He raps, for bars and bars at a time, in a way that he hasn’t seemed interested in for awhile, and in a way that rap fans who feel reflexively derisive about him probably aren't used to. His voice is mixed higher and clearer there is less AutoTune applied to his voice, fewer glottal non-verbal performances. These sorts of decisions are often what keep skeptical rap fans at an arm’s length from Keef, but Sorry 4 the Weight is the least abstracted thing he’s released in a long while. He breaks words up over bars, so that words like "money" get rendered as two molten lumps, "mah" and "nah", strewn across different beats.
CHIEF KEEF BEST SONGS 2015 FULL
His cadences have strange emphases everywhere, and the effect is similar to hearing someone clumping around a floor above you wearing a full leg cast. This is where the sneaky complexity of Keef’s music comes in: He’s a formal innovator, one who finds lots of ways for his muttering vocals to mesh with the contrary moving lines of his music. On "What Up", produced by Keef himself, circular bongos pulse against a snare roll, and Keef weaves a third pattern in between them, so that there are at least six different permutations of rhythms to nod your head to. It’s both busy and dinky, a hard chunk of sound that separates into a writhing pile of earworms when poked.Ĭongas and bongos, clattering busily around the edges of the music, are the most noticeable new addition on Sorry 4 the Weight. The sounds all line up along the same plane, so it all reaches your ear in a trebly tangle of mid-frequencies. The basic stuff of the sound comes from tinny MIDI patches arguing with each other in squiggly bursts, while drums boom and rattle. And that sound has settled into something that feels both formally fixed and malleable, a sort of sonic Silly Putty that can be stretched and stamped in any direction. The vagueness of authorship may be intentional, a way of retaining ownership over a house sound.
Individual names are subsumed into the collective, but members include Hurtboy AG, 12 Hunna, DP Beats, and Keef himself. The tracks on Sorry 4 the Weight are credited to simply GGP, or Glo Gang Productions. On Sorry 4 the Weight, he emerges as something new: A calm, poised, self-sufficient auteur, a production machine of Keef Music. It was occasionally indistinguishable from flailing. It was a fascinating reinvention, forged away from the glare of major labels, in the soup of YouTube and Audiomack plays. On Back From the Dead 2 and Nobody, he drowned his voice in processing like someone bent on murdering their personality through technology. He uploaded songs to his SoundCloud, like "Wait", that felt too weird to include on any official releases. After Interscope released Finally Rich, the Chicago rapper underwent serious, uh, glowing pains, during which his already-dark music took a surreal, infernal turn. Dropped last week with a title punning on Lil Wayne’s recent release, the tape feels like an emergence, in a way, from Keef’s wilderness period. He repeats this ear-sticking phrase, "glowed up", on the first track of his latest mixtape, Sorry 4 the Weight.