Chief Keef: Chicago’s Most Promising Anti-Hero

keef 2Cozart has actively invited and engaged controversy on his rise to fame thanks to his violent and anarchic songs. On his breakout hit, “I Don’t Like,” he boasts that he’s “pistol toting and I’m shooting on sight” and “I done got indicted selling all white.” The backlash against Cozart reached new heights after his flippant and reckless (alleged) response to the death of 18-year-old Joseph “Lil JoJo” Coleman, who was gunned down earlier this month while riding double on a bike with a friend on 69th and Princeton. This was hours after Coleman publicized his whereabouts on Twitter—and months after he released “3hunna K,” a track that disses Cozart and his GBE crew. The next day, a series of tweets in response to Coleman’s tragic demise showed up on Cozart’s feed (he claims he didn’t type them), sparking a police investigation into a possible connection between Cozart’s crew and Coleman’s death, jump-starting rumors of an intense rivalry between the pair, raising speculation that Interscope might drop Cozart, and launching a new wave of anti-Cozart fervor. One of the tweets on Cozart’s feed particularly captured the public’s attention: “Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted to Be Jus Like Us #LMAO.”

Cozart is now a radioactive figure whose name draws vitriol from across the country. It’s easy to find angry rap fans attacking Cozart on social media sites. One observer bluntly tweeted, “Chief Keef is whack and he should dead kill himself.” About.com hip-hop writer Henry Adaso put it more vividly when he called Cozart “garbage wrapped in human skin.”

Sure, it’s easy to find Cozart’s music objectionable, and detractors have asserted that his cold, nihilistic persona is poisonous to the youth of America, particularly those who live in areas where violence is rampant. But those perspectives lose sight of the fact that Chief Keef is actually good for Chicago.

Yes, Cozart’s songs are cruel and treacherous, but so are the Chicago streets that inspired them. A loyal legion of young fans from the city’s most blighted neighborhoods took to him long before Kanye West and Interscope came calling. This time last year Cozart’s name didn’t register outside of the south side, but he was a superstar to the thousands of Chicago Public Schools students who listened to him on YouTube. Tremaine “Tree” Johnson, a 28-year-old rapper who lives in Englewood, works outside the drill scene—the locally grown, apocalyptic spin on the gangster-style trap music that Cozart and company are known for—but he understands why the sound is popular among south-side teens. “He looks like us, he sounds like us, and his lingo is what we say and how we talk,” Johnson says.

It’s important to recognize that Cozart resonates with a large, young portion of the city if there’s any hope to understand—or maybe even overcome—the issues plaguing those parts of the city (and, by extension, Chicago as a whole). To many Chicagoans, Cozart is a peer who has suffered through the troubling systemic issues that have crippled entire neighborhoods. These kids see themselves in Cozart’s imagery—that’s obvious even to outsiders. Unfortunately, rather than trying to understand those who connect with Cozart’s music, many Chicagoans are pointing fingers—and the divisiveness appears to be getting worse. Twitter has become a hotbed of ignorant comments about Cozart’s fans, fueled by stereotypes about class and poverty. For example: “Chief Keef makes music for niggas who struggle to read out loud in class.”

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