Over the past year, Chicago rapper Chief Keef (government name Keith Cozart) has been the poster child for an often overwrought debate over the cultural repossession and appropriation of gangster rap. Yesterday, only two short weeks after the lukewarm release of his debut Interscope album, “Finally Rich,” the dreaded teenage rap sensation was sentenced to two months in an Illinois youth detention center for firing rifles at a shooting range during an awkward June episode of Pitchfork’s Selector series (in which host Eavvon O’Neal accosts rappers with a series of edgy EDM trap beats which they often prove incapable of – or uninterested in – freestyling over). The clip itself was riotously uncomfortable; a bespectacled O’Neal shepherds Keef into a gun range, where the mutually autistic duo bust shots and struggle through a few beats Keef didn’t like, finally finding something decent enough to prompt the wunderkind to rattle off an uninspired freestyle. Several months later, Keef became the subject of investigation in the murder of Lil’ JoJo, a rapper from a rival Chicago gang. Keef responded to JoJo’s death by tweeting: “Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted To Be Jus Like Us #LMAO.” A few months later, Keef’s appearance in the Pitchfork video copped him two months in a juvenile detention center for violating his parole, which had prohibited him from touching or possessing handguns.
Immediately after Keef’s tweets about JoJo’s killing, Pitchfork retracted the gun range video, basically outing that things had gotten a little too real:
“Pitchfork’s roots are in Chicago and many of our employees and several contributors live in the city. The horror of the gun violence that has plagued our hometown is something we all take very seriously. Many people have pointed out that this episode could be seen as trivializing gun violence, and we feel they have a good point.”
Pitchfork basically hung around the hood until shit popped off, at which point she hopped into mom’s Benz station wagon a few blocks out of sight of her friends. Pitchfork was distinctly aware of its journalistic take on Keef, given that (a) it had widely publicized his status as a juvenile on probation (b) it was happy to promote Keef’s music (which, in nearly every song, references murder) and even egg on his brazenly violent character, so long as it garnered support from the people who watch Keef and Grimes videos back to back. All of a sudden, when the subject of every single Chief Keef song came to fruition, it was high time to invoke the sacred moral high ground that comes with the ironic levity with which Pitchfork and similar sites (Fader, etc.) approach Keef and other violent rappers. Despite a lack of proof that Keef played any role in the killing, the fact that he mocked – rather than mourned – the death of an enemy was suddenly untenable, and spurred a Lawyer Milloy-esque exercise in backpeddling.
While one wouldn’t be wrong to call the flippancy of Keef’s reaction to Jojo’s death callous (or even alarming), I would argue that we temporarily sideline moralization, and instead consider whether Jojo’s murder, and Keef’s reaction to it, should really have been all that surprising. Just hours before his death, JoJo filmed himself taunting Keef’s affiliate Lil’ Reese while he idled in an SUV on his block. In the months leading up to his murder, the baby-faced 18 year-old (of rival Brick Squad gang affiliation) taunted Keef’s 300 crew with a series of disses, copying everything from his flow to his beats to his music video treatments (a bunch of shirtless young men toting enormous automatic weapons). While we can all feel some level of sadness – or, at the very least, sympathy – towards JoJo’s loss, it bears saying that he was, in some sense, “asking for it.” My argument here isn’t, of course, that JoJo deserved to be killed, but rather that given Keef’s music and the undeniable reality of Chicago’s gun violence epidemic, it was fair for JoJo to expect some type of real-life retaliation for his actions.
The important aspect of this turn of events, though, is that Keef’s reaction to JoJo’s murder forced various media outlets into a spasm of moral self-evaluation. The question is: why now? This isn’t the first time that a rapper has been linked to a murder or been filmed holding guns. The fact of the matter is that in the last year, Keef has made real a lifestyle which had heretofore existed in a fantastic netherworld of guns and violence, along with a large share of other American entertainment. The media, in the past, has had nearly full discretion in regulating how real the “gangster image” became. As Pitchfork tried to toe the line between playing along with Keef’s image and normalizing it, they got burned. In real life, Keef is part of a generation of kids that grew up hypersharing their day-to-day lives on the internet; whether through Worldstarhiphop, Twitter, or Facebook, this generation often lets their social interaction spill into the public domain. This spillover can get messy when media outlets accustomed to having full control over an artist’s image find themselves a little too in-tune with the negative and very tangible aspects of the lifestyle.
Instances of this “spillover” are plentiful in the case of Keef’s GBE crew. This fall, a video leaked onto the internet of Keef’s running partner Lil’ Reese brutalizing a young woman with swift hands and a particularly disturbing stomp/powerhop combo. Keef has instagrammed himself receiving fellatio from a young woman, and has had his Instagram account suspended several times for other lewd or inappropriate uploads. Numerous members of his crew brandish illegal weapons in music videos and Instagram shots. Quite to the contrary, though, Keef’s self-portrait can be as tender as it is jarring; perhaps the most frequent cameo-snatcher on his Instagram is his daughter Kay Kay (whose name graces my personal favorite song on “Finally Rich”). While Keef’s verbal outlashes at Kay Kay’s mother are just as frequent, Keef’s commitment to parenthood is undeniable. It also bears noting that Keef’s overbearing control over his own image isn’t limited to Twitter or Instagram. When label head Jimmy Iovine and 50 Cent colluded to schedule a high-budget video shoot in Las Vegas for Keef’s possible single ‘Hate Being Sober,’ Keef was a no-show. He wanted D. Gainz, the video director who shot most of his material since ‘Don’t Like,’ to shoot the video instead. So while Keef’s instinct to represent his own perspective can be attributed in part to his generational comfort with sharing opinion via social networks, it’s also attributable to his unwillingness to be inappropriately caricatured by “the man.”
The Pitchfork incident has pushed the age-old, often abstracted argument about the moral rectitude of supporting violent rap into slightly more uncomfortable territory. Pitchfork knew that Chief Keef wrote violent lyrics and made violent videos, but when they brought him to a gun range, they thought they could temporarily place Keef’s reality in a low-stakes, neutral environment. But with Keef determined to say his piece, the comforting claim that “it’s just music,” loses its punch. The debate can no longer simply concern how lyrics can abstractly impact or influence violence; now, rappers are toting guns and tweeting the aftermath of gang-related murders. Gang confrontations are documented step-by-step on YouTube. The argument that “it’s just art” has been fundamentally challenged by the fact that it seems – quite honestly – to be real life as well. As these outlets continue to reinforce Keef’s image, he continues to put them in dangerously hot water, when they have to answer the question of whether they’re reinforcing certain elements of his persona through their documentation.
I tend to think that this is a good thing, and maybe it’s just because I don’t believe that journalists can remain morally aloof from aspects of the music they promote. The ambition here is not to take a side in the argument on Keef, his actions, or even his music. It’s to explore what it is about Keef that has spurred the world of hip-hop journalism towards this uneasy self-evaluation.
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