“I fill a void with the pen, feel the fear … shrill,” he raps on “Old Friend,” SICK!’s opener. A similar pall clouds SICK!, the fourth album from Earl Sweatshirt, the Cali rap scholar we first met in the gritty early Odd Future releases, whose records can sometimes feel allergic to straightforward narratives, preferring to speak in allegories that don’t easily give themselves away. Few Good Things, the new Saba album home to “Soldier,” takes all these worries and more into account as it maps the unique concerns of a young Black man unnerved by his own unexpected but hard-earned success and struggling to reconcile the difficulties of his inner-city Chicago upbringing with his recent move to Southern California.
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That time of year is always an emotional pressure cooker now, especially, the holidays aren’t just times to visit family but also to stress about communicable illness, crumbling infrastructure, and frayed nerves.
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A repository for hard-edged poses and gangsta fantasies, he’s a mediocre MC who, having been showered with praise for his antisocial immaturity, will likely never develop into anything better.Saba wrote the song “Soldier” during a trip back home to Chicago in November 2020, reconnecting with the compatriots the rhymer and vocalist came up with over the preceding decade, where collectives like his Pivot Gang, Savemoney (Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa), Only the Family (Lil Durk, King Von), and Glo Gang (Chief Keef, Fredo Santana) proved to the rest of the country, once again, what Windy City hip-hop was capable of. Unlike the kids in Odd Future, who possess a similar sinister nihilism, but also a winking detachment from it, Keef is coarse, cold, and lusterless, special only for his extreme embodiment of such qualities. But there’s also a joyless and dispiriting quality to the music, something soul crushing in how the most backward elements of rap culture have coalesced into one hardened teenager. The same goes for “I Don’t Like,” which serves as a neat summation of Keef’s harsh, basic aesthetic, effective despite its callous shell. Songs like “Hate Bein’ Sober,” which returns 50 Cent to the devilish charmer mode he always worked best in, are well-formed and catchy, buoyed by a platform of skittering snare hits, exhibiting the skillful production that’s helped dredge Keef up out of a rabble of similarly inclined voices. Even with some illuminating admissions of his age (including a rare unguarded moment on the title track, where he delights in finally being able to take care of his mom and his dog), Keef’s words never matter as much as the attitude behind them, which is persistently rancorous but also desperate. This tone of manic, furious immaturity persists throughout, whether he’s railing on “bitches” or “snitches” or detailing the outlines of boilerplate affluence to which he robotically aspires. Keef’s debut, Finally Rich, begins with a breathless tantrum that, with a slight change in subject matter, could reasonably be directed at a parent rather than the audience. Rather than standing out as a shortcoming, the assaultive primitivism of his music and persona are the icing on the cake, further proof of this legitimacy, which allows fans to hold him up as a rough-edged, art-brut curio. As artists like Rick Ross and Kanye West grow more fabulously cartoonish and detached from reailty, figures like Keef appear as counterweights, couched in a disquieting form of authenticity.
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The difference, of course, is that Keef has made it out, the result of a sort of Faustian bargain, wherein he’s left his old life behind, but can never shed its trappings.įellow Chicago rapper Rhymefest has called Keef “a spokesman for the Prison Industrial Complex.” It’s an apt assessment: Keef acts as one of the most extreme representatives of a dark offshoot of modern hip-hop, rappers who are less fulsome masters of ceremonies than slogan-spouting cogs in their own machines, which are more subtly parts of larger corporate machines. Yet aside from a strong collaborator in producer Young Chop, some mainstream connections, and an especially nihilistic presence, there’s little to separate Keef from thousands of other aspiring rappers roaming Chicago’s rougher neighborhoods.
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Notorious for his pro-gun ramblings, Twitter death threats, Instagram oral sex pics, and other forms of mischief, 17-year-old Chief Keef is also a quickly rising MC.