Daydreaming in the Projects

Most songs about public housing arrive already carrying a verdict. They come as a warning, a plea, or a statistic set to a beat. "Daydreaming in the Projects" does something stranger and more generous. It follows the kids who lived there and treats their imaginations as the main event, not a footnote to hardship.

It is a three-minute song with a lot of air in it. Breathy horns open a doorway, a jubilant chorus swings it wide, and the rapper's voice sits somewhere between recollection and play.^[1] You do not walk away from it feeling sorry for anyone. You walk away feeling that something precious was there and then taken apart.

Where the song sits

The track is the sixth of twelve on Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, released September 15, 2017 on Mello Music Group, and it was produced by Illingsworth.^[5] The album is a concept record about the Robert Taylor Homes, the Chicago public housing development on the South Side that was built in 1961 and demolished by 2007.^[4] Open Mike Eagle did not live there full time, but his aunt did for much of his childhood, and he spent a great deal of time visiting.^[4]

The demolition was not a single event. XXL notes that the development came down in stages between 1998 and 2007, which means a generation of residents watched their home disappear building by building.^[6] A song about children daydreaming there is therefore also a song about a landscape that was already shrinking while they played in it.

By his own account the project began with a question: what happened to the Robert Taylor Homes? He had not thought about the place in years. After watching documentaries about its demolition, he went back to Chicago and found empty fields where the towers once stood.^[3] He has described the record as an audio version of a mural, something impressionistic rather than documentary, built from fantasy, hazy memory, and the real damage of displacement.^[3]

That framing explains the song's position. The album opens with a mythic superhero figure and moves through grief, anger, and a final noisy collapse.^[7] "Daydreaming in the Projects" is the point where the mural briefly turns warm. It is the album's clearest statement of what the children had that nobody could bulldoze.

Play as a quiet act of defiance

The central idea is that childhood imagination is a form of resistance. Loud and Quiet reads the song as honoring the games children play in the projects as quietly revolutionary acts.^[1] That is a useful way to hear it. When the surrounding world has already decided what a place is for, deciding to invent your own rules is a small rebellion.

Bandcamp Daily describes the song as an ode to youth's ability to rise above its circumstances.^[2] The word "rise" matters. The song is not claiming that the buildings were pleasant or that daydreaming fixes anything. It claims that a mind at play is not fully governed by the conditions around it, and that this is worth celebrating on its own terms.

The narrator keeps his adult awareness in the room. There is humor, and there is a loose, playful way with the details of kid life, the kind of material the rapper has said he wanted to mine when he set out to reconnect with how he thought as a child.^[3] He talks about how commercials, jingles, and television themes can feel enormously important to a child and then fade, and how the album let him use those memories without having to prove them factual.^[3] That permission to remember impressionistically is part of the song's texture.

Why the delivery matters

Eagle has said that his delivery here is more melodic than usual and that the song carries strong emotion.^[3] You can hear it. The cadence loosens, the phrasing leans toward singing, and the effect is of a person drifting back into a mental room he has not entered for a long time.

The production supports this. Illingsworth keeps the arrangement bright and buoyant, which gives the song its sense of lift.^[1][5] Against the album's heavier moments, that brightness is an argument in itself. The kids in these buildings were not defined by gloom, so the music should not be either.

This pairing of cheerful sound and sober context is a signature of Eagle's work. He has said he uses humor to catch listeners off guard rather than to be jokey,^[9] and the same instinct is at work here. The lightness makes the loss land harder when you remember where the story ends. A listener who has been smiling for three minutes is more exposed to what comes next.

The comic book lens

Eagle's press materials describe the album as a comic book style reimagining of the Homes, told from the perspective of a daydreaming kid.^[8] Loud and Quiet notes that it mixes real history with the fantastical universe of DC Comics, and that the young daydreamers are the protagonists of a story that heads toward catastrophe.^[1]

Seen that way, the song is the stretch of the story before the disaster, when the heroes are still at play. The title carries the album's whole structure. Daydreaming is what the characters do, and "still" in the album title suggests that the habit survived the demolition. The kids scattered and grew up, but they kept the faculty that made the place bearable.

Memory and what was lost

The album gets its weight from the gap between the warm remembered place and the empty lot. Eagle has talked about finding a painted number marking where one of the buildings had stood, and about how that was both painful and comforting.^[3] He also learned that former residents hold a reunion each year, which he took as a sign that the community was working to stay connected.^[3]

Against that backdrop, a song about daydreaming reads as an act of preservation. The buildings are gone, but the inner life that happened inside them can still be recounted. The track does not argue for the towers. It argues for the people and for what they made of the space they were given.

This is why critics tended to respond to the record as a tribute rather than a lament. Pitchfork's Matthew Ismael Ruiz called it an antidote to dystopian depictions of the neighborhoods and communities on Chicago's South Side.^[5] Bandcamp Daily called it a love letter to the housing project and the rapper's most heartfelt work to date.^[2]

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone will hear pure celebration. One reading is that the song is bittersweet, since daydreaming is also what you do when you want out. The title can suggest escape as much as empowerment. A kid imagining another life is a kid aware that this one has limits, and the album's later turn toward anger suggests that awareness did not stay gentle.

A second reading is that the song is partly about adulthood. The narrator is looking back, which means every bright image is shadowed by what he now knows. The album's theme of futility, described by SPIN as flowing from the demolition itself, hangs over the nostalgia even when the sound is sunny.^[7]

A third reading treats it as a corrective aimed at outsiders. Public discussion of housing projects has tended to reduce residents to problems. By centering games, jokes, and invention, the song quietly insists that the children were fully people, with interior lives as complicated and playful as anyone's.

Placement helps too. The song lands at the midpoint of a twelve-track record, after the superhero opening and before the album's darker stretch, so it works like a held breath in the middle of the story.

Why it resonates

The album was widely praised, earning a Metacritic score of 82 and placing on several year-end lists, including those of NPR, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork.^[5] Within that, this song is the one that most plainly states the album's generosity. It does not ask the listener to understand a policy. It asks the listener to remember being small and certain that anything could happen.

That makes it work for people with no connection to Chicago or public housing at all. Everyone has a place they once filled with private meaning, and many of us have watched such places change or vanish. The song gives that experience a particular address without making it only about that address.

It also matters as a model for how to write about a community under pressure. Eagle brings affection, humor, and craft, and he lets the residents speak through their own pastimes rather than through a case made on their behalf. The result is a portrait that grants the kids dignity without turning them into symbols.

Conclusion

"Daydreaming in the Projects" is brief, bright, and quietly radical. It insists that imagination is a real resource, that play can be an act of defiance, and that a demolished place can still be held whole in memory. After the towers fell, the album suggests, the daydreams stayed. This song is where they get to run free for three minutes before the rubble arrives.