Was Chief Keef Too Gangster for Interscope?

Courtesy of Glory Boyz Entertainment

Chief Keef

America in the 21st century is one of the most economically polarized and heavily armed societies in history. As the top rises, it becomes harder to see the ground through the clouds.

Disconnected, nihilistic subcultures have developed in areas abandoned and forgotten by mainstream society. Such aberrant cultures used to exist only in isolated wildernesses: mountain men in north Georgia, the uncontacted tribes of Brazil.

But today, with the prevalence of guns and drugs, cities are wildernesses, too.

"These guys are from an entirely different world," says Peeda Pan, manager of the notorious Chief Keef (a/k/a Sosa a/k/a Keith Cozart), the most gangster gangsta rapper since the 1990s. At only 19, he's already been to jail twice and rehab twice, in part due to his penchant for Instagramming photos of himself posing with guns.

When a rival was murdered, Keef tweeted, "LMAO," prompting an uproar among more mainstream rappers like Lupe Fiasco, who threatened to retire because of it. Fiasco said, "Chief Keef scares me. Not him specifically, but just the culture he represents."

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It's that culture, however, that attracts people to Keef's music. Those of us who live in the confines of the mainstream are fed up with it, and hearing something truly foreign is refreshing. It's not that Keef's lyrics are particularly depraved or violent; it's something about the way he says them. They're almost a different language, like deep-space recordings from another, more brutally honest world.

That world, "Chiraq," a/k/a the South Side of Chicago in 2014, is indeed about as far from the world most of us occupy as you can get. Shootings are so frequent that local papers publish tallies of the violence, rather than individual reports.

I asked Tadoe, Chief Keef's cousin and member of his rap group/entourage, the Glo Gang, how Chiraq differs from other 'hoods.

"We turnt. We too turnt, fo. We too turnt. Just look our shit up, fo. It's too much goin' on," says Tadoe. "If we was still back there we'd be dead or locked up or some shit, fo. Or tweakin' out. But we out here coolin' now, we into this money." He hits a blunt, then starts yelling: "Tadoe OG! Chief Keef OG! Gangin'! Shiiit. We still on our shit though. We still got shot, still got guap."

Tadoe and I are sitting in the backyard of a mini-mansion in a dreary part of Woodland Hills. In July, Chief Keef moved here from Chicago to be closer to his record label, Interscope.

In 2012, at only 17 years old, Keef signed a $6 million deal with Jimmy Iovine's label, which is also home to Dr. Dre's label, Aftermath. The deal had to be presided over by a judge because Keef was still a minor.

Chief Keef caught Interscope's eye (and everyone else's) after a raw, ghetto-chic music video for his song "I Don't Like," featuring Lil' Reese and produced by Young Chop, became a national mega-hit. The catchy song, in which Keef lists things he simply doesn't like (e.g., "fake niggas," "bitch niggas"), has an instantly relatable quality. There are certain things, after all, that we just don't like, no matter how many Huffington Post headlines try to convince us otherwise.

One of the things the mainstream doesn't like, however, is Chief Keef himself. Before moving to L.A., he had been living in a wealthy suburb of Chicago called Highland Park. He got evicted for terrorizing the neighborhood.

My conversation with the Glo Gang at their Scarface-style McMansion was intended to serve as a precursor to an interview with Keef himself. Upon request, I brought a six-pack of beer and two bottles of Hennessy, and blunts were passed with metronomic frequency.

Despite those icebreakers, the conversation was strained and awkward. The news that Interscope had dropped Keef and the Glo Gang was leaked by a rap blog that morning.