This is Portland, Chief. You look ridiculous with those shades on. Photo courtesy of Vice.
Chief Keef has had a rough year. In an attempt to build hype for Bang 3, his sophomore full-length commercial release, he relentlessly teased fans with audio snippets, drafts of album artwork, and the promise of a A$AP Rocky single that never fully materialized, all in addition to announcing an EP. Despite lowering his arrest count from three incidents in 2013 to a single DUI in March of 2014, Keef failed to keep up to his label’s standard, and in mid-October Interscope dropped him—along with, presumably, the friends Keef had already signed to his personal Glo Gang imprint.
“Moral of the story, I ain’t worried ’bout nada,” Keef responds on his Frankenstein monster of a comeback mixtape, Back from the Dead 2. Released a week after his departure from Interscope, the feature-film length, nineteen-track behemoth has impressed quite a few of hip-hop’s critical gatekeepers, with plenty of praise directed to the 15 tracks featuring Keef’s amateur (and consequently experimental) production. For the first time, Keef contributes instrumentals as backdrop to his monosyllabic slang-ridden flow. The sloppiness of an inexperienced producer is there, but Keef is able to reconstruct the sound landscape painted by his previous co-conspirators with surprising accuracy, and with a bold new brushstroke.
Tracks like “Cops” and “Where’s Waldo” remind me of elements of Oneohtrix Point Never, digital ambient pioneer, with soaring vocals summoned from software mouths. The playful lead synths on songs like “Stupid,” “Cashin,” and “Cuz” mirror the woozy dream-vibes of last year’s Almighty So mixtape—now unmarred by the incredibly poor mixing job Keef applied to former project (he has blamed the low production values of previous tapes on his addiction to lean). My bet is that Keef’s desire to innovate by providing his own production was a turn-off to executives at Interscope, who had seen him achieve monetary success by replicating and expanding an established banger-formula. However, Keef’s major label dismissal didn’t hinder his creative potential—it unleashed it.
Keef has been generous. Since his departure from Interscope, he has released “Colors,” a bright bubble of a single with a hilarious Gangster-Seussian hook, promised an additional four mix tapes by Valentine’s Day, and unabashedly over-promoted Kanye West’s involvement in his impending iTunes-exclusive single and its accompanying digital album, Nobody.
Upon its release, the single was met with a wave of disapproval. Kanye’s contribution is minimal— a heavily auto-tuned hook, murmured and vague— and the production (co-credited to Kanye alongside producer 12million, a.k.a 12Hunna) is built around a sample of Willie Hutch’s soundtrack to the blaxploitation film “The Mack.” The sample is familiar to most hip-hop fans—it provides the warm backdrop for Chance the Rapper’s “Lost” and the gun-shot aftermath of Dr. Dre’s “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat.” But here the sample is cold, and, surprisingly, not robbed of its context—here the beat is inter-spliced with the distinctly cinematic dialogue of its 1973 source. Most critics dismissed the beat as over-used, and were disappointed by the lack of lyrical showmanship on ‘Ye’s part. They have a right to feel shorted—Keef’s instagram loudly advertised Kanye’s face next to his own on various covers for this single. However, detractors of the song seem to be missing the effectiveness of West and 12Hunna’s retooling of Hutch’s instrumental.
Keef chimes in with two auto-tuned vocal tracks, dropping bars that are part surly brags of his monetary success, part cry for help. “My bank account, I swear it’s no telling, All type of amounts, just so I get spendin…fake niggas act friendly…I’m on now, gotta keep it near me,” Keef slurs robotically. “Pistols all around, don’t try catch me slippin.” This is the price of Keef’s fame, notoriety, and his penchant for keeping his riches in rubberbands—unwanted attention from the shadier sides of rap’s underworld.
He has reason to be paranoid, apparently. Fellow GBE affiliate Capo was recently harassed in a restaurant by Atlanta hip-hip trio Migos. Keef reportedly retaliated by snatching Qauvo’s chain, although it is uncertain whether this was in person or by proxy. With gang violence in Chicago showing no noticeable decline, there is a definite possibility of Keef not surviving his stardom. Keef, in an unfortunate moment of limited perspective, is unwilling to examine his role in the situation. Posturing remains an essential part of mainstream hip-hop, and Keef willingly buys into the consumer culture that he has always been entrenched in.
More concerning is his continued portrayal of violent acts. Keef is telling us he is scared, but what he fears is exactly what he dishes out on his enemies a few bars later. Perhaps as a nod to his collaborators’ fondness of maternal affection, Keef shouts his mother out, recalling her past abuse but offering any material good in the world to her as consolation for his own misbehavior in his younger days. This is perhaps the most telling personal glimpse Chief Keef is willing to provide—a peek into the childhood of a troublemaker known for being opaque. The song is clean and mechanical, but retains its emotion like a sponge. It’s a ballad to a crumbling tech-driven culture staring in the face of apocalypse.
The rest of the album, a barrage of icy robo-verses floating atop snappy drum fills and murky synths, expands on the picture of paranoia, violence, and luxury that Keef sketches in Nobody. The content of his rhymes isn’t entirely new territory for Keef, but he takes his time to explore a variety of different flows and vocal flourishes, an unmistakable staple of his discography. Here, Keef sounds as new as the shimmering beats he rides on. He tackles most of the tracklist single-handedly, with GBE affiliate Tadoe delivering a single verse within the first few minutes of the 30-minute long affair.
The album’s brevity is one of its strongest selling points; whereas Back from the Dead 2‘s 20 tracks can seem menacing, Nobody limits itself to a digestible 12 tracks, which rarely feel repetitive, as Keef’s talent for concise and catchy song topics provides endless variation on a solid theme. Standout track “Funny” pairs eerie bells with a skewered female backing vocal, with Keef bellowing many of his daily activities, sounding unimpressed with his own exploits. “Hard” begins astonishingly, with Chief Keef purring the popular onamonapia “skurrrrrr” over a swelling soundscape before melting easily into classic Keef love song. “She won’t regret me, but she let me fuck, She won’t look at me, but she see I go hard…”
The album, however, isn’t as seamless as its mechanized sound promises. “Pit Stop” is a late-showing disappointment, and “Gooey” fails to live up to the promise of its title’s playfulness. Keef never approaches the lyrical prowess of J. Cole, or even Nicki Minaj—his most relevant commercial competitors this week—but his delivery does more than enough work to convey intense emotion. This is a lonely album, as the name implies, and feels more at home as a soundtrack to a post-midnight blunt on a Chicago rooftop than a turn-up session.