Secret7 - Chance the Rapper: Same Drugs

This song was a challenge for me to illustrate, as I knew I wanted to use childlike imagery to convey mature ideas. Same Drugs is a song about the realisation of growing apart from someone you once loved, and the confusion that comes with this feeling, for both people. The music video features Chance singing and playing piano as a large Big Bird style puppet lolls on his shoulder, and eventually begins to sing alongside him. The video concludes with Chance leaving the music studio, and everyone he passes is a puppet. The video works well to show the disconnect he feels, from his lover and the world he perceived them to exist in.

Alongside the imagery of the video, the lyrics were also a large contributor to my decision to marry youth and adulthood while thinking of ideas for this.

"I thought you'd never grow up,

I thought you'd never,

Window closed, Wendy got old"

This line is the admittal of the change that his girl has undergone. Using the name Wendy as a reference to the storyline of Peter Pan, Chance presents a sad but playful outlook. At the end of Peter Pan, Wendy invites him to come and live with her so that they can be together and grow up, but Peter is unable to give up his eternal youth and opts to stay away. This is reflective of how Chance in the song realises that the girl has outgrown him. I really enjoy this dichotomy and I wanted to convey that disconnect between youth and childhood as well as differing aspirations and outlooks that contribute to a relationship breaking down.

I chose to use lollipops as a visual metaphor as they clearly convey childhood and innocence, and a shattered one immediately suggests to me a loss of innocence, a realisation that maybe everything isn't going to be okay, or the way you thought it was going to be. It also represents the sudden crushing reality of a dream not working out in the real world. The main lyric that made me want to explore this is in the final verse:

"The past tense, past bed time,

Way back then when everything we read was real and everything we said rhymed."

The "past tense, past bed time", to me speaks of stories and dreams respectively, things that children depend on to develop, but as they grow realise are very different to how the real world operates, and they grow out of them. The second line speaks to the optimism of youth, and the optimism of a new relationship; everything seems like its going to be okay, the world seems on your side and you feel that you've found someone who understands you. And this song explores what happens when this all breaks down over time, and it frustrates you because nobody is to blame.

I really engaged in the exploration of this song and I think that helped me make a successful illustration for it. This is what I feel is really advancing my practice, the contextual understanding of material such as music and film is helping me deal with more complex ideas and heightening my work on a conceptual level, rather than just aesthetically.