Album Of The Week: Chief Keef Finally Rich

If you're willing to publicly admit to enjoying Chief Keef's music, you're going to have to deal with a few uncomfortable realities. For one thing, he certainly presents himself to the world as a pretty loathsome human being: Pointing guns at cops, laughing on Twitter over a teenager's death, annoying everyone he works with when he no-shows his own video shoots. Of course, there's context there. For one thing, he's 17, and every 17-year-old is a loathsome human being. (Sorry, 17-year-olds, but you know it's true.) And for another, he comes from a place so cold and merciless and utterly devoid of hope that his general disposition makes a lot of sense. David Drake's long and excellent Complex piece on the rapper spells it all out: This is someone now being paid millions of dollars to rap about his block-to-block neighborhood turf disputes on a massively hyped album, and who now has to worry about the shifting power dynamic between himself and the legitimately terrifying people who put him in a position to succeed. How is a teenager supposed to make any sense of any of this? He isn't. Instead, he retreats into a weed-cloud of chaos, because that's where he's most comfortable, and he treats any outsiders as potential hostiles, because maybe they are. The good news is this: You do not have to hang out with Chief Keef. It doesn't matter if you like him. And if you're wringing your hands at his ascent, you're depriving yourself of the brutally effective hunk of thud-rap that he's released into the world today. Don't do that.