Finally Rich - Chief Keef

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.

these bitches love Homeland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2S9EUE0gA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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

I haven't read all the way down the thread yet but someone already covered how this is wrong, right

lol guess not

It's not really important anyway, I'm just going to sit over here and crack up at the hemiola post

lol

i understand the impulse to push back against the narrative of CK as murderous high school dropout with asperger's who won the music industry lottery but the counter narrative of CK as incredibly savvy and deliberate innovator with innate musical ability and sky high commercial and artistic potential is just feeling a wee bit wishful

lol aspergers

I will say that his little contemptous grunt at Glover's "I ain't got one tat, my brother's got one" is very underrated though. One of the key grunts of 2012.

lol

one of my fondest memories of New Years Eve 2012 will now forever be "sneaking furtive glances at my phone in the middle of a party to monitor the thread where deej finally goes off the rails"

Ha, I did that too.

deej has been known to go off some rails

granted i opened this thread in bed when i got home but y'all need a fucking life

on that note, i'll continue to plot an elaborate mutiny against another message board thread title

def glad to be clusterfucking into 2012 with all of you

oy, 2013 ... where does the time go?

i understand the impulse to push back against the narrative of CK as murderous high school dropout with asperger's who won the music industry lottery but the counter narrative of CK as incredibly savvy and deliberate innovator with innate musical ability and sky high commercial and artistic potential is just feeling a wee bit wishful

― some dude, Tuesday, January 1, 2013 2:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah not to put words in my mouth or anything

i think ive been pretty careful to say 'he just thinks hes doing something fresh' not SKY HIGH COMMERCIAL AND ARTISTIC POTENTIAL

saying he's a deliberate innovator really doesn't strike me as a stretch at all -- denying him that is p much what everyone has been doing, like this is some sort of accidental thing instead of intentional & i pretty strongly disagree w/ that

this is pretty much what drummers do all the time ... any time you play 3 against 4, or what have u
I haven't read all the way down the thread yet but someone already covered how this is wrong, right

― GIMME SOME REGGAE (DJP), Tuesday, January 1, 2013 1:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was three over two not four, but yes, jazz drummers do polyrhythms all the time (incl 3 over 2) aka playing w/ two time sigs at once that dont divide evenly

but whatever guys you obviously want to believe hes just an idiot who's haphazardly rapping w/ no rhythmic command be my guest

keep in mind we've had these kinds of debates before, for gucci most memorably (no i am not saying keef is at gucci in '08 level) & ppl would go on & on (most of the same ppl in these threads) about how he wasnt doing anything & then came around on it eventually, i'm not saying it means u have to agree now but it would at least show a lil bit of respect to acknowledge that maybe i might have a point here?? idk though if you guys just hear chaos in that guest verse than i'm not sure what to tell you b/c it sounds to me like he's p intentionally doing some extremely novel stuff w/ rhythm in that verse that is also not random / chaotic / accidental

Accidental vs. intentional is sort of the wrong question though? Happy accidents are a force of history and intentions do not matter in the end. I'm interested in seeing how far he can take things.

not everyone came around to gucci btw

those who didnt arent those im trying to convince in this case, fwiw

not sure how that pertains to the argument but i have no horse in this race

maybe i might have a point here

"intentional" is a silly thing nobody cares about; it doesn't matter whether an artist knows what he's doing or not. (at all. ever. it is never pertinent to a discussion of whether the artist's work is good.) the "novel" stuff with rhythm, like unless you can actually describe it, how can you even in good faith claim to have a point? he is comically off beat. you want to like it, so you make ridiculous claims about how he's on some higher level of rhythm. I'm not a great musician, but there're good musicians me posting to this thread who also hear the verse you cited -- as a good one -- as "lol, what the fuck." maybe listen to them about how hilarious Keef's flow is here.

it's fine to like Jandek - I have a metric ton of Jandek records! - but insisting "no no, I have a deeper understanding of Jandek's craft, no way it's actually Jandek" is lol for days

i never said i have a 'higher understanding' christ

this is actually a really really simple idea & we say stuff like this all the time -- not being able to describe in musical terms the functional cause of a musical effect doesnt mean that there isn't one.

Polyrhythms are made up of different subdivisions of the same macro beat based off of grouping together note values of the same microbeat; everything about them is directly related. Saying they are "different beats" and acting as if there is no relationship between them is like saying there is no relationship between two groups of three pennies and three groups of two pennies.

i'm waiting for the post where deej explains that keef was waving a gun at cops to create a tension and warhol-esque crime-as-pop meta-narrative as a sly juxtaposition to lyrics about partying

Polyrhythms are made up of different subdivisions of the same macro beat based off of grouping together note values of the same microbeat; everything about them is directly related. Saying they are "different beats" and acting as if there is no relationship between them is like saying there is no relationship between two groups of three pennies and three groups of two pennies.

― GIMME SOME REGGAE (DJP), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 9:40 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uhh if thats how you interpreted me saying 'different beats' then you misinterpreted. they are, in fact, different, which doesn't mean they're not related--obviously i think there is some relation as opposed to lil b who completely disregards the original beat

i'm waiting for the post where deej explains that keef was waving a gun at cops to create a tension and warhol-esque crime-as-pop meta-narrative as a sly juxtaposition to lyrics about partying

― finally rich, fun-packed, fulfilling (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 9:42 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dog shut the fuck up

this trick where u guys bog things down in pedantic critiques in order to make it seem like i'm trying to argue he's doing some big complex mozart concerto style ambitious thing is stupid

where we tricked you into saying "a pretty masterful sense of rhythm" and "a self-consciously 'sloppy' style" and "he's keeping time in his head outside of the actual beat" and "hemiola"

Discussion is reminding me of the late 80s when hardcore bands who picked up instruments for the first time a week before they recorded an ep were described as Beefheartian in zines

where we tricked you into saying "a pretty masterful sense of rhythm" and "a self-consciously 'sloppy' style" and "he's keeping time in his head outside of the actual beat" and "hemiola"

― finally rich, fun-packed, fulfilling (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 10:10 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh i think all these things are pretty self evident in the music, it sounds like u guys are just hearing some amateur kid flailing around & i dont think that's really the case