Wise from Ohio starts a new ‘Chapter’

Wise from Ohio started work on the album that would become Chapter 88 more than three years ago, describing the making of the record as a tumultuous process nearly derailed completely by the death of his father a couple years back.

“That was a shift in everything, where I was debating, do I even get back into music? Do I just let it go?” Wise said by phone in late July. “This record’s been three years in the making, and there were at least 10 times where it almost didn’t come out. There were so many breaking points, and everything you can think of that could have stopped me from releasing it happened – every mistake, guilt, shame, death, hesitation. … But when my father passed, that really became a transitional moment for me, where I had to let go of my fears, let go of those things that were holding me back, and let go of who I was.”

Initially titled Chapter 8 and consisting of eight songs – Wise said he became enamored with the numeral owing in part to its resemblance to the symbol for infinity – the Columbus rapper scrapped more than half the tunes he had originally written amid a lyrical outpouring. Once the dust settled, Wise found he had doubled the track list to 16, a number of which found him reckoning with the man he once was while simultaneously setting the stage for whatever might come next.

This lyrical bloodletting creates a natural tension within the record, as the instinctively guarded Wise – he raps about his long-held urge to keep people at arm’s length on album standout “Life’s a Joke” – gradually allows these long-erected walls to crumble.

“I’m glad you look at it that way, because absolutely I do have a huge people paranoia,” said Wise, who released Chapter 88 digitally today (Friday, Aug. 1). “But on this record, I’m trying to shed some light where people can come in … and laugh about the trauma, laugh about the pain. … I think I needed a soft spot without sympathy in my music. I wanted some honesty. … I think maybe I needed a new way to be me instead of being who I used to be. I’m not that same cocky person. I used to be arrogant, flamboyant. And even when I want to be that I don’t have it in me anymore.”

Not that the rapper has shed a lick of his well-earned confidence. How else to explain his approach to spitting alongside Lil Wayne on “Purpose,” a massive track built on a concrete-cracking beat that finds him standing chest to chest with the Young Money MC rather than placing him on a pedestal. Wise similarly goes toe to toe with Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ghostface on “Triumph,” a vintage soul inspired banger given a vocal assist by Columbus singer Qamil Wright.

While these high-profile guests will ideally serve as a gateway, attracting new listeners to the underappreciated MC, the best tracks here find Wise working solo to either exorcise the demons of his past or more firmly secure his footing in the present. Witness the emotional, album-closing one-two punch of “Sosa’s Song” and “More Changes,” which serve as bookends to existence, in a way, the former applauding the sense of promise the rapper sees in his 3-year-old daughter and the latter paying pained tribute to his late father. “I wanted to die when you died but I kept it inside,” he confesses on the piano laced track.

Elsewhere, Wise traces the winding path he’s taken on “Labyrinth” and then peels back the veneer on “Call Me Crazy,” a song on which he raps candidly about his mental health struggles and the split existence he lived as a younger man – “Grew up in the church but was friends with the killers” – while acknowledging his desire to chart a different course moving forward.

“We have to outgrow our imperfections,” said Wise, who on the track also cautions his son against mirroring his behaviors, and in particular the callousness with which he once routinely treated women. “And that doesn’t make us perfect, and that doesn’t make us whole or me better. … But it’s important I take pride in that growth, because there was a phase where being Young Wise was my only happy spot, and I only found comfort in the sunglasses and the ego and the bravado. … And I really had to learn to look at myself without Young Wise, and to look at myself for my flaws and still be able to find a sense of grace.”

Similar ideas surface in the showstopping “Life’s a Joke,” which finds Wise attempting to laugh off the accumulated hurts, recounting his brushes with industry success, the violence he viewed with regularity growing up on the city’s North Side, and the various romantic relationships turned to ash.

The myriad self-realizations Wise uncovered in the journey to Chapter 88 have drastically reset his aims, with the MC saying he no longer desires the spotlight the way he once did. (“Fuck being famous,” he raps with typical bluntness on “Life’s a Joke.”) In fact, coming off a 2024 health scare – Wise had a cancerous tumor removed, recalling how the surgery and subsequent recovery forced him to confront his own mortality in a way he never had previously – he began to entertain thoughts that this record could be his last.

“I felt alone when I was going through all that, but I also had this acceptance … that if this was my last record, and this was the last thing people heard from me, I would be comfortable,” he said. “So much work goes into putting out an album. It’s mental, it’s spiritual, it’s emotional, it’s financial. And I’m getting older, and I don’t have that oomph anymore. And, actually, I still love music. I just don’t love the business of it anymore. I don’t love the game the way I used to.”

Within the same breath, the rapper left the door open to the possibility of future music, noting how Jay-Z “retired” with The Black Album only to return with a new LP three years later. More than anything, he simply sounded content to take things one day at a time, embracing the reality that nothing is given and that the person he might be tomorrow could be imbued with different aims than the one he was even in the moment we spoke.

“You often hear people say, ‘I’m just like that. This is who I am, and I’ll never change.’ And I’m not that,” he said. “I’m definitely not who I was yesterday, and I’m anxious to see who I’ll be tomorrow, because life changes fast.”