my dream even existed. There’s no charm like a good coincidence.

By the time that verse was released, he would have already delivered his set at Brown. He may have gotten a wrap at East Side Pockets, or walked through Faunce, or even played tourist with one of the many bear statues on campus. I wonder what he thought of this place I’ve been lucky enough to call my home for the past four years.

I wonder if he noticed the way that the magnolias on the Main Green started to bloom and released their sweet fragrance to the world. I wonder if he picked up on the artificially transplanted lawn that comes and goes and brings it with it swaths of students to sit and share each other’s company. I wonder if he knew about the way the sun fills the Petteruti Lounge and makes it unbearable to do anything but just take a secret little nap in between classes. There are so many charms of this wonderful little campus that have made me bask in the fortune of it all during my time here. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about these little wonders recently and the chance that anyone has felt these exact same feelings in these exact same spaces as I have. Are there people on this campus that I have physically just never crossed paths with—never been within distance to brush coats or hold a door? Do they walk the same routes that I do just in parallel, like a dog chasing its own tail, never to make contact?

These feelings resurface most often on my weekly walk through Patriot’s Court where I see my old Harkness window. The current tenants keep the shades closed for the most part, but I can see a plant peeking out of the bottom of one, a monstera much more ambitious than the sorry excuse for a succulent that I tried to foster in that room. I wonder who lives there, if they noticed the torn paint that behind our old posters, and used the light that I couldn’t figure out how to remove, or found the signatures that my roommate and I left when we moved out. 

There’s been a photo that has been popping up on my timeline recently. It’s an artistic interpretation of a universe, though I’m not confident I could call it ours. The caption reads, “All this and we still met.” It’s a wonder that I’ve met so many people who spin me around and fill my cup over and over and have altered my DNA in everlasting ways, but in the vastness of it all, it’s hard not to think about all of the acquaintances I never made, and the connections that have just blown by.

I can’t stop myself from getting mushy at the end of it all, staring down the barrel of the last iteration of my favorite Brown tradition. I’m looking forward to this year’s lineup, and all of the memories that will mutate my musical DNA in ways I’ll never be able to shake. But most of all, I’m looking forward to sharing that time with the people who have crossed my path during the past four years.