Finally Rich - Chief Keef

how can you listen to a track like 'diamonds' & say he cant catch the beat ? he's completely in the pocket

j0rdan you make it sound like some Trout Mask Replica thing inventing his own language. he's making a variation on Soulja Boy rap, and he can't catch the beat with a butterfly net, just like Soulja Boy.

― trey songza (some dude), Friday, January 11, 2013 7:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

wait what are you talking about

that malik yusef video is really great everyone should watch it

i assume you're not talking about the hemiola beat xp

don't recall having any opinion either way about the vox on that one, will have to listen to it again tonight to remind myself what his delivery is like on it

i'm never talking about the hemiola beat itt, it's a red herring

one thing that i think is an issue in the keef debate is that it makes much more sense to talk about 'finally rich' from an aesthetic standpoint because its very much wrapped up in its own aesthetics. 'back from the dead' is not that way and from an aesthetic standpoint it has less going on and its influences are much easier to trace out, and the moral issues that keef presents are much more apparent in those early tracks than they are in the ones on 'finally rich'.

the entire debate of what keef represents is more divorced from 'finally rich' than i think a lot of people realize, which is why i thought something like derogatis' review was a trainwreck

― J0rdan S., Saturday, January 12, 2013 12:42 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this ties in with what I was trying to say. The Finally Rich narrative points toward transcendence in a way that Back From The Dead-Keef didn't - but it's like people don't really believe it. They still primarily identify him with the environment he represents - and I think that's partly why the "he can't rap" argument keeps popping up in the discourse as well, since you are only allowed to transcend the environment if what you are doing can be considered as art rather than as an automated "reflection" of what goes on in your life.

we've all agreed he has an 'off-beat flow' where he occasionally plays w/ how on or off beat he is. other rappers do that sometimes, he does it a lot. an example of a rapper doing it is how eazy e ends "making sure the mutherfuckers don't see me" on 'for the love of $'

this, obv, has nothing to do w/ the big lean song, which was on some next level shit starting each phrase like 2 beats early

like is it just impossible to say maybe he's sloppy? that possibility can not ever be entertained? xp

one thing that i think is an issue in the keef debate is that it makes much more sense to talk about 'finally rich' from an aesthetic standpoint because its very much wrapped up in its own aesthetics. 'back from the dead' is not that way and from an aesthetic standpoint it has less going on and its influences are much easier to trace out, and the moral issues that keef presents are much more apparent in those early tracks than they are in the ones on 'finally rich'.

the entire debate of what keef represents is more divorced from 'finally rich' than i think a lot of people realize, which is why i thought something like derogatis' review was a trainwreck

― J0rdan S., Saturday, January 12, 2013 12:42 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this ties in with what I was trying to say. The Finally Rich narrative points toward transcendence in a way that Back From The Dead-Keef didn't - but it's like people don't really believe it. They still primarily identify him with the environment he represents - and I think that's partly why the "he can't rap" argument keeps popping up in the discourse as well, since you are only allowed to transcend the environment if what you are doing can be considered as art rather than as an automated "reflection" of what goes on in your life.

― future kendricks (longneck), Friday, January 11, 2013 6:53 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think he's left it allll behind. and the reason for that is in the malik video (thank you for checking it out m@tt)

like is it just impossible to say maybe he's sloppy? that possibility can not ever be entertained? xp

― trey songza (some dude), Friday, January 11, 2013 6:54 PM (24 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i thought we all had agreed there was a sloppiness to his style?

1017 new answers

j0rdan you make it sound like some Trout Mask Replica thing inventing his own language. he's making a variation on Soulja Boy rap, and he can't catch the beat with a butterfly net, just like Soulja Boy.

― trey songza (some dude), Friday, January 11, 2013 7:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

well i'm not saying everyone has to agree with me in terms of the quality of what he's doing on the album. but the mixtape and album are clearly different... like there was much more thought and time put into 'finally rich' and how it sounds than and what he does with his voice and choruses than there was on 'back from the dead'. it's just a much, much more intensive album... i mean almost anything would be compared to what they went for with 'back from the dead' but still.

i don't think that keef has totally left all that stuff behind, there's still some scattered lyrics about shooting people in the face and stuff. but it is instructive that the album is called FINALLY RICH, after all. the tone and mood of the album is a lot different than the mixtape. i do think that if you heard the album w/o knowing keef's backstory it wouldn't scan as a remarkably divisive album content-wise.

so i don't know... that question of how far to separate his backstory and old music from the 15 or so songs on 'finally rich' is probably something that tripped me up in my review. but i think it's also muddled the debate a lot because people are talking about different things even if they don't realize it.

did you quote my post on purpose because i wasn't talking about lyrical content at all

oh. frankly i'm not sure what you're talking about.

so i don't know... that question of how far to separate his backstory and old music from the 15 or so songs on 'finally rich' is probably something that tripped me up in my review. but i think it's also muddled the debate a lot because people are talking about different things even if they don't realize it.

― J0rdan S., Friday, January 11, 2013 8:04 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well yeah, it's also kind of weird since if people (and I'm not singling you out in particular) are gonna focus on the organic, grassroots-driven success that keef has had, then it's gonna be because of the more grim earlier stuff. like, if you want to use the CHICAGO YOUTH MOVEMENT as one point to support taking chief keef seriously, you don't get to also totally erase the part of his past that got him that support in the first place by only talking about finally rich.

the earlier stuff wasnt THAT grim either. there were songs like 'true religion jeans' and 'designer' and 'everyday' that had basically no gang banging

if anything the 'realness' of keef that scares so many people makes a lot of 'violent' rap that doesn't have that same angle seem cheaper and more exploitative to me, rather than the other way around.

the earlier stuff wasnt THAT grim either. there were songs like 'true religion jeans' and 'designer' and 'everyday' that had basically no gang banging

― rap steve gadd (D-40), Friday, January 11, 2013 8:29 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

well idk... there were some songs like that but the majority of it is pretty grim

j0rdan you make it sound like some Trout Mask Replica thing inventing his own language. he's making a variation on Soulja Boy rap, and he can't catch the beat with a butterfly net, just like Soulja Boy.

― trey songza (some dude), Friday, January 11, 2013 7:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i agree btw that he's making a variation of soulja boy rap. i just think he's really really good at it and does things on the album that are pretty unique. all i tried to do w/ my review was talk about his place in the matrix of artists like wayne/gucci/soulja/waka/jeezy/future etc. i don't necessarily think that keef himself is a gamechanger or a groundbreaker but that entire group of artists definitely is (and continues to be). i think keef makes songs as good as any of them and is helping carry that baton to whoever the next artist is.

i think he's a dope rapper who made a dope album & part of this clusterfuck is about the timeless ILX activity of eating up boredom by trying to reframe each other's arguments so that you sound less crazy by a narcissism of small differences & then someone says something that is a little past the line & then you characterize it as totally nuts, and someone else says something a little more out there & they get characterized as completely wrong, and it's about trying to get your opponent to 'slip up' and admit something as horrible as liking this more than that perfunctory meek mill album (which i also like, but is about 100x more boring than the keef record)

so now you can't say its important or that he's not doing something new w/out RADICALLY OVERSTATING HIS SIGNIFICANCE COME ON GUYS HE ONLY HAS ONE BILLBOARD HIT AS A SOLO ARTIST even though 8 mo. ago i was saying, 'this guy could do something' & everyone's like HE"LL NEVER GET AN ALBUM OUT but as the mood shifts, so do the goalposts, and people who thought he'd never have a major label debut think he won't sell, and then when he sells they set up this false sales expectations as if those of us who like keef's music were expecting him to do 100k+ without any songs in rotation

shit is silly & sorry but Al is a big part of why this style of argumentation is completely frustrating

the malik yusef vid is great

I agree with all that deej but the thing is you are just as responsible for the clusterfucking as anybody else! me included

i have no idea what will happen w/ him and his career but he was without a doubt one of the most interesting recording artists -- contextual shit ASIDE -- in 2012. his songs were most interesting, i wanted to hear them the most, his rapping engaged me, i cared what he was saying, which are my main expectations for rappers

xp i do take responsibility for the clusterfucking generally, i am nothing if not playing my role

dayo as far as shameless trolls itt go, at least guys like some dude and DJP have enough confidence in their intellectual capacity to also contribute to the discussion

I am just coming back to this thread and this may be projection/overstepping but I seriously doubt anyone who has graduated with an Ivy League degree feels any any doubt about their intellectual capacity; in fact this charge may be the single dumbest thing I've seen in this argument.

nah it's cool DJP; I get what he was saying.

yeah i mean 乒乓 brought some quality content to the thread after and seemingly in response to that post

I should have kept reading before I posted

i was just trying to goad dayo into not being a dick for 5 minutes

wait dayo did you go to an ivy? i had no idea

i mean i was also sort of mad at him too

I think it's been a running thing in the goon threads how I only pop in to snipe and zing and troll people, which is probably pretty true!

pfft you don't need an ivy degree to do that

but otherwise goon threads are just deej ship and whiney meshed into a neverending http://i.imgur.com/YfJmn.gif

Lol now I feel like I just blew up dayo's spot

lol I've posted about it before plus j0rd should have known from fb

as an independent observer, i thought everyone was p. chill despite talking past each other for 1k posts

not like a [MODERATOR EDIT NECESSARY FOR ALL OUR SANITY] or anything

lol

Yeah I hope slocki doesnt find this thread too

The one thing about the jazz/keef things that breaks down for me is that free jazz dudes who were challenging rhythmic conventions were all schooled in the classics and completely technically adept enough to knock out sets of standards, where it's not like keef could like knock out a Do or Die type verse

"You already know how to rap. Now rap wrong and make THAT right": Keef D-Bags Thread 2013

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M-OqF8-N-Dw#

like this is one of the first coltrane recordings and you can here him pushing a bit compared to the others but only slightly, this was a wilbur hardin record

god y'all some bop boys

there were individual jazz players who had idiosyncratic styles from day one tho. t monk is an extreme example

but anyway w/ jazz i was just talking about swing that basically every artist does, where the shit is written out as if it's right on the beat but if a classical musician plays it it sounds stiff and if a jazz artist plays it, it's actually slightly behind or w/e on the beat

I'm guilty of this too but comparing rap or rock artists to jazz dudes is always kind of a stretch because most rock or rap dudes are basically pants pooping infants, musically speaking, compared to jazz dudes

Except chief keef, of course

i'm not making an argument about anything musically except how the artist finds a rhythmic pocket on the beat. what is wrong w/ you guys

http://media.mediapost.com/images/inline_image/2012/10/11/Hot-pockets-B.jpg