

That’s why kids in high schools across Chicago gravitated toward his early music, it mirrored the familiar and felt authentic. It’s violent, cold-hearted, and full of the kind of nihilism found in hopeless neighborhoods around the country.

Keef did, he painted his surroundings in a recording booth with a language his environment would understand. Rap is beautiful because it can come from a place where beauty doesn’t exist and stay beautiful, an actual happy ending to the gangster movies.Ĭhief Keef comes from a place where the air is tainted by gun smoke and the streets, any street can become a graveyard for the gangbangers and the innocent, not the kind of imagery that Picasso would paint. We know their backgrounds, who they were before, who they are now. Scarface the rapper will always do more than Scarface the movie, The Black Album will touch more souls than Jay Z the business man. But the few that survive, documenting their scars for the world to view, they inspire. Their stories are left behind, the distance they covered rewound.

Some do, most do. Right when they’re at the tunnel’s end, that light shining on them also makes for an illuminated target. Rap is one of the only avenues where stories of success blossom from poverty-stricken environments and don’t wither within months, weeks, days. Mitch had to be murdered, an example to the kids that the game loves no man. Cain had to die, would hate for kids to believe you can do wrong and get a second chance at life. Tony Montana had to be killed, would hate for kids to believe success can be built with bricks of cocaine. Article Soundtrack: Read this while playing Kendrick Lamar’s "U" and DMX’s "Slippin."ĭead or in jail, the only outcomes parents, teachers and television told us would come from living dangerously. Drug dealers and street hustlers, thugs and gangsters, all underworld dwellers glorified by Hollywood in a world where happy endings don’t exist.
