In person, Keef is intensely reserved and refuses to reveal much about himself, a quality that he may have picked up after witnessing the unintended consequence of a loud mouth. Nobody in the rap world could ask, "Who the hell is Chief Keef?" after that.
On March 12, Keef released his second mixtape, "Back from the Dead," featuring the song "I Don't Like," a single so huge that it became Keef's calling card, and on May 1, Kanye West released a remix of "I Don't Like" featuring himself, Chief Keef, Pusha T, Jadakiss and Big Sean. Everybody is trying to somebody - no disrespect to anybody-but Keef, each song he comes with something new, just him."Īlmost three weeks after Chief Keef was released from home confinement at the beginning of 2012, 22-year-old San Francisco rapper Lil B (another unsigned phenom) hopped on a remix of "Bang," and a week after that, Soulja Boy did the same thing for Keef's "3Hunna." But the moment that gave Keef the most exposure to the world outside of Chicago was, ironically, the result of another Chicago rapper: Kanye West. But when Keef came to my studio, I was like, this boy. DJ Kenn, who was literally taken off the street by Chief Keef's uncle after coming to Chicago from Japan, explain's Keef's appeal this way: "First time I came to the studio, I didn't with a lot of people. Keef's loyal fanbase in Chicago was built on the support of local listeners and through a network of likeminded rappers like Keef's cousin Fredo Santana, SD, Lil Durk and Lil Reese, as well as producers like Young Chop and DJ Kenn. On "Bang," Keef raps with punchy, syncopated delivery, "That smoke's got me gone, can hear it in the air/we on top like some stairs, don't give a f**k, I be goin' to hell." But more importantly, his music accurately and honestly reflects the violence, hopelessness and frustration, as well as moments of joy and victory, of the environments that Keef and hundreds of thousands of other poor and working-class kids live in all over the world. Keef's music, primarily comprised of minimalistic homemade string and drum tracks punctuated by his menacing, nihilistic lyrics, sounds like the next evolutionary step in the style of tracks by Lex Luger and Waka Flocka Flame.
Keef's YouTube video for "Bang," a song off of the mixtape "Bang" that he released in 2011, garnered about a million views before Keef had any visibility outside of his home city, spurred by young listeners who found the atmosphere in Keef's sound and the message in his lyrics to be resonant in their own lives.
In the video, a teenager screams and sings in delight for about four and a half minute about Chief Keef's release, prompting YouTube comments like "Who the hell is Chief Keef?" But many people knew exactly who the hell Chief Keef was because he'd been doing something almost unheard of in the Internet age: becoming massively popular through local word of mouth.Īlthough Keef himself stopped attending school at age 15, his music gained prominence in the Chicago Public Schools, the third-largest school district in the country with over 400,000 students. On the day he was released, the world outside of Chicago got their first taste of Keef's presence: a viral video called "It's Something Wrong With This Lil Boy: Freaks Out When He Finds Out His Favorite Rapper 'Chief Keef' Gets Out of Jail.'" On December 4, 2011, at age 16, Keef was shot at by police and arrested for unlawful use of a weapon and subsequently placed under house arrest, at his grandmother's house, for a month. Long before Chief Keef (born Keith Cozart) was one of the most popular teenage rappers in America and the youngest major label head in history, he was a legend among kids on the South Side of Chicago, a gritty set of neighborhoods that most recently made the news for its astonishing rise in murder rate (up 38 percent in 2012 alone).
0 kommentar(er)
