Finally Rich - Chief Keef

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
Reply ·

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

but he's keeping time in his head outside of the actual beat

fucking really, man?

zorba the chief played in greek wedding bands before the hip-hop thing took off, can rap in 9/4

but he's keeping time in his head outside of the actual beat

fucking really, man?

― packt like phoebe cates's dad in a chimney (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Monday, December 31, 2012 7:34 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is pretty much what drummers do all the time ... any time you play 3 against 4, or what have u

i'm not making an argument on some prog-rock shit, because i don't think there's any intent on his part to be 'complex,' i think he's just trying to rap w/ a flow other people haven't used yet

imo every music critic should really study jazz at some pt b/c a lot of this stuff is pretty central to understanding how jazz works rhythmically

this shit is embarrassing what the fuck deej

you tried to play it on established technical terms and ran aground miserably, you had a brief moment of clarity finding other words for "innate musicality", now youve doubled down on the bullshit

rtc otm ppl put ur pride aside it's not difficult

look up the rhythmic definition of 'hemiola'

no! i will not!

(p drunk rn apolz in advance)

~sigh~

ha i wasn't familiar with the term but now that i am it is something i have done often ****as a drummer who has played in jazz bands****

much like in jazz the music exists first & the explanation for what's happening comes later. rhythmically, on that track, he's attempting to do something w/ rhythm that is unusual, but is also not completely chaotic & random. i don't know exactly what he's doing, but it seems pretty easy to determine listening to it that there's a rhythmic logic to it, going across barlines or against the beat or what have you.

obviously, he's not conceiving of it this way, he's just trying to make something that sounds fresh. but i have to say i stridently disagree w/ the argument that it's just aimless rhythmlessness

ha i wasn't familiar with the term but now that i am it is something i have done often ****as a drummer who has played in jazz bands****

― some dude, Monday, December 31, 2012 7:43 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i played trumpet & studied jazz for about six years, but what do i know