(Frechette kept it pretty trill to the end: Eventually he robbed a bank while allegedly tripping on LSD and died in a prison weight-room accident in 1975.) Maybe it’s because he’s 16, but you can totally believe Keef doesn’t like the shit he doesn’t like as much as he claims not to, and that, like Frechette’s character, he’s willing to die, but not of boredom. The person who discovered Mark Frechette, the Boston commune dweller and non-actor who ended up playing the doomed college radical in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point, is said to have sold Frechette to Antonioni by saying, simply and excitedly, “He’s 20 and he hates!” Minus four years, that’s Chief Keef on “I Don’t Like,” his best single to date and this year’s best punk song, a litany of objections so sneeringly and triumphantly resentful that I want to travel back in time and kick a hole in the Sheetrock of my childhood bedroom whenever it comes on. So did the detail that Keef has managed to blow up despite still being under house arrest at his grandmother’s home, which is also the kind of hook that gets the attention of editors at outlets not normally known for commissioning long-form profiles of newish rappers (call it the Earl Sweatshirt Exemption). Keef was big among local high school kids, but he seemed to have no connections whatsoever, even on the regional level in a hip-hop moment where even upstart blog-rap types like A$AP Rocky seem to arrive pre-assimilated, with label/media/fashion cosigns in place, that appearance of total aesthetic purity goes a long way. Earlier this year, he became a viral fascination after a video of a very, very excited young man in a wood-paneled rec room celebrating Keef’s release from jail on weapons charges became a hit on. A question on the occasion of the 13th or 14th time I’ve listened to Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like (Remix)” today: Is anybody better at co-optation through collaboration than Kanye West?Ĭhief Keef is a previously superunknown, dreadlocked 16-year-old rapper from Chicago’s South Side.

Chief keef 3hunna producer