Sooner or later, my grandchildren will roll their eyes as I launch into my three hundredth re-telling of what it was prefer to be alive in Chicago in 2012. However issues had been taking place, and you could possibly really feel it. The most effective rap reveals I’ve ever witnessed was within the spring of 2012, on the now-shuttered Congress Theater; technically, the night time was headlined by Meek Mill, however for all sensible functions, it was a showcase for native rappers whose buzz had develop into deafening: King Louie, Lil Durk, Lil Reese, Fredo Santana, and most of all, Chief Keef, the dread-headed, Gucci-belted 17-year-old rapper who’d arrived in an ankle monitor. (Nonetheless on home arrest at his grandma’s, he’d gotten permission from the Chicago Police Division to carry out that night time – the final time the CPD would deal with the rapper with something remotely resembling empathy.) Halfway by means of the present, the paranoid fireplace division locked down the venue, trapping everybody inside. When Keef lastly appeared on stage, flanked by about 50 of his closest buddies, the room went electrical; when he carried out “I Don’t Like,” it felt like historical past was being made.
Nonetheless, to say the dialog round Keef, on each an area and nationwide scale, was divided is to place it mildly. Critics known as his early mixtapes dumbed-down, hyper-repetitive, artless, even suggesting they glamorized the violence that had plagued Chicago for many years. (“Why can’t he just be a role model and put the guns down?” was a celebration line heard repeatedly that summer season, a profound misunderstanding of not simply town’s structural realities however the worth of artwork.) By the point his major-label debut dropped in December 2012, the dialog across the teenager had develop into so frenzied and polarized that it felt like we’d misplaced the thread of what had made Keef so well-liked to start with. (And no, it wasn’t hip-hop bloggers; Keef’s cult-like mass of devotees had been cast on town’s South and West sides lengthy earlier than the infamous fan video that Chief Keef would in the end pattern on Lastly Wealthy’s title observe even hit WorldStar.)
Take heed to Chief Keef’s Lastly Wealthy right here.
Removed from glamorizing the environment that birthed him, Keef introduced a world that was beforehand invisible to outsiders, precisely because it was – a world that had develop into inconsiderate media pundit shorthand for the worst elements of America, an imaginary, dog-whistled battle zone that had eclipsed any first-hand consideration of Chicago’s financial and police-sanctioned warfare because it truly existed. Keef resonated as a result of his mere existence was anti-establishment: anti-industry (i.e., bailing on his personal “Hate Being Sober” video shoot); anti-Chicago rap canon, because the antithesis of town’s handful of existent superstars; and most of all, by not solely surviving however excelling, an unignorable instance of precisely the kind of one that wasn’t purported to make it.
To an outdoor viewers, Lastly Wealthy as a piece was inextricably linked to the overall notion of Keef’s Chicago – grim, violent, nihilist music, with martial Younger Chop drums befitting town that had come to be often called “Chiraq.” It was an comprehensible lens by means of which to view all of it, however on reflection, it distracted from components that made Chief Keef’s Lastly Wealthy one of the vital spectacular major-label rap debuts of the 2010s. Take “Kay Kay,” most likely the album’s most underrated observe, devoted to Keef’s then-infant daughter. KE on the Observe’s beat comes crashing in waves, with meditative piano loops and hovering synths that at all times jogged my memory of the Dipset Trance Get together tapes. Keef’s half-sung vocals are processed to sound like a slurry android, with the paradoxical impact of heightening the humanity of all of it. When he chants “Pullin’ up in our foreigns / Ig-NOR-ance,” he attracts out the ultimate phrase as if it’s a full sentence, bending the language to his will. It’s way more intelligent than he acquired credit score for.
Many would name Lastly Wealthy the height of Chief Keef’s profession, and recommend that his inglorious decline began virtually instantly thereafter: jail stints, rehab, getting dropped from his file label, and being successfully banned from performing in his hometown, even in hologram kind. In fact, that is solely remotely true in case your engagement with rap is solely restricted to Billboard charts or no matter is fed to you by Spotify’s sterling caviar spoon. In reality, post-Lastly Wealthy Chief Keef has solely continued experimenting and making massively well-liked hits (see: “Faneto,” “Earned It”), following his each artistic whim in between rounds of paintball. In the meantime, the ripples of his cadences, flows, and adlibs – to not point out Younger Chop’s manufacturing type – have, towards all odds, deeply resonated amongst a brand new technology of rappers, touching not simply the underground however the highest echelons of the mainstream. The record of benefactors of Keef’s type is limitless, however a brief model contains Lil Uzi Vert, Fetty Wap, Playboi Carti, 21 Savage, Yung Lean, Bobby Shmurda and the whole GS9 crew, a whole UK drill motion, Lil Yachty and DRAM’s “Broccoli,” Tay-Okay’s “The Race,” and just about the whole SoundCloud rap ecosystem.
Had “I Don’t Like” or “Love Sosa” been launched in an period the place streaming information factored into chart numbers, we is perhaps approaching Lastly Wealthy’s legacy, and Keef’s profession trajectory, from a completely totally different perspective. However then once more, perhaps not. With the good thing about hindsight, it’s not a lot Lastly Wealthy’s affect that makes it really feel so essential – actually, it’s far more the opposite. What cements Lastly Wealthy within the canon is Chief Keef’s cussed dedication to his personal imaginative and prescient, doing issues precisely how he wished them in an {industry} that wishes to shove you down the lots’ throats. It’s that Keef by no means fell into that entice that makes him the legend he’s immediately. “I’m finally rich, but ain’t a damn thing gonna change,” he rapped on the album’s titular outro – and he was proper.
Take heed to Chief Keef’s Lastly Wealthy right here.
Editor’s be aware: This text was initially revealed in 2017.
