This Is My Rifle: EddieFTW vs. Jason James, “The Great Chief Keef Debate” Posted by Jason James on 09/12/12 | Filed under This Is My Rifle, Opinion, Chief Keef

A Note From Nathan S: "This Is My Rifle" creator Jason James is a great writer, EddieFTW is a great writer, so when the two pitched the idea of doing a joint article centered around the Chief Keef debate, I was on it like Rick Ross on a plate of crab legs. No need for further delay, let's get right into it...

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EddieFTW :

I don’t like weak punk ass music. If I hear some violent rap music about drugs and guns, I prefer the beats are amazing and the lyrics are tight. And I prefer that the person rapping has actually done some or all of what he is rapping. This might not be the most popular of opinions, but I'm not going to be riding in the car listening to the fucking police or some snitch rapper talk about bagging up work with an AK on the kitchen table. Pidd.

Sure we can say “its just music!” or “You realize that Al Pacino isn’t actually a member of the mob” but for me to enjoy the music, I want to believe what you're saying. Is violence cool? You're goddamn right it is. Chicago is on top of the music industry right now because of the ultra violent music that is being pushed to the forefront by the media. And let's be perfectly clear. It wouldn't be pushed if it didn’t get page views and ad dollars.

But when Freddie Gibbs was beating up A&R’s and the music industry hated him (and a lot of the industry still does), nobody was paying attention. When he was on Carson Daly throwing up gang signs, nobody stopped him. Most people are scared to say anything to his face. Ask Yung Berg if he wants to be in the same room as him. But once Gibbs blew up and people saw Charon, EVERYONE started scoping Chicago rappers (sidenote: this same phenomenon was seen during the Grunge era when Nirvana blew up). One person on twitter said that FakeShoreDrive turned into a Chicago Keef chronicles website. And now the people holding the Midwest back are doing everything they can to showcase the best and worst of the area. But Chicago is a violent place, regardless of what Gangsta Grillz mixtape drops.

The Midwest is full of gangsters, from Detroit to Gary to St Louis and back. And A LOT of them are dressed in suits and have jobs in government. This is where I was born and raised. So when I'm driving around listening to Black and Brown and I get into a car chase with 2 cars full of Mexicans I've never seen before... Well let's just say that I'm not going to pay someone to lie to me. Not because it's cool, but because it's real life. And in real life, the CPD is going out of their way to block Chief Keef and LEP Bogus Boys (among others) from performing their gangster rap music in Chicago. But the Chicago Police Department’s general incompetence protecting the people of Chicago from violence, and their strategy of Balkanization towards street gangs, has created an environment where they are unable to slow or stem the violence in the city, as well as remove all the centralized structures which used to exist. We have a gang environment that is so fractured, that the police openly admit they don’t know who is who. And the young ones just run around without any OG's to advise them or answer them.

At the same time that the Sun Times is telling people that “Hip Hop is not the enemy” they are running anti-gun/anti-gang articles that are transparently manufactured and widely considered to be fake stories. They are running full-page stories called, “Chicago Rap Advisory: Deadly Content”. It's very easy for me, a full-grown middle class adult to become disillusioned. When the people from the Midwest are the ones doing the most to tear it down, I'm not at all surprised that the inner city is disillusioned. There is no ministry in hell.

One day I'm going to die: fact. Death comes for us all. And there is no stopping it. If I'm lucky it will be after a long happy life from natural causes. If I'm unlucky it will be a short life, and horribly violent. Violence is a fact of life. By all accounts from sociology researchers, the world is in a remarkably peaceful epoch. And the world is still incredibly violent. I'm lucky to live in Chicago. Not Syria. Not Kenya. Not Yemen but “ChIraq”. That is one of the new terms that become popular over the last few years.

Yes, Chicago is a violent American city. But it is not Iraq. I've argued in other places that the US should count itself as lucky that it has only lost thousand lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they could have lost a lot more. And it is still struggling with the impact of the violence on their fighting force, with suicides accounting for a staggering portion of the fallen service men and women. As far as I know, NOBODY has spent 2 years in Chicago and then killed themselves four years later because they couldn't deal with the strain of their time. How we describe our city, and the ways we attempt to understand the problems we face, frame the way that we attempt to fix them. When we call it “ChIraq” we overstate the violence of the city and understate the violence of that country. And from someone whose family raised El Chapo, let me be clear: Chief Keef is not Z-40. Nobody in Chicago is.

Our problems here need to be viewed objectively. Not by blaming WSHH or Pitchfork or Keef or the parents or the kids. In areas of the city that is literally cut throat, teenagers who are on YouTube with guns threatening each other are victims as much as the guilty parties. Those kids were failed for years or decades before they ever hit the record button. Social networks reflect the society that we live in, the same way that the music does. Lil JoJo's mother is a victim here. His friends are victims. Going to war against another gang and winning is only slightly better than going to war and losing. The best I can do is try to stay alive and lead the folks I know in the right directions. The same as JoJo's mother was trying to do. Lupe Fiasco said "Gotta make it home, cuz you might not make it home."

Jason James

Since the late 1980’s Hip Hop has walked a fine line between entertainment and exploitation. When artists like N.W.A. and Ice-T emerged onto the radar and Gangster Rap became a dominant force within the culture, we began to ask the question, “how far is too far?”. As a result of this debate, Hip Hop was divided between opinions. On one side there were those who believed in the “keep it real” mantra- a phrase that suggests artists should live the lyrics that they write. On the other side there were those who backed the “it’s only entertainment” argument- an expression used to explain away the lack of real life experience that most of the artists involved in Gangster Rap actually had.

But what both sides of the discussion could agree on was the brash honesty exhibited by this new version of the art form. As ugly or violent as the lyrics were, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, Eazy-E, Yella and, most notably, Ice Cube were also underlining a problem that had been bubbling in South Central Los Angeles for over 20 years and they were brining awareness to a set of issues that had been largely ignored by the public prior to their immersion into the mainstream. The music was obscene but at the same time was thick with deep political and social messages which highlighted the narrative. Whether these artists were “keeping it real” or were merely providing entertainment, they opened the door to a subject that was uncomfortable for Middle America to examine and pressured them to acknowledge it.

To say that Chief Keef travels along the same vein as the gangster rappers that came before him is, in my opinion, a gross over-statement. Keef is, for all intents and purposes, the very definition of “keeping it real”- a 17 year old kid with multiple charges for firearm possession and various other violent crimes from a city that boasts over 350 homicides this year alone. However, the difference between him and an artist like Ice-T is that he does not exemplify the reasoning behind his actions, he is instead the poster boy for a generation of youth so disconnected and out of control that the murder of another human being is not just something that is accepted, but is encouraged.

Truth be told, I do not believe that Chief Keef is to blame for this. As he demonstrated on his twitter page after the murder of rival rapper Lil JoJo, he is in fact still a child. He does not yet have a bearing on what it means to live; therefore he does not understand the extreme nature of death. Couple this with his exposure to the severe violence that has ensnared the city of Chicago and his appreciation for life becomes minimal, if there is any at all.

So who is to blame for the Chief Keef phenomenon and the millions of children like him?

The greatest villain in this scenario is by far Interscope Records, and companies like them, who have absolutely no problem exploiting this culture of violence and death for profit. At no point have they made any attempt to take on the responsibility of explaining who Chief Keef is or where he comes from. If anything, they have worked to push the image of Keef into the collective consciousness as something that is to be celebrated rather than analyzed. It is in their best interest to portray Keef as a teenage monster because once we see him for what he really is, a troubled youth, we come to understand the horrific circumstances this generation is genuinely faced with.

The lesser evil in the Chief Keef design is the listeners. We have come into an age where everything and everyone is accessible at all times; where Hip Hop music and it’s artists are disposable and the figures who reside at the top of the culture must become increasingly outrageous in order to compete with one another for the excessively shortened attention span of the buying public. Because of this, each artist has to have a story more nefarious than the next, a constant cycle of rappers fighting in a battle of shocking claims and brazen bravado instead of placing their focus on what’s truly important- the music. With every flagrant statement another million views get tacked onto their YouTube videos and more fans are made. The dividing line between real and entertainment has been blurred and so Rick Ross gives way to Chief Keef and so on and so forth. The unfortunate part about this is that Rick Ross (the rapper) is a fabricated identity stolen from a real person and Chief Keef is real. He is terrifyingly, and sadddeningly, real. To the public though, there is no distinctness between the two.

If there is a silver lining to this topic, it’s that we’re debating it. I sincerely hope that Chief Keef takes his success, and as he gets older, uses it to influence those who follow him to strive for better. To listen to somebody talk about violent acts on record is one thing, but in cities like Chicago it’s a harsh reality. Perhaps we can now set our sights on what is causing our society to fall apart at the seams and find a way to pull these communities out of the suffocating poverty that gives birth to thousands of Chief Keefs every single day

(Jason James is an artist, freelance columnist and writer for RefinedHype.com. You can listen/download his most recent album, "Marvelous World Of Color", here and you can contact him here and here.)

See Also: This Is My Rifle: They Say They Want a Revolution