Finally Rich - Chief Keef

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

you want me to answer that question

ok done w/ this one for the night happy new year yall

i have to come clean and admit i p much have a massive transparent chip on my shoulder appearing anytime anyone opens the music theory terminology kimono

not to say i'm wrong however obv

hemiola kimono is one of my fav filmmakers

keef is making a vernier scale between the beat on the track and beat in his head. that he is only on beat twice in the track is a testament to how precisely he can calibrate his internal beat. keef precision.

lol

deej the thing is -- everybody you're talking with has listened to jazz. we're all talking the same language, but you seem to want to assert that something's going on rhythmically that can't be talked about in simple rhythmic terms (4/4, 3/4, 6/8) - which aren't big-theory-talking-above-anybody, they're absolute if-you-don't-know-this-why-don't-you-it's-easy stuff. if that were true, that'd make chief keef a profoundly forward-thinking musical thinker along the lines of ornette coleman. were that the case, I'd expect absolutely next-level tracks, not "sounds like they refused to let him hear that actual rhythm track" stuff.

deej the thing is -- everybody you're talking with has listened to jazz. we're all talking the same language, but you seem to want to assert that something's going on rhythmically that can't be talked about in simple rhythmic terms (4/4, 3/4, 6/8) - which aren't big-theory-talking-above-anybody, they're absolute if-you-don't-know-this-why-don't-you-it's-easy stuff. if that were true, that'd make chief keef a profoundly forward-thinking musical thinker along the lines of ornette coleman. were that the case, I'd expect absolutely next-level tracks, not "sounds like they refused to let him hear that actual rhythm track" stuff.

― too many encores (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, December 31, 2012 8:56 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not saying it CANT be talked about in rhythmic terms (i'm not talking about time signatures, though) i'm saying that i'm not enough of a pro to always hear what someone is doing rhythmically and explain what the actual music would look like written out or what specific trick he's using (i.e. it might not be a hemiola at all)

a time signature is not a rhythmic pattern, though, not sure why you're bringing that up. and i'm not saying he's ornette coleman, but i am saying he's doing something w/ a level of inventiveness that makes it stand out from most rappers (i.e. the other guy on the track) (although 'sounds like they refused to let him hear the actual rhythm track' actually sounds quite a bit like what they used to throw at ornette coleman, so it's kind of ironic that you would use that as a defense, coleman was one of the most divisive jazz artists ever!)

yeah i was joking about the 9/4 thing, time signatures definitely aren't really the topic here.

well, I mean, for every ornette coleman there's 100 college free jazz players insisting they're playing "sheets of sound" when they don't really know their way around a scale like ornette. there are plenty of rappers who do all sorts of inventive ways of throwing interesting patterns (which I'd argue are time-based eventually if we got down to formal analysis, but if we got to that level I'd have to tap out, too); the section you cited just sounds like he's not sure where the 1 is.

lonely sosa

I keep that shit 3/4

"w/ a level of inventiveness that makes it stand out from most rappers" is such a delib polemical statement, man why? you know the stand out part is contingent on contextual listeners and will raise hackles

the audience to which keef appeals by way of what he does is completely diff to the one you're trying to reason to

derrick rose does seem really nice so keef otm there I think we can all agree

can't play free jazz on house arrest.