Keef took a magpie approach to songwriting, building songs from the loose pieces of his influences: a one-off money-machine adlib from an obscure Yo Gotti mixtape cut would become a Keef signature an obscure piece of D.C. Unlike Soulja Boy - whose populist teen groundswell was one of Keef’s own inspirations - Keef developed a complex, cohesive, evolving aesthetic language, a style of both music and marketing, which was readily emulated over the next five years at home and across the country.
#Chief keef dedication soundcloud series
He was the first.”ĭuring this period he took a radical new approach to the sound and composition of rap records, a prolific series of blueprints emulated by the many artists who followed in his wake. There was nobody who had the kind of gravitational pull he had online. Bigger than Lady Gaga, in terms of mentions and online activity. Larry Jackson, the A&R who signed Keef to Interscope before leaving with Jimmy Iovine to work on Apple Music, put his new kind of stardom in perspective, telling me: “Week over week at Interscope, he was the most active social media artist we had. It can be witnessed in a comparative chart of Google search volume, which at its peak dwarfed the peaks of his contemporaries, who are now seen as more “mainstream” stars. (When he did receive notoriety afterwards, it tended to focus on his list of ultimately minor legal infractions.) (Today it claims 70 million.) YouTube, where the majority of Keef’s fanbase consumed his work, had no impact on Billboard chart positions until February 2013, just as mainstream attention in Keef was beginning to wane. But in 2012, the Apple Music streaming service did not exist Spotify had only been available in the United States since July 2011, and had only 5 million users worldwide by December of the following year. Sales numbers, in 2018, are conjured through a complex formula incorporating streams and CDs, and for the vast bulk of hip-hop artists, those streaming “sales” dwarf CD sales. Streams are a reliable predictor of ticket sales, and predict artist signings at both major and indie labels. It seems obvious today, when streaming numbers drive the industry. Any star who has been influential has been influenced, and every rapper who achieved any sort of fame over the past decade is described as “influential” at one point or another: Drake, Lil B, Odd Future, ASAP Rocky, Young Thug, Future, Migos. Music flows forward in an ever-broadening conversation, and ideas are constantly pilfered and improved upon, from even the least captivating artists. “Influence,” after all, is an easy concept for a writer to apply, as it requires minimal investment - “influential” doesn’t mean “good,” or even “important” - and the scantest evidence.
It’s no longer original to suggest that Chief Keef ended up being more influential than most expected when he burst from obscurity in 2012. But my brother’s immediate response at that early date felt closer to my own: “He’s so self-possessed.” Online, it was suggested he suffered from a learning disability, and message board rumors proliferated that he was autistic, as an explanation for his awkward on-camera behavior. In the years since, interviewers invariably describe Keef as petulant, incoherent, difficult, or drugged-out. When we left, I asked my brother, who’d tagged along to take photographs, what he thought of the rapper who was - though we didn’t know it - on his way to becoming Chicago’s biggest star since Kanye West. I don’t sit down and ‘think,’ I write about what’s going on right now, what we just did, what just happened.
They-” he gestured at a fanbase, somewhere outside his grandmother’s apartment, “-don’t want to see me do that. “See, motherfuckers think I can’t do metaphors. He wore flannel pajama bottoms, a black t-shirt, and rosary beads, and we sat in the sunlight of his grandmother’s Chicago living room next to a portrait of Barack Obama while I asked him questions about his music. I first met Chief Keef one unseasonably warm day in late January roughly six years ago, while he was on house arrest.
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