At just 28, Chief Keef has churned out dozens of projects in nearly as many different styles. His influence can be felt from rap’s top rung like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert to the toasted digital landscapes of new-age acolytes like Xaviersobased and Devstacks. He’s one of the pioneers of the Chicago drill sound, and while there have been peaks and valleys—being a volume shooter often comes at the expense of a spotless track record—he’s never lost the thrilling “Lex Luger and Brick Squad dipped in the Chicago River” quality he’s been honing since the “Faneto” days. Even when he’d miss, the boldness of his experiments kept heads intrigued.One of those peaks was 2013’s Almighty So, a mixtape where Keef and a slew of producers melded drill with the chirpy cloud-rap-adjacent aesthetic that would soon populate SoundCloud. Street rappers weren’t spitting over production like Yung Lan’s “Ape Shit” or Abe Beats’ “Young Rambos” back then, and that adventurousness, coupled with bars comparing guns to dildos, turned Almighty So into a cult classic among fans and slightly younger contemporaries. Between arrests, label disputes, and being blacklisted from shows in his home city (until recently), Keef’s been through a lot on and off the mic over the last decade. Through it all, a sequel to Almighty So, first announced in 2018, has lingered in the margins. Despite Keef’s reservations about being hooked on drugs during that era, it garnered the kind of mythic status usually reserved for alt-rap team-ups and AAA albums that never were. But Almighty So 2 is real, as vibrant and busy and flippant as anything Keef’s ever made, a capstone that brings the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future.What stands out most about Almighty So 2 is just how different it is compared to the original. As opposed to hiring a dozen producers, Keef employs himself on all but one of 16 tracks. So 1 is airy and saturated, the audio equivalent of watching a neon sign flicker and short out. So 2 crashes in like the Kool-Aid man, leaving a trail of sticky footprints. It also borrows and mutates elements from other Keef extravaganzas: The Trap-A-Holics tributes dotted across this year’s Mike WiLL Made-It collab Dirty Nachos seem to have influenced the drops for fake radio station 4NEM Radio that pop up here; Ghanaian-Liberian comedian Michael Blackson, whose interludes powered much of 2013’s Bang Part 2, is back and desperately trying to make his DJ Drama-esque ad-libs funny. But these would just be nostalgic touches without Keef and his co-producers’ enveloping beats. On “Jesus Skit,” Blackson’s cloying bit about Black entertainers getting reparations is drowned out by Keef, Slowburnz, and MBZ’s production, their hellish keyboard stabs and Gatling-gun drums transitioning smoothly into Keef and longtime collaborator Lil Gnar’s verses on “Jesus.” It’s an update on an older formula that is fuller and more ambitious.
Source link
