Finally Rich - Chief Keef

i think it's part of his persona to not both doing a 2nd take, but i don't know if he realizes or cares what his performance might gain if he took another pass with the beat turned up louder in his headphones

not caring is part of his persona too i guess

persona doing some heavy lifting itt

well the rapping ain't gonna!

persona doing some heavy lifting itt

that this whole interpretive approach makes it out of undergrad classes at all is kind of a crying shame - it's not like use of persona isn't a working trope but people hold onto it like it's a great way of explaining why a given musician doesn't write/rap/sing/play well

Hes not "off beat," or if he is its not what makes his verse notable there. its possible they mislaid his vocal track so its "early" (the engineer on the kanye version of "i dont like" dropped his vocal track in at the wrong time) but its SO early it seems more likely to me it was intentional

Or arguably big lean's people dropped it in at the wrong time, but that doesnt really say anything about keef's rhythmic control

It sounds like hes trying to place his words at unexpected parts of the beat, hes coming in "early" and ending each line early

Also its "sad stories like soap ops" as in operas

youtube commentors arguing the same thing:

bigwillonmygrind 23 hours ago
damn keef was off beat
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Ontibadboy 21 hours ago
nawq he wasn't he was goin with the drop
Reply · in reply to bigwillonmygrind

Tha Sheen 9 hours ago
yea he not off beat the first time i heard it i thought he was but listen again keef crazy
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STPLamzino 11 hours ago
he's not off beat, he's just switching his flow.......
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naturezoo 19 hours ago
Keef ain't off beat wtf are y'all talkin bout. Nigga just comin with a diff flo.
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then to be fair to Al there's ppl claiming d-riders are delusional and that he's 'off beat'

haha blaming the fuckin engineer is shameful. the thing about Keef's phrasing is that a lot of times he starts a line at the right time, but he rushes to the end so that the syllables fall in weird places and he finishes the phrase earlier than it seems like it should, which works out especially badly for him since he leans hard on end rhymes.

im not blaming the engineer, i think its intentional (think dont know). but i disagree, his entrances are all coming in on the same early count -- it sounds like his verse (or the waveform) is shifted to the left.

although i kind of like this too lol:

KENNY GK 2 days ago
Keef killed this. the beat is just fucked up smh
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pretty much every track he's ever made has this issue -- either all of them (including the ones on his major label albums) were engineered by the same incompetent/sabotaging guy or hmmmm nope that's the only explanation

ok well in that case we're apparently talking about two completely different things because what i'm hearing here is not present on any of his other tracks

dude even the "huah huah huah" drifts off-beat at the end of the loop every time

fwiw the engineer story on the i dont like remix is true so stop being a cock about this

it's not the orthodox craft one but it seems evident keef does have an innate musicality and not simply a delinquent anti-aesthetic

like j0rdan said it follows on from the pervading post-fruity youth swag

deej was misguided in trying to validate it thru classical metrics, ships' "what his performance might gain" was stuckist condescension falsely implying objective benchmarks

i thought the "i don't like" thing was an issue of a verse being dropped in a weird place in the melody of the beat, but it still locks in with the rhythm fine? apples and oranges xp

yeah i will cop to condescension -- i often play armchair producer and think "get back in the booth, man, you coulda killed that verse if you actually tried"

i'm talking about where his vocals drop in on the beat, ship, like i said, we're talking about two different things

which classical metrics are u referring to rtc

well after you concluded we were talking about two different things, you said i was being a cock about disregarding thing 2 after you brought it up and continuing to focus on thing 1

look i mean i get it, keef is by received standards "off" and in another time might be laughed out of town, but idk i listen to the album and that shit works 4 me, by its own logic, just like kendrick's falling-down-the-stairs flow or whatever

i understand there's a fine line where you feel one has to be vigilant against brainwashing yourself and automatically giving the kids free passes but the other maybe greater danger on the other side of that coin is you end up kinda listening to yourself listening to music rather than just listening to music, i know that sounds like a risible formulation but idk

oh shit i should have known deej would someday lure me into the worst dr. seuss story ever

LOL

i mean idk daisy age dudes were probably smh-ing to deliberately flat-ass tunnel banger choruses way back when, this is just the next episode

KENNY GK 2 days ago
Keef killed this. the beat is just fucked up smh
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ive decided im going to ride with this explanation bc its the funniest

which classical metrics are u referring to rtc

― D-40, Monday, 31 December 2012 20:49 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

"masterful sense of rhythm" can logically only refer to past masters

im referring to the polyrhythmic jazz drummers of eras of yore.

what did u think of his guest verse on the youtube in question, intentional creation of a novel flow, mislaid audio track, or off-beat accident?

he actually has some intricate flows, it's not like he's kicking some blocky run dmc cadence, just the way he's not hitting the syllables suggests his reach exceeds his grasp. it's like listening to a kid who's still learning the chords to "stairway to heaven" attempt the solo. breath control is like the last thing rappers seem to master these days.

maybe the diff between what we're talking about is im talking about the general rhythmic structure of his verses & you're talking about his precision. i would agree he has a self-consciously 'sloppy' style and can see how that might be off putting but to me it works. when i say he has a 'masterful' rhythmic command i'm talking more about the underlying rhythmic ideas rather than how flawlessly he executes them

clarity!

I totally thought a few of the Keef songs on the album sounded like an engineer goof! It reminds me of the story about how run dmcs 'king of rock' is all "off" because the vocals and the beats got seperated. Except on #chihuahuahua they didn't do the best job of reconnecting them.

yeah it just sounds so much like soulja boy and other swaggy mixtape rappers-type 'relaxed' vocal style that i assumed the final product is pretty much his performance without much technical interference

what did u think of his guest verse on the youtube in question, intentional creation of a novel flow, mislaid audio track, or off-beat accident?

― D-40, Monday, 31 December 2012 21:00 (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

part intentionally clipped, part "fuck it" swag, it's a fluid dialectic between the two rather than concrete percentages tho

but all this vague underlying rhythmic ideas of the polyrhythmic jazz drummers blah is some counterproductive fanution imo

i thought it was obvious the jazz drummer thing was not to be taken too seriously, i don't think he's self-consciously making complex polyrhythmic decisions

i do think he's aware, tho, that he's doing something musically new / fresh-sounding, kicking a flow that he hasnt heard someone try before, & that involves coming in 'early' (but actually on time)

he's doing a sexy vampire voice on "love sosa," right

xp how many million joeks do u have to painstakingly explain before u maybe stop taking what is or isnt serious for granted dude

basically agree with the latter summation i guess

youre apparently better at communicating ambiguity

just to be clear, you realize i'm talking about the place his vocals land on the beat (as in which part of the beat) rather than the slightly 'off' rhythmic nature of his voice that somedude is talking about, right -- hes putting his vocals down in unconventional places w/in the rhythm of the track

― D-40, Monday, December 31, 2012 4:00 PM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tempted to go with "the polyrhythmic jazz drummers of eras of yore" dn

this is actually a lot like previous examples of ppl not really getting where im coming from bc im doing a somewhat tongue n cheek statement to render a truth

in this case yes he is doing, fundamentally, what jazz soloists would try to do which is make a new style or put a new slant on how they were rapping rhythmically

jazz drummers (unless classically trained) (which many werent) werent thinking about it in terms of laid-out european written music tradition either, it was just an (actually fairly complex) rhythmic calculation done in their head that this shit would sound cool if they did it like this

similar to the process going on here, im making reference to a historical parallel for an underlying thing

the joke is i know ppl are pretty regularly assuming that im overintellectualizing or overhyping something that isnt there so referrin to polyrhythmic jazz drummers of yore was a partial troll, although these things always seem to backfire

your sense of humor explains a lot about your taste in rappers tbh

It sounds like hes trying to place his words at unexpected parts of the beat

if you're going to make a claim like this it'd be helpful to say what he's doing in terms of actual timing. Is he rapping 3/4 over 4/4? 6/8? Just lagging? (It sure doesn't sound like he's lagging in the style that guys like Devin do, which is audibly still in the rhythm.) It just sounds like he has a poor sense of timing.

(and in the case of those jazz drummers, even when they themselves couldn't state rhythmically what they were doing in formal terms, it was always quite clear to anybody with some formal training what was going on - you don't need a formal education to innovate. But what Keef's doing sounds like "having a poor sense of rhythm.")

i disagree. to me it sounds like he's (sloppily, as is his style, but still on time) locked into a pretty prescribed rhythm, and is landing on the exact same part of the beat in every line.

i can't explain what is going on rhythmically because i don't have that training to break it down either, but it sounds to me like he's treating the and of three like the one, or maybe the four like the one, or something like that

is landing on the exact same part of the beat in every line.

see this is not my experience at all, his timing is very erratic and inconsistent from line to line

idk i find it pretty striking & it seems to have its own intentional internal logic to me as opposed to how like lil b used to just completely disregard the beat

well yeah lil b often not writing or obeying meter at all. when he does, though, not sure there's a world of difference.

at the risk of completely overanalyzing something that i just brought up b/c im like 'this sounds cool yo', maybe a better way of saying it is that he falls into this descending pattern <em>dat-dat-dat dat-dat-dat</em> and sticks with it regardless of the beat, but he's keeping time in his head outside of the actual beat, or something, so it is some kind of hemiola type pattern idk

fucking html

for someone who a day or two back couldn't even perceive any deviations from the rhythm in his vocal performances you sure do have a detailed understanding thereof now