When Interscope signed Chief Keef, the 17 year-old rapper from Chicago whose music often reflects the violence and paranoia of his hometown, people were kinda miffed. The conventional wisdom said this was a boneheaded move, that this kid signing was a result of Interscope trying to find their own hot young rapper who got famous because of the internet, just like Sony had the Odd Future kids and RCA had A$AP Rocky. Chief Keef played a show in New York City and it was pretty meh, a twenty-minute affair that involved him playing “I Don’t Like,” as well as his version of the remix and him rapping with lots of his friends around him, wearing gigantic sunglasses as if they were a security blanket. Then there was the whole thing about his legal woes, talk of which have in the past few weeks seemingly evaporated. Are they still a thing? They seem like they’re a thing. He’s got a court date on November 20th, at least.
Anyways, Chief Keef’s been on a fucking roll lately. Between recent tracks “Love Sosa,” “Dat Loud” and “Kobe,” the video for which was released today (stream it below), there’s reason to believe Keef’s debut album, entitled Finally Rich and due out December 18th, might be something legitimately special. This would be awesome, not only because the world needs all the good music it can get, but also because it’s fun to prove the haters wrong. If you check the album’s tracklisting, you’ll see that he’s got features from French Montana, Rick Ross, 50 Cent, Wiz Khalifa and Young Jeezy, so it’s pretty evident that Interscope’s trying to stack the deck for Keef. Anyways, the video’s below. “Kobe” seems like one singles that’s calculated to hit in lots of different markets (read: they want it to get played on the radio in L.A., Baton Rouge and New York despite there are vastly different types of rap fan in each town), and they filmed the video in front of the Staples Center so the Lakers are probably going to play the song during warm-ups.