Chief Keef: Finally Rich – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/06/chief-keef-finally-rich-review

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Although the benighted lives of young black people in the poorer boroughs of the US remains one of the most shocking failures of the first world, it has been a while since hip-hop as a genre has felt genuinely alarming. Obnoxious LA crew Odd Future generated a flurry of controversy recently, but at least one of their number, Frank Ocean, has since emerged as far more than just a teenage skater kid ringing the doorbells of tastemakers then running off.

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On the South Side of Chicago, meanwhile, a rapper has arisen who makes OF look like pantywaist poseurs. Chief Keef is now 17; in 2011 he fathered a daughter and was arrested for pointing a gun at police officers. He is currently under investigation for violating parole, a case that has roped in music website Pitchfork, who, in their infinite wisdom, took Keef to a shooting range for a feature, thus landing him in the soup.

Although mainstream hip-hop has been heading towards a newly elevated plateau with thoughtful, lovelorn rappers such as Drake and new boy Kendrick Lamar, Keef is the poster boy for a generation for whom the bitches-money-drugs-guns tropes of gangsta rap are emphatically not passé.

His videos feature gaggles of ripped, inked young men. I Don't Like, Keef's breakout cut, lists many of the things he doesn't like: snitches, fake shoes. Featuring local producer Young Chop's mix of chimes, rattles, string stabs and menace, the track is annoyingly catchy. Keef and his crew are so often so stoned on "loud" (extra strong weed, Rihanna fans, extra strong weed) that language sometimes breaks down. Laughing All the Way to the Bank is just a collage of noises, deranged laughter and raps muttered out of intelligible range.

All this would normally seem played out, except that Chicago is in the grip of an exceptionally violent epidemic of gun crime. Within hip-hop a debate is raging as to whether Chicago's feral youth are going too far. Hip-hop elder statesman Lupe Fiasco earned himself a death threat for expressing his chagrin at Keef and his ilk.

Throughout the course of 2012, Keef parlayed his local infamy into a deal with Interscope. His major label debut, <em>Finally Rich</em> compiles a slew of his tracks that have done the rounds, with a handful of new songs. It's distressing, elementary and samey yet utterly unignorable.

I Don't Like's twin is Love Sosa, another ner-ner-ner rhyme. On it, Keef sing-songs about bitches loving him, his "Rarris and Rovers" and how much money he has with an almost quaint obsessiveness. This is hip-hop at its most basic, but thanks to the drama in the production it's undeniably effective.

He may not have finished high school yet, but often Keef sounds withered and blank as he swaggers his way through a litany of boasts and threats. His flow lacks the dexterity that usually distinguishes the finest of the thug life bards. These are playground taunts that rhyme words with the same word again, but they demand attention; even if, from a privileged enclave of white fandom miles away from the action, that attention looks like rubber-necking prurience. There's some novel drug slang (Molly is MDMA) and the local South Side block in-joking (GBE tells you who he rolls with). Most of all, though, there is the sense here of a lost boy who grew up wanting to be 50 Cent rather than fellow Chicagoan Kanye West.

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