"This is Chicago," shouts Kanye West, arguably the most popular rapper in the world right now, after mentioning the names of underground Chicago artists - the LEP Bogus Boys, Chief Keef and King Louie - whose rise to stardom might help West more than them. That moment on West's remix of Keef's track "I Don't Like" was the signal that turned all the lights on the Chicago rap scene, which is currently at the peak of its creativity.
The third largest city in the USA, Chicago gave birth to the house scene, but it was never particularly represented on the national hip hop scene. The current rap revival in this city seems to be happening on all levels, a collision of younger generations with new technologies and cheap distribution. YouTube culture has raised awareness of local artists, especially the street rap scene on the city's east side known as the "drill scene," known for slow beats and rappers such as 16-year-old Keef, King Louie, Lil Durk and Lil Reese.
From the moment Kanye West broke through, rappers from Chicago had moments of commercial success, but all of them, like West himself, left the city to make a career. The first sign that things were about to turn around was the breakthrough of LEP Bogus Boys in late 2010. Their music video for "Goin in 4 the Kill" brought a lot of attention to the city. West's former manager John Monopoli became a founding member of the independent label Lawless Inc, which soon embraced King Louie as a main artist. Then last year Chief Keef suddenly came out of nowhere and signed deals with Interscope and Dr Dre.
But what gave everyone the wind at their backs was the pressure that had been building in recent years, as more and more of Chicago's poorest got online for the first time. At the head of this movement was the "drill" scene that was created on the street, in the network of clubs and parties, as well as in high schools. When this movement finally exploded all eyes were on the city which had to offer a whole palette of radically different sounds created in total isolation.
The sound of the hip hop scene in Chicago is the sound of extreme segregation. White Chicagoans once pelted Martin Luther King with rocks when he marched through their city, and today that place is the point of greatest racial intolerance in the US.
When one of the legends of the Chicago house scene, Frankie Knuckles, moved to Chicago from New York in the 70s, he was shocked at how different things looked. When he started DJing, he noticed the detachment of the audience, but he thought the problem was his approach, not existing prejudices.
"White kids didn't want to go to the same parties where black kids were," he told dance music historian Bill Brewster. If you're black, just take a train ride south of Roosevelt and you'll see white people abandoning public transportation en masse. Or ask about former detective John Barge, who reportedly led a squad that freely tortured and terrorized blacks on the city's South Side during the 70s and 80s with almost no legal repercussions until he was finally fired in 1993.
Today, the violence in Chicago has reached a boiling point and there are more innocent victims and collateral damage. According to the "New York Times", the number of murders jumped by 38 percent compared to last year. All of this has contributed to Keef's controversial music being heard throughout the city, and his youth and reckless lyrics full of references to local places, gangs and characters are a sign that control over the younger generations has been completely lost in this city.
Segregation in Chicago isn't just based on race—social groups are divided by gangs, school systems, even neighborhoods. Chicago hip hop reflects this division, and the city received a new brutal nickname in rap songs - The Apprentice.
What does it mean when the most vital American hip hop right now comes from one of the deadliest addresses, where both victims and authors are equally young, poor and dark-skinned? It is easy to criticize the connection between violence and pop music, but it is also wrong, because if the music stopped tomorrow, there would be no murders. Young Chicago rappers are responding to the ubiquitous and growing violence by challenging it, ignoring it, embracing it, exploiting it, running away from it - sometimes all at once. Each song is different, but each is an implicit declaration of survival.
Lil Durk's "Dis Ain't What U Want" is one of the most representative songs of the new Chicago scene with its slow street swagger stretched over a clattering funeral march.
When the XNUMX-year-old sings "They say I terrify my city" it sounds like a delta blues lament from the future. But the lightness of his thought comes with a heavy subtext: what is so terrible about music?
"Dis Ain't What U Want" can be heard in the Washington metro area, but that song didn't achieve nearly as much success as Chief Keef's "I Don't Like." The then 16-year-old signed a record deal reportedly worth $6 million and drew attention to the "drill" sound and the Chicago rap scene.
However, while the ink was dry many were quick to criticize Interscope Records for promoting musicians with criminal pasts. Keef signed the deal while in prison, and Lil Durk was later arrested for possession of a firearm, a few weeks before his probation was due to expire for the same charge. Durk ended up in prison, and in the meantime his mixtape "I'm Still a Hitta" was released, on the cover of which a gun and a lump of cocaine were found.
A month later, the online popular culture magazine "Pitchfork" published a video of the then 16-year-old Chief Keef shooting a gun at a shooting range in New York, and smoking marijuana during breaks. The video, despite numerous criticisms of "Pitchfork" for exploiting young Keef, remained online for another three months.
At the same time, the number of murders in Chicago increased by 39 percent compared to the same time last year.
Joseph Coleman, an 18-year-old rapper known under the pseudonym Lil JoJo, was later shot while riding a bicycle, and Chief Keef laughingly commented on Twitter that JoJo wanted to be like him, so the police opened an investigation into Keef's connection to the death of the young rapper.
"Stereogum", "Fake Shore Drive", "The Fader" and "Pitchfork" who are responsible for much of the hype surrounding Chief Keef did not report anything about this case, but the last mentioned soon removed the video from the shooting range, calling it a mistake, and the rapper is charged with gun possession based on that video.
After only ten days, a video of Lil Rees beating up a girl surfaced on the Internet, and the previously mentioned media did not publish anything about it either.
However, according to Andrew Barber, editor of "Fake Shore Drive", lately things are changing - the audience is slowly getting tired of the "drill" sound and increasingly turning to rappers like Chance the Rapper who offer a slightly more positive angle.
Even when he laments the Chicago violence in his lyrics, humor is felt: "Down here, it's easier to find a gun, than it is to find a parking spot... Everybody's dying in the summer, so pray to God for a little more spring" ("It's easier to find a gun here than a parking spot... Everyone dies in the summer, so pray to God that spring lasts a little longer").
"It's gotten out of hand. Every day there's someone new. And it's diluted the scene a little bit. Last year a lot of people were fans of that sound, and today those fans want to be rappers," says Barber.
Segregation in Chicago isn't just based on race—social groups are divided by gangs, school systems, even neighborhoods. Chicago hip hop reflects this division, and the city received a new brutal nickname in rap songs - The Apprentice. What does it mean when the most vital American hip hop right now comes from one of the deadliest addresses, where both victims and authors are equally young, poor and dark-skinned? Young Chicago rappers are responding to the ubiquitous and growing violence by challenging it, ignoring it, embracing it, exploiting it, running away from it - sometimes all at once. Each song is different, but each is an implicit declaration of survival
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