What he does successfully is capture the sneering arrogance of a 17-year-old kid celebrating the good life. Keef comes off as a cold-hearted, dead-eyed teenager whose entire persona is based around acting like he doesn’t give a shit about anything and would love to prove it to you. The difference is that at least Waka had energy and charisma. In some respects, Keef is just this year’s Waka Flocka Flame, another rapper with limited rapping skills and morally reprehensible subject matter. Women are exclusively referred to as bitches, men as niggas, and his haters end up “slumped over.” Ten mixtapes of this kind of hyper-DIY, hyper-regional rap get released every day by other sixteen-year-old aspiring rap moguls. It’s pretty standard street rap: simple beats, simple rapping, and simple subject matter that never goes beyond cars, money, hoes, drugs, and the threat of violence. The problem is, without the backstory, there isn’t much about Keef’s music that stands out or warrants much attention. With that in mind, I tried to listen to “Finally Rich” without all of the baggage of Keef’s backstory. Led Zepplin were occultists who abused groupies, Chuck Berry spied on women going to the bathroom, James Brown beat his wife, and even nice-guy Paul McCartney has his share of haters.
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Nas described having a shootout in a playground full of kids in “NY State of Mind” and that song is considered an all-time classic. Biggie was a woman-beating drug dealer, but “Ready to Die” is still one of the best rap albums ever made.
“Lifestyles ov the Poor and Dangerous” is still a great album. Big L’s persona was a murderous sociopath, and Lamont Coleman was gunned down in the vein of the lifestyle he described on wax. If being a deplorable person disqualified people from being successful artists, some of the best music of the past fifty years would be off limits. There have been multiple articles in publications that don’t normally cover rap music on the implications of Chief Keef, what his art says about the state of the world, and the tricky racial politics of the few white critics, especially Pitchfork, who celebrate his music.Īmid all the press, PR, and controversy, its easy to forget that Chief Keef is an artist and an entertainer. Fellow Chicagoan Rhymefest called Keef a bomb who was created to destroy, and Lupe Fiasco has also condenmend Keef’s music. He also got a co-sign from Kanye West of all people, who remixed one of his songs and clearly influenced Keef’s rapping (more on that later). A guy who was implicated in the murder of a fellow rapper, who ran into parole issues after Pitchfork stupidly took him to a firing range for a video segment, thus violating his parole, and who has made a name for himself precisely because of his alleged “realness.” Like 50 Cent, who appears on the album, Keef comes custom wrapped in the authenticity of a criminal record. Here’s a guy glorifying gun violence who comes from a community wracked by gun violence, and who released his album days after the most horrific of 18 mass shootings in 2012.
It’s hard to listen to Keef’s music without thinking about everything except the music. His debut album, “Finally Rich,” was released last month. He grew up in Chicago’s South Side, one of the epicenters of that city’s recent wave of shootings, and is the most famous drill music artist. Seventeen-year-old record label head, internet sensation, rapper, and father Keith “Chief Keef” Cozart is a product, chronicler, and possibly participant of the violence in Chicago. Drill is slang for revenge, and revenge factors heavily into many of Chicago’s homicides. The local street rap that eminates from Chicago’s most violent districts is called drill music. There were almost 500 homicides in Chicago in 2012, mostly shootings, mostly gang-related, and mostly involving young African-American men.
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