Street Beats: How Chicago Hip-Hop Mimics and Molds Chicago Culture
A piece from “Chicago Retold” — A project on the violence in Chicago.
by Brock Lockenour
It’s midnight at a small west-side Chicago bar, and it’s crowded. Snapbacks and tattoos stand stark under dim yellow lights, and the DJ behind the stage scratches his plates to change tracks. Heads bob to heavy beats, and an emcee stands in front of the circled crowd preparing to announce the next performer at the hip-hop open mic.
Up next to perform is 22-year-old Otto Collins, known onstage as Wavi. He’s got the dreads of Keef and the mustache of Chance, and stands a cool 5’10”. You couldn’t tell from his calm demeanor, but he’s been waiting all night to perform. There’s a problem, though: Wavi’s friend, also a rapper, showed up late to perform.
Wavi (far left) is called onstage to perform.
“Hold up, hold up, y’all, we got a problem,” the middle-aged emcee says loudly. The crowd hoots and hollers as the two amateur rappers approach the stage. The emcee points at Wavi’s friend.
“Now you was late, you know that,” he says through the mic, still pointing. The young man acknowledges by exaggerating and hanging his head, and the crowd laughs. “And you know we got a full list for the open mic. We can’t do both of ya.”
The music changes tracks again. The emcee ushers the two on stage.
“In order for us to decide, y’all gonna have to…” The man thinks for a moment. Someone in the crowd yells, “FIGHT!” Another echoes his call. The emcee is quiet, then chuckles. Looking at the two onstage, he says, “Play rock, paper, scissors. Okay, go!”
The crowd erupts. A table of middle-aged women in the back point forward and slap their table, while the rappers who previously performed stand near the stage, hopping in eager anticipation. Wavi turns to his friend, both of them smiling, and their fisted hands bob three times for the crowd.
Wavi (right) and his tardy friend (left) play to determine who performs.
They both play scissors, and the crowd gets even louder. Wavi shakes his head with a smile, and the two play again. This time they both play paper. Wavi’s friend throws his head back and pulls his hair, laughing. The emcee steps between them.
“Uh, I’m pretty sure y’all planned that,” he says, pausing for a moment to let the audience finish laughing. He then turns to Wavi. “You were on time, so you’re rapping. Go.”
The rowdy attendees clap, and the two friends hug before Wavi’s friend leaves the stage with the emcee. Wavi gives the DJ his music, and proceeds to perform while his friend actively cheers him on. The crowd is pleased with the music, bobbing heads and waving arms when prompted. Wavi finishes his track to applause, and as he returns to his bar stool he is bombarded with pats on the back and knuckle bumps. Even Wavi’s friend doesn’t leave empty-handed; during the performance the older emcee pulls him aside to give advice on booking gigs and crafting new music.
Wavi’s performance at the open mic that Monday night exemplifies the influential role hip-hop plays in the culture of urban Chicago.
Wavi performs.
In the inner city, music envelops and affects everyone. School kids tune in to the rappers who grew up on their street. SoundCloud hosts hundreds of rapper-hopefuls hailing from nearly all neighborhoods of the city. Record labels keep diligent watch of this ecosystem, trying to anticipate who could be the next big thing.
From the outside looking in, this underground industry might seem shallow, driven solely by ego and money and drugs — grimy and negative. Hip-hop, though, isn’t always the tough, criminal thing it’s thought to be. It is more complex, more nuanced.
“Hip-hop has struggle and victory embedded in the music,” said hip-hop artist CW Allen, who grew up in various ‘hoods across several big cities. “It’s inescapable and powerful.”
“Hip-hop has struggle and victory embedded in the music.”
- CW Allen
Rap is many things in Chicago. It can be, depending on the individual, an outlet to express anger, a ladder to the top of the social scene, or an escape door from hard times. In an age when anyone with internet access could get into the game, music has become the lottery of the street. These days, it seems like everyone is playing.
Very few individuals embody the hopes and dreams of Chicago rappers better than Keith Cozart. Commonly known by his rapper name Chief Keef, his rise to fame set a precedent in the rap industry and became the aspiration of hundreds of local rappers. No understanding of Chicago’s current hip-hop landscape is complete without Keef’s story. Though he signed with Interscope in 2012, his story begins a year earlier.
It was noon on a chilly Friday in early December. The 6100 block of South Indiana Avenue was quiet, its churches and liquor stores uniformly normal that day.
Then, gunshots disrupted the silence. Police responded, finding only a lanky 16-year-old with dreads exiting his grandmother’s house. When stopped by the cops, Keef dropped the jacket he held in one hand to reveal a gun in the other, which he promptly aimed at the officers.
Keef didn’t pull the trigger, but the resulting chase earned him a house-arrest sentence, which would actually prove to be a golden opportunity for the rapper-wannabe.
Although he had already earned modest recognition among his fellow high school-age rappers, many in Chicago did not know Keef, and his influence had not spread past those steeped in the underground rap scene. He, like others before and after, wanted more.
Keef invested his newly-found free time in shooting music videos. “I don’t Like” was by far the most popular, and became a minor viral hit within Chicago’s rap scene. The video features Keef and his gang in a house, smoking and waving their guns as Keef raps about his distaste for other gangs.
Keef’s story might have fizzled out after this brief fifteen minutes of fame — but then a miracle happened.
Or, more accurately, Kanye West happened.
West, perhaps the premiere rapper hailing from Chicago, noticed “I don’t Like,” liked the track and remixed the song. West’s massive audience — his Twitter alone is followed by over 27 million people and his albums have sold a whopping 80 million copies — suddenly became Keef’s, and the local Chicago kid was heard by millions.
Overnight, Keef, a 16-year-old kid on house arrest, was thrust into the worldwide spotlight.
Later that year, Keef struck a deal with Interscope Records, and quickly continued to grow in prominence. While with Interscope, he signed exclusive shoe deals, was interviewed by high-profile magazines like Rolling Stone, and even performed at Lollapalooza.
Chief Keef is the Cinderella story of Englewood. Money, girls, respect, a way out of poverty — Keef seemed to have it all, and his impact on the Chicago scene is still felt six years later.
Chief Keef is the Cinderella story of Englewood. Keef seemed to have it all, and his impact on Chicago is still felt six years later.
“Chief Keef put Chicago back on the music scene,” Wavi said. “Yeah, his message was f—ed up, but it put Chicago back on the music scene.”
That message is where the controversy rears its head.
Drill rap wasn’t always as popular as it is today, but with the explosion of Chief Keef’s “I don’t Like,” the uniquely Chicago style of hip-hop was thrust into the mainstream conscious.
Organically born alongside the rise of accessible computer-generated music, drill rap typically features heavy percussion beats and usually depends on a basic loop. It is the kind of track that could be made on a Mac outfitted with GarageBand. The lyrics, which commonly feature hyper-local accents and slang, are the controversial part.
“Talkin’ out his neck, pistol to his throat
Blow this m—er f — er, he gone choke
On the ground, on the floor
Someone pick him up, take him to the morgue
I’m ridin’ through New York
Finna go and shoot New Jersey up
Tryna take my chain, I ain’t goin’
We gon’ come and blow New Jersey up”“Faneto” -Chief Keef (2014)
Allen pointed out that many examples of Chicago drill rap embed gang culture into the music, with call-out signs, gang names, and references to specific gang happenings. Shootings, arrests, deaths, and deals become drill language lingo.
In a profile on the hip-hop landscape, The New York Times wrote, “With rare exception this music is unmediated and raw and without bright spots, focused on anger and violence.”
The desire to get noticed is so strong among young rapper-wannabes that Englewood local Del Shane believes it’s even contributed to the increase in violence in recent years.
“Everybody wants to get noticed like Chief, so they all go an’ try to be as bad as they can, then they talk about it on social media,” he said.
In a radio interview shortly after Keef signed with Interscope, Lupe Fiasco, (a Chicago-born rapper who became famous earlier than Keef), said, “The murder rate in Chicago is skyrocketing and you see who’s doing it and perpetrating it. They all look like Chief Keef.”
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel found the content of Keef’s music to be so incendiary that he shut down a concert where Keef was set to appear in hologram form. When the concert moved to nearby Indiana, the neighboring police force shut it down midway. In defense of the shut down, Emanuel’s administration cited violent content and a ‘significant public safety risk’ as reason.
Most fans of the genre aren’t fazed by a parental advisory sticker — the hyper-locality of the music oftentimes matters more than the explicit content. For the teens of Englewood, hip-hop is embedded with cultural identity.
“All the Chicago rappers grew up in the areas where we live,” said Monte, a teen from Englewood. “That’s why we can relate to them.” Monte held up his iPhone to show album artwork of a man smoking a joint while holding a gun in one hand and pills in the other. “He lives over on 71st.”
“All the Chicago rappers grew up in the areas where we live. That’s why we can relate to them.”
- Monte
A common thread among hip-hop lovers is a desire to belong, to fit in somewhere. Most of the time, hearing a rapper who grew up in the same neighborhood describe “raw” life means there is someone out there who understands.
Back at the open mic, where Wavi and another friend of his stepped outside after performing, Wavi lit a cigarette and talked about his past inspiration for starting music.
“I was in a deep-a — state of depression,” he said between puffs. “So I had to sit down and think about what I was feeling and write from there.”
KiDd Prince (left) and Wavi (right) take a smoke break outside the open-mic event.
KiDd Prince, a taller, somewhat thicker young man with less flashy hair concealed by a beanie, nodded in agreement.
“I went through a big depression in high school,” KiDd said, “and that was when I really got into making music. It was the only way I had to express what I felt. Like things I couldn’t just talk to other people about, I could put into music. It’s a passion. It’s my gospel.”
Wavi tossed the cigarette to the cement; orange sparks bounced off the pavement.
“In our community,” he said of Woodlawn, “there’s not too much s— to get into, so that’s why we try to encourage kids like, ‘Ya’ll got frustrations? Just put that s— in music.’”
Indeed, Wavi, KiDd and his crew have grand ambitions to use hip-hop positively in the city of Chicago, citing recent acts like Chance the Rapper as inspiration.
“We just started A Media Nation, a media collective, and we plan to travel around Chicago and host open mics to raise money for community centers.” KiDd said. He and his friends began a collaborative group (which has been rebranded ‘Tree House Productions’) to help inspire and equip up-and-coming artists who need help in the process. Music production, recording, and album art are just a few services they offer.
Wavi nodded in agreement. “What we do is we try to be positive. We don’t talk about drill s — or none of that.”
KiDd pushed off from the brick wall he had been leaning against and adjusts his glasses meticulously. “Fame only goes so far… what are you doing to promote change? Everybody wants the fame and riches, but I want change. How does becoming famous create change? Are you helping your city? Are you helping out the next generation after you?”
“Fame only goes so far… what are you doing to promote change? Everybody wants the fame and riches, but I want change. How does becoming famous create change? Are you helping your city? Are you helping out the next generation after you?”
- KiDd Prince
That consciousness isn’t isolated to KiDd Prince and Wavi’s collective — it’s been a trend in the hip-hop world as of late. Chance the Rapper is perhaps the tantamount example of this mindset, a SouthSide local who invites the Chicago Children’s Choir to feature alongside himself and Kanye West.
Chance the Rapper
The three-time Grammy-winning rapper does not deny the difficulty of life in the city, but holds a decidedly more positive outlook on its future — he knows the eyes of the industry and of young children in Chicago are on him with every track.
“This is for the kids of the king of all kings,” he says in “All We Got.”
With mainstream names like Chance the Rapper and grassroots acts like Wavi and KiDd Prince promoting the same message, the coming years may see a new light cast on the hip-hop scene in Chicago, shedding perceptions of surface-level self-promotion and gratuitous drug indulgence for the more nuanced, expressive art form Chicagoans currently play on loop.