Every week, a different FADER editor compiles a playlist to highlight a new release and give you a guide to that artist’s web of influences and peers. These Staff Selects live in our Spotify app, alongside GEN Fs from our archives and playlists for each issue. This week, it's Matthew Schnipper (not) on Chief Keef.
In completing the newest issue of The FADER, soon to hit stands, I got pretty obsessed with listening to Chief Keef. As someone who has always had a predilection for brutal music of all forms, Keef pretty much boiled down all the aggression I could ever want into an endlessly reproducible formula of formless bombast. Surely his producers, particularly Young Chop, are responsible for this bounty of loudness, but as the mouthpiece, Keef is highly effective at making me want to run through brick walls like the Kool-Aid Man. With the exception of whatever weird zone Future's "Turn on the Lights" lives in, my rap diet has lately subsisted of Keef songs, and a few from his blustering Chicago peers. But earlier this week, in a wormhole inside my brain, I started thinking about this Jadakiss album from 2004, and how it maybe had some jams. I went to Spotify, listened to it, and turns out I wasn't entirely wrong. It reminded me that though whatever is most brusque may be my current favorite, if I take off the blinders, there's a lot that of random shit that could use some revisiting. Here's a sampling of rap I have always liked a lot that doesn't sound like Chief Keef. Jump straight to the playlist here, or listen in The FADER Spotify app.
Staff Selects: Rap That Doesn't Sound Like Chief Keef
