This, personally, is one of my favourite instances from Kanye’s Ultralight Beam, and Chance, in his Biblical references, has clearly outdone his past work. The agitation of the ‘ugh’ a few lines before, and just the pleasant isolation of the individual’s voice and associations that the genre of Rap, as a whole, allows, interact brilliantly with the lyrical allusions.

The tale of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt is borrowed from the Book of Genesis, ans the story goes, that as two angels descended onto Earth to destroy and burn, ‘in Gods Fire,’ the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, they allowed Lot, Abraham’s nephew, to escape with his wife and daughters. The angels then go on to leave Lot and his family outside of the city, asking them to move on and not look back, at the cities that now burn, in divine retribution, for their sins and vices. The sins and vices in themselves being homosexuality and material indulgence. The wife looks back and is immediately turned into a pillar of salt. But why? And how does Chance position himself in this entire discourse, when he uses this particular story in order to present an ex who clearly fucked up by leaving Chance, who went on to become a successful musician and a great father.

Of course, the same isn’t a very new and noble image in Rap music, and the obviously sexist foundations of the same are irrelevant to my discussion. All I’ve been thinking about is the interaction of these lines with the ‘bad-boy-turned-good’ narrative with popular Black celebrities, where the ‘bad’ is always indulgence of some sort, and the causes of those indulgences, which are often always systemic and associated with years of discrimination, are never addressed in their own — the entire argument against black celebrities such as Kanye, and Jay Z, and so on and so on.

These lines fashion Chance as Lot himself, and selective readings of the Bible present Lot as a brilliant man, who achieves a lot and everything, and that way, Chance is fine. But simultaneously, there are questions about the responsibilities that dropped on Lot as a husband, when his wife was literally turned into a pillar of salt, and as when his city burned, for the sin of seeking material enjoyment and sexual pleasure in sodomy. Especially, when you take into account, an earlier instance from the same Book, when Abraham and Lot are working on deciding who goes in which direction, and Lot, instead of following the path of chance, and divine predestination, that Abraham was working on, sneaks a peak towards one side and chooses it, for it presented itself as fertile and agreeable. And also, his troubled relationship with his daughters, because as far as my brief searches on Google revealed, there are readings in which Lot offers up her daughters to the citizens of Sodom to sleep with, to restrain them from going after the aforementioned angels. Umm, think about the reference to Chance’s daughter in the song, and with the claim that she shall stay out of the public eye, as he literally sings about her, and parades the same ‘privacy’ as a brilliant ‘public’ lyric. If anything, and I’m not arriving at any conclusions, the varied nature of understandings of fatherhood, and virtue, that this episode from the Bible allows is fascinating to note, in their own right.

Another reading of the same lyric could also position Chance as the city of Sodom that burns, because the ex in looking back upon him turns into a pillar of Salt. The ex has no motive to look back upon him, and if she looks back because he is now a successful musician and a good father, her turning into a pillar of salt is a weird thing, unless Chance means to talk about some weird meta shit, but that’s for another day.