DCĬhief Keef, “3Hunna” Back From the Dead (Internet 2012) Respectfully, though, West turned the spotlight in the other direction on his verse on the “I Don’t Like” remix, rapping Free Bump J, real nigga for life. His biggest song (and the hardest track ever featured in a national McDonald’s commercial) was “Move Around,” which opened with a typically self-aggrandizing adlib from its producer, Kanye West. Now, Bump’s career is as cautionary as it is inspirational: he’s sitting halfway through a 10-year stint for bank robbery in Texas. In 2005, Bump J was Chicago’s most beloved street rapper, bestowed with the gang nickname “Chief.” His blasted-from-parked-cars local buzz grabbed today’s drill crowd just when they were first getting into music, making Bump and his million-dollar Atlantic contract, for some, their first local legend.

ABīump J, “Move Around” Nothing to Lose (Atlantic 2005) But unlike couture fashion, the benefits here are mutual: Keef gets a co-sign from a rap god, and Kanye renews people’s faith in his own creation myth, even if he’s increasingly more at home on Boulevard Saint-Germain than in the boroughs of his Chicago youth. Like so many of the couture designers he adores, here Kanye acts as art director to his miscreant muses, taking cues from the street and wrapping them up in lavish production like a cultivated aesthete. The obvious irony that Kanye West has rallied the troops around something he absolutely does like should not take away from the fact that he’s co-opted Chief Keef’s adolescent fed-upedness with great aplomb. Pusha T, Chief Keef, Jadakiss and Big Sean, “I Don’t Like (Remix)” (Internet 2012) Read Felipe Delerme’s FADER #81 cover story on Chief Keef and Chicago rap, and check out our notes below.

Footnotes is the section in our magazine where we take a deeper look at the music surrounding our feature artists. The reigning sound of rap in Chicago-with toughly detached deliveries and muddy beats as big as the Sears Tower-bears little obvious resemblance to the sound of just a few years ago, in part because some of today’s crop didn’t even graduate middle school until after Kanye West’s Graduation dropped.

Chief keef 3hunna producer