this guy used to write for various rap mags so he cant be written off as a hipster...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/arts/music/chicago-hip-hops-raw-burst-of-change.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1359119036-4+QwmThh92ADi+NP8nWdiA

Chicago Hip-Hop’s Raw Burst of Change
By JON CARAMANICA

THE defining document of hip-hop’s current evolutionary state isn’t a song, or a music video or a concert. Years from now cultural archaeologists will do much better to look back over the Twitter account of the 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who’s been exploding, or imploding, depending on how you look at it, one short burst of text at a time.

Last month Lil JoJo, an aspiring rapper who had a feud with Chief Keef, was murdered, and afterward a message that appeared to be mocking his death was posted on Chief Keef’s Twitter account. Amid an ensuing outcry, he later suggested that his account had been hacked and proceeded to fill it up with a stream of uplifting aphorisms that were the opposite of his usual boasts, as if he had actually been hacked, but by Oprah Winfrey or Joel Osteen.

Around the same time Chief Keef, who has spent much of this year under house arrest because of gun charges, threatened the older Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, who in a fit of reckoning the previous week expressed grievous concerns about the younger rapper’s nihilistic music. Keef threatened on Twitter to “smack him like da lil bitch he is.” Again, after an outcry, he said his account had been hacked. Finally, also last month, Chief Keef was relieved of his Instagram account after posting, also to Twitter, a photo of himself receiving oral sex from a woman.

By any measure, this is raw, difficult-to-consume stuff. That it’s coming from one of hip-hop’s most promising young stars newly signed to a major label makes it unusually scandalous. But what’s most surprising about the situation is that it highlights the vast gap between Chief Keef and the rest of hip-hop, at least its mainstream, popular incarnation.

This atavistic behavior highlights a sea change long in the making. Hip-hop has long been associated with unvarnished truth, both by insiders looking to traffic in supposed authenticity and shock value and by critics looking to keep it at arm’s length from polite society. But that’s an outmoded value in contemporary hip-hop, which skews heavily toward the triumphant, the fantastical and the unattainable — Drake and 2 Chainz talking about stealing girlfriends, Rick Ross boasting about wealth and so on. No one’s struggling, everyone’s celebrating.

What’s notable about Chief Keef and much of the Chicago music scene that he’s come to symbolize — known locally as drill music — is how those elements are all but absent. With rare exception this music is unmediated and raw and without bright spots, focused on anger and violence. The instinct is to call this tough, unforgiving and concrete-hard music joyless, but in truth it’s exuberant in its darkness. Most of its practitioners are young and coming into their creative own against a backdrop of outrageous violence in Chicago, particularly among young people — dozens of teenagers have been killed in Chicago this year — and often related to gangs. (There’s a long history of overlap between Chicago’s gangs and Chicago’s rap.) That their music is a symphony of ill-tempered threats shouldn’t be a surprise.

Sure, plenty of rap is like this, but rarely, in this era of hip-hop’s full assimilation into the mainstream, does it attract much attention. It’s a surprise that Chief Keef is beginning to gain traction because there’s strikingly little room for what he does in the hip-hop mainstream, which is preoccupied with success and, probably even more impossible for him, melody. Waka Flocka Flame, another rapper who shouts more than raps, and who largely eschews the pop-oriented songwriting that’s now a permanent part of the genre, is his only real peer among current rap stars, and he’s an outlier too.

Chief Keef serves as a reminder of what’s been whitewashed out of the hip-hop mainstream: a sense of the struggle bedeviling the communities that produce much of the music. For someone whose primary exposure to hip-hop comes from terrestrial radio or BET, and whose idea of a mainstream hip-hop star is Drake, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne or even Rick Ross, who turned darker on his most recent album, “God Forgives, I Don’t,” the single-minded roughness of Chief Keef’s music would be almost wholly foreign.

Certainly if he sticks around long enough and becomes even a little successful, the subject matter of his music will change. But for now he’s becoming known for the sort of music that rappers tend to make early in their career, when few people are paying attention. After a long climb that began with a YouTube groundswell, “I Don’t Like,” the collaboration with Lil Reese that’s the defining document of the current Chicago sound — stark, violent, happily unforgiving — has now spent a few months on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop singles chart.

In the Top 50 of the most recent incarnation of that chart not one other song deals directly with the circumstances that Keef and Reese rap about. Mostly the competition is preoccupied with love and seduction and good times that help bury older, more scarring memories. It’s possible the Keef antagonist Lupe Fiasco will disrupt this homogeneity in coming weeks. He just released “Food & Liquor II: The Great American Rap Album Pt. 1” (1st & 15th/Atlantic), a work that, for all its thematic heavy-handedness, at least does not ignore poverty or the American underclass. Lupe Fiasco is a stern and didactic teacher, but it’s arguable that Chief Keef’s music is far better at ringing warning bells.

The last real rap star to make thuggery such a major part of his early-career persona was 50 Cent, during his pre-“In Da Club”-breakthrough mixtape days a decade ago. But even though 50 Cent kept that aura as a central part of his personality, he tempered it from the moment he signed his major-label deal, mixing it in with more female-friendly fare. Fear went only so far as an aesthetic. After Chief Keef’s outrageous stretch on Twitter, 50 Cent reached out to him, also over Twitter, perhaps to offer cautionary tales or maybe to talk strategy.

At the moment Chicago appears to be spilling over with talent, but the fact is plenty of cities are spilling over with talent. Not every city has a spotlight to squander, though.

Chief Keef is the best known of the young generation of Chicago rappers, but he’s not singular. His crew, GBE (Glory Boyz Entertainment), includes Lil Reese and Fredo Santana among others. Lil Reese’s recent mixtape “Don’t Like” is one of the best releases to come from the scene, and Fredo Santana just released a spooky mixtape, “It’s a Scary Site.” A handful of young female rappers balance out the city’s tough heart, including Katie Got Bandz and Sasha Go Hard. Last month Sasha Go Hard performed at Santos Party House with a set that was short, sweet, and tentative — before that trip to New York she’d never been on a plane. Though the young women of Chicago’s drill scene can be as rowdy as their male counterparts, they’re also more diverse in subject matter and point to a possible way forward.

In large part, though, much of the music coming from this world has followed a straightforward template: beats by Young Chop or DJ Kenn, a video by D Gainz. What has set the city apart is its visibility on the Internet. In recent years the city’s hip-hop has been documented and boosted on blogs like Fake Shore Drive and So Many Shrimp, giving it an Internet footprint that’s exponentially broader than its accessibility and popularity in other media. Its rise also reflects an Internet hive mind that has increasingly focused attention on the grittiest corners, the modern version of Alan Lomax’s field recordings.

This sort of outlet wasn’t around in the mid-1990s; otherwise standard-bearing Chicago acts like Crucial Conflict and Do or Die might have been more than regional curios. Now the city is experiencing a small windfall of major label signings — Chief Keef to Interscope, King Louie (now King L) to Epic, Lil Reese and Lil Durk to Def Jam. For a city that despite producing the occasional breakout star like Common or Twista, and, of course, Kanye West, has never had a strong hip-hop infrastructure, this is a startling turn of events.

But it’s Chief Keef’s shoulders on which the lion’s share of the burden falls. He doesn’t make it easy. In interviews he comes off as uninterested or outright dull. For his New York live debut in June, he played a dead-eyed, chaotic set at S.O.B.’s that was part revelation but more consternation. Pitchfork dimwittedly chose to interview him at a gun range; following the Lil Jojo murder, it removed the interview from its Web site and apologized.

It’s mostly on the Internet where Chief Keef is very much alive; he’s been maintaining a robust social media presence throughout the last few months of his ascent. But the one place he’s been largely quiet is in his music, which has slowed to a trickle of late. Now that he has a larger audience to answer to, maybe he’s realized there’s a gap between the rapper he is and the rapper he may have to become.