Chief Keef emerged from the almost cartoonishly violent streets of Chicago’s South Side in 2011, riding the crest of a grassroots, for-teens-by-teens movement that came to be known as “drill music.”
Like all ascendant genres, drill (and, by extension, it’s superstar Keef) was met with a mix of traditionalist revulsion, outsider derision and early adopter over-adulation. The simplistic rhymes and aggressive beats left some folks shaking their heads and others nodding along.
It’s been 3 years since Keef barked his way into the hearts and minds of the hip-hop cognizati with Glory Road. If you’ve managed to make it this far without an opinion on the still under-20 Chiraq veteran, read on for our group-by-group breakdown of Sosa opinions..
South Side Teenagers
(This is you if: You can actually walk to the landmarks Keef raps about)
These are the folks who originally put Keef and his GBE collective (RIP) on. They absolutely love Keef, seeing in him one of their own who managed to make it big.
Keef’s ultra-violent gangland tales of drug-dealing resonated with kids growing up in some of the most economically depressed and dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. It’s hard to relate with Rick Ross' gold chains in a G7, when you’re surrounded by decay and blight.
“B.M.F.” is a fantasy, but “Love Sosa”? That’s that shit they do like.
North Side Teenagers
(This is you if: You can’t play Keef’s songs too loud or your mom will take away your driving privileges.)
These guys love Keef just as much as the South Side kids, even if they feel awkward about how much Keef says the n-word and are too afraid to go to one of his shows.
“Finally, someone from where I’m from is making it big,” they think, trying not to reflect too hard on the fact that Sosa comes from a world completely different from Highland Park.
Bill O’Reilly/Old White Men
(This is you if: You’ve ever spread a chain email comparing the First Family to monkeys.)
There’s a reason Keef’s fellow Chicagoan Chance The Rapper opted to yell “Fuck Fox News” in the middle of his track “Everybody’s Something.”
Fact is, Bill O’Reilly (and his audience of old white conservatives) like to think that Keef's music is the root cause of violence in the inner-city. Years of discriminatory hiring and housing policies have nothing to do with the concentrated poverty of the South Side, O’Reilly figures. Everyone who lives there just bought a copy of Finally Rich and decided to be poor.
What can you expect from someone who calls Common a “gangsta rapper.” (More on him in a minute.)
I’m not sure what Bill wants Keef to rap about, having grown up in this environment, but it probably has something to do with “bootstraps.”
What Bill doesn’t know is that, now that Keef is rich, he’s working on a conservative opus about the wonders of tax cuts for the rich called Sosanomics. It’s been indefinitely delayed because Keef can’t find a word that rhymes with Benghazi.
Common/Hip-Hop Heads
(This is you if: You performed/listened to Nobody’s Smiling.)
These guys are like Bill O’Reilly in a mirror universe, coming at Keef from the opposite end. Despite having listened to rap for most of their lives and never going on a shooting spree, Common and his ilk think that Keef should cool it on all the gun talk as it sets a bad example.
While Common’s wish for a “peace summit” with Sosa to discuss the violence in their shared hometown is admirable, the implication that Keef somehow holds sway over the issue is laughable.
To put it in the words of a group revered by heads all over the world, “Rap is Black America’s CNN.”
Keef didn’t create the violence that surrounded him, he just reported on it.
Early Keef Fans
(This is you if: “Man, I saw ‘I Don’t Like’ when it had 3 views.”)
Chief fandom is a tricky proposition right now. The former face of drill has largely moved away from the hard-hitting sound that made him famous, opting to record space-based, structureless songs with Kanye West and the dude from Bon Iver in Paris.
Holding it up to the lifestyle that Keef came from, can you blame him?
For these fans, the answer is definitely yes. He’s left his people behind.
Current Keef Fans/Music Critics
(This is you if: You listened to “Nobody” more than once.)
This is a special subset of music fan in general, the kind who can listen to a track that is objectively terrible, look you dead in your optic stems and lie to you about how good it is.
These are people who have sex to Metal Machine Music or at least that’s what they want you to think on Twitter.
They’ll argue that Chief Keef doesn’t need to be coherent or on beat. Because, art. But you can bet your ass they’ll never expand the same courtesy to Silkk The Shocker.