Single Review: Chip Tha Ripper’s ‘Sauce Me Up’ is a smooth and poignant track about knowing yourself and your history.

‘Sauce Me Up’ comes from Chip Tha Ripper’s 2023 album, The Charles Worth LP. The song is one of the most hot-blooded tracks on the record – with Chip delivering fiery lines about not letting society tell you who are or what you can be.

In late 2023, Chip Tha Ripper shared his latest album, The Charles Worth LP. 

Chip’s massive fanbase had highly anticipated the album, many of whom have followed him since he first started sharing music and mixtapes in the mid-00s. 

Chip achieved viral fame after his ‘Interior Crocodile Alligator’ freestyle effectively became the first ‘meme’ of the internet era. He became more famous after working with some of the most successful hip-hop artists of the 21st Century, including Kid Cudi (Chip and Cudi collaborated on the Platinum-certified single ‘Just What I Am’). 

But beyond these big highlights in Chip’s career, most dedicated fans have praised how Chip’s artistry has continued to adapt throughout the last two decades. Having started as a street performer and freestyler, Chip refined his rap flow with each album/mixtape so that he’s one of the few artists who seems to get better with each new release. 

You can see the evidence for this everywhere on The Charles Worth LP. The album focuses on family life, family history, his upbringing in Cleveland, how the city made him who he is, and how it continues to shape him as an artist in the present moment. 

On ‘Sauce Me Up,’ Chip Tha Ripper sounds energetic, restless, and erudite as he raps over smooth trap-sounding beats. At the surface level, the song is about knowing yourself, doing things for yourself, and being confident about your narrative, history, and place in the world. In one of the song’s verses, he raps beautiful and essential words to people in the black community, encouraging individuals not to accept the stories they’re told by society and to seek out their truths:  “Don’t believe what they talking about/Track your lineage find your folks/The enemy history book is/Filled with Lies & jokes.”

For those who don’t know, ‘sauce it up’ means ‘to make something better’ (i.e., add sauce to something). So, for Chip Tha Ripper to write a song like ‘Sauce Me Up’ is him laying down the message that he wants to improve himself. He makes clear how he’s going to do this. He accepts that the world is challenging – “We already livin’ in hell b***h/Life don’t need no help being hard” – but he also adds that he doesn’t need help in this struggle because “my fans and family believe in me.”

 The song has an optimistic, hopeful message, even if Chip’s flow and tone can sometimes feel confrontational. He’s a profoundly complex artist – precisely why fans love and appreciate him. 

 

Photo Credit: Ronald Charles

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