Finally Rich - Chief Keef

I mean, to be fair, there's been at least one early single of his that was ok

so yeah, this album is really good. Now I understand why Interscope stood by him.

he's gonna be around for a bit

yeah, that seems certain now. And I have mixed feelings about that, but damn, if he can make an album like this at age 17, maybe he deserves to.

I get the Flockaveli comparisons to an extent, but for me the big difference is Flocka is very charismatic in his way, and he brings a fun energy. Keef is just vile dude with a bitter presence. Kind of amazing he parlayed that into such an effective album.

he's a much better artist than anyone ever gave him credit for. very clearly not just riding on the tails of "i don't like" but slowly pushing his sound outward

i don't find keef that "vile" or "bitter" at all... like, he often sounds like he's taking glee in playing the "part" of a "rapper" on his songs, a kid who grew up listening to 50 cent inhabiting that role... like there's a lot of "fun energy" that you claim waka has, evan, in keef's music for me. he sounds fucking stoked to be rapping... am i the only one who feels this way?

or maybe not stoked to be rapping as much as making rap songs, if that makes any sense at all...

I understand what you're saying. Keef is obviously engaged, and enjoying what he does—the record would be miserable if he didn't. But I don't sense the same "I'm loving every fucking minute of this" release from him that I do from Flocka. He takes a much more austere posture.

he's gonna be around for a bit

― salute me or crut me (J0rdan S.), Friday, December 14, 2012 1:23 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bottling this gem and releasing it back into the wild in december 2013 to see how it smells then

Lol

ha; Al's word choices are always so vivid. Love it.

i usually don't mix that many metaphors tbh but i had just woken up from a nap

it's ok, they all land

bottling this gem and releasing it back into the wild in december 2013 to see how it smells then

― Poli oppa lice style (some dude), Friday, December 14, 2012 2:21 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i assume you'll be catching on right around then

where is this sudden meme about waka being joyous and charismatic coming from

like you guys are thinking of his PETA ads and not his actual musical output

his personality is that way & his music has trended that way at times since flockaveli but flockaveli is not that way at all

look at waka in the 'live by the gun' video & tell me hes not as or more detached & dead-eyed than keef has ever been

haha brutal zing j0rd

deej you know you cherrypicked one waka video out of 200 others where he's pulling grinning and pulling faces all over the place

lol pulling grinning sorry for typo

deej makes an important distinction tho

at least as far as flockaveli goes

keef may take the same track as he continues to isolate himself from the streets... i mean his grimmest tracks are certainly the earliest

citgo is so good. it's the song soulja boy should of made.

'zan with that lean' era soulja boy that is

deej you know you cherrypicked one waka video out of 200 others where he's pulling grinning and pulling faces all over the place

― Poli oppa lice style (some dude), Friday, December 14, 2012 4:06 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which? the one that springs to mind is the one with keef, who is also grinning.

to me what is interesting about keef's style is that it is at once 'deadened' as ppl have described its ... detached-ness, but projected. Like, his voice jumps forward. I feel like for most rappers when you try to put that kind of energy in it, you lose that detached 'cool' cf pusha t in 2012

all of them besides 'live by the gun' iirc? like waka was hilarious in the 'bingo' video and that was one of his first big looks.

well it's not like the "i don't like" or "3hunna" videos depict a sad or detached keef. it's a different conversation.

yeah i'm not sure why videos were brought up to begin with just thought d-40's trying to hard w/ the waka video example

ew gross i called deej 'd-40' what is happening to me

what do they call you in the bay, '40 daughter'?

ok, well talk about his delivery on any track on waka's album.

what do they call you in the bay, '40 daughter'?

― Poli oppa lice style (some dude), Friday, December 14, 2012 4:17 PM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

i missed deej saying "video" cuz "live by the gun" is a pretty good counterexample to the narrative deej is trying to counter

dude seems more interested in melody than waka

ok look guys, forget the video -- i felt like live by the gun was a good example, visually, of waka's style more generally. his stuff that people really like almost never sounds 'joyous' or w/e, it's cement-brick-hard shit. right?

'no hands' is joyous tho but it's kind of an outlier if his biggest (?) song

i dunno out of his 5-10 biggest singles that only describes "hard in the paint" doesn't it? unless you're talking about his "core" fanbase's favorites vs. what most people actually know him for. xp

"waka will you be my baby daddy?" NO! **throws cinder block into wall**

i see 'hate being sober' being a radio smash tho and it's gonna be off keef's own back whereas you could prob argue 'no hands' was so popular cos of the sing-song hook.

i would agree waka has more charisma however

(i hope you have more bottles)

this is getting into hip hop dungeons & dragons territory but i think keef is the more charismatic artist by +2

i just think it's interesting that the Flockaveli thread even at the height of its excitement had a lot of fatalistic (and in retrospect realistic) talk about 'he made a great album but he'll never top this, it's all downhill from here' compared to the incredibly optimistic 7 day forecast itt

the direction keef seems to be pushing with this album suggests 50 is a better reference point anyway and i find it interesting how this sounds worlds apart from other rap music heavily influenced by 50 (e.g. max b)

i just think it's interesting that the Flockaveli thread even at the height of its excitement had a lot of fatalistic (and in retrospect realistic) talk about 'he made a great album but he'll never top this, it's all downhill from here' compared to the incredibly optimistic 7 day forecast itt

― some dude, Friday, December 14, 2012 4:34 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean...was that not true about waka?

i think this album is worse than flockaveli but he has more room to grow / higher ceiling. i mean, anything can happen, i think predicting these things is stupid. but the potential is there imo

i said 'in retrospect realistic', read the post jeez

i guess i have no idea what the best case scenario for chief keef's artistic growth or commercial prospects, maybe a lack of imagination on my part but i can't see it

idk what it is either but i didn't see good kid, maad city coming either

people were VERY primed for the kendrick album to do what it did, it was just the rare major label debut that actually fulfilled their expectations

UK drill & NY drill were initially impacted by Keef in obvious ways (ie the first GS9 tape has flips of Keef's post-Finally Rich song "Pull Up") but the main blueprint for the sound is Lil Herb & Bibby's "Kill Shit." Which in Chicago was kind of a brief window / angle of the sound around DJ L's production.

The way in which Keef's post-Finally Rich sound was influential is much more around Bang 2 & the loosies from that 2013-2015 period, and its influence isn't so much on 'drill' the way its conceived in ny/uk as much as rappers like uzi, kodak, 21, xxx, playboi carti, et al

imo he made his voice *more* interesting not less after "Finally Rich" -- on FR he was doing that style where his voice casually rides the beat, sounds like Gucci Mane but his voice pops more to the front of the speaker where Gucci was kind of demur. But then he did that looser more aggressive attack & that's when his voice became way more malleable & started experimenting w/ darker melodies & textures & IMO showed much more the possibilities for vocal stylings that other artists picked up and ran off with

new song is titanically great, goddamn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f36hvoQ-bCs

https://hiphopdx.com/news/chief-keef-finally-rich-10th-anniversary-reissue

aoty

Mexicans in Chicago ✅✅ pic.twitter.com/K4qDsQap4B

— El Sol Sale Pa Todos (@frijoliz) December 5, 2022

the feeling is back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dDBzZ1_XYA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cql3XELoam4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL4XT91tUmU

posted briefly in the other keef thread, on third listen... aoty

could easily list 10 or so highlights for this one. "neph nem," "grape trees," "treat myself," "i'm tryna sleep," "believe," "drifting away"

all self-produced too

lol @ chief sosa made drill, kanye think he did too

ha yeah i've been playing "drifting away" enough for the past 24 hours or so that my wife is already like "this fuckin song again"

7000 square feet n**** come from a damn cubicle!

almighty so 2 is amazing but dirty nachos was just as good imo don’t sleep on it

dirty nachos was a lot of fun, production is not on the same level tho.

he raps his ass off on both, to be sure

this is cool

Chief Keef sat down for an extremely rare interview with Zane Lowe to promote Almighty So 2.

Now 29, Sosa discusses what it was like to blow up at 16 years old and how his life has changed since. Beautiful to see. pic.twitter.com/WfuPP9Sxmq

— Andrew Barber (@fakeshoredrive) May 9, 2024

I'm mad keen to hear the new one if it's a return to his best form.

"drifting away" is incredible. i love how he references cash money, cam'ron, gucci & kanye. the first time i was listening to it before he shouts out kanye's beats it was making me think of "let the beat build," which is ofc a kanye beat. anyway keef is a pivotal figure in the history of rap and i love that despite being positioned by a lot of people w/ in rap culture as a destroyer of all things sacred he actually knows his artistic lineage better than a lot of his critics do.

truck sit up like a cowboy
i think i got more cars than every member of the hot boys
and we got broomsticks, hogwarts
and i ain't worried about the opps we don't fly the same airport

insanely good rapping on this song

first couple listens i thought he was saying he wanted to beat kanye's ass

another really good interview: https://www.grammy.com/news/chief-keef-almighty-so-2-new-album-interview

had no idea that was fabo yelling on the "almighty" intro

I love this. “I start wearing yellow diamonds, it look like I peed myself” -- lol.

very moving reading that article seeing what a good place he is and how restless his creative mindset is after the amount of terrible shit which got put on his shoulders and how patronising a lot of the early coverage of him was. love that he is still listening to mixtape gucci all the time.

posted briefly in the other keef thread, on third listen... aoty

― devvvine, Friday, 10 May 2024 15:39 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

will double down on this too

"believe" is so cool

from that grammys interview:

From the beginning of your career, you've had this association with the word "turbulence." You use Turbo as an alter ego.

[Laughs] How do you know all this? This is some Nardwuar s— right now, man.

in fairness they aren't used to interviewers making even the slightest effort

the whole album's good but i just keep coming back to "believe"

best Cher cover

https://open.substack.com/pub/ddrake/p/chief-keef-interview 2017 interview

“Jesus” is a journey