(“Why can’t he just be a role model and put the guns down?” was a party line heard again and again that summer, a profound misunderstanding of not just the city’s structural realities but the value of art.) By the time his major-label debut dropped in December 2012, the conversation around the teenager had become so frenzied and polarized that it felt like we’d lost the thread of what had made Keef so popular to begin with. Critics called his early mixtapes dumbed-down, hyper-repetitive, artless, even suggesting they glamorized the violence that had plagued Chicago for decades. Still, to say the conversation around Keef, on both a local and national scale, was divided is to put it mildly. When Keef finally appeared on stage, flanked by about 50 of his closest friends, the room went electric when he performed “I Don’t Like,” it felt like history was being made. (Still on house arrest at his grandma’s, he’d gotten permission from the Chicago Police Department to perform that night – the last time the CPD would treat the rapper with anything remotely resembling empathy.) Midway through the show, the paranoid fire department locked down the venue, trapping everyone inside. One of the best rap shows I’ve ever witnessed was in the spring of 2012, at the now-shuttered Congress Theater technically, the night was headlined by Meek Mill, but for all practical purposes, it was a showcase for local rappers whose buzz had become deafening: King Louie, Lil Durk, Lil Reese, Fredo Santana, and most of all, Chief Keef, the dread-headed, Gucci-belted 17-year-old rapper who’d arrived in an ankle monitor.
But things were happening, and you could feel it. One day, my grandchildren will roll their eyes as I launch into my 300th re-telling of what it was like to be alive in Chicago in 2012.
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