By Haymarket Books
In a career that began with a YouTube video corralling millions of views, young Chicago rapper Chief Keef has recently skyrocketed to fame.
In a matter of months, Chief Keef’s most popular song, “Don’t Like” was remixed by Kanye West, while he was on house arrest for a gun charge. Chief Keef has also been signed to a major record deal, and investigated for the murder of a rival rapper – all to the backdrop of increasing gun violence in Chicago and heightened media controversy.
Yet, as poet-educator Kevin Coval writes, “Every institution in Chicago fails Black youth. Segregated and systematically inequitable, Chicago is a town where white kids exist in an increasingly idyllic new urban utopia, and Black and Latino kids weave and dodge through a war zone.
“The largest specter in the spectacle and circus that surrounds the city, Chief Keef has become its poster boy and scapegoat. He is a young man who looks and sounds like thousands of young people in Chicago – reared in a culture of nihilism, death, and capitalism.
“He is a young man who sings the demented measures and results of white supremacy, the legacy and maintenance of grand inequity. Chief Keef sings a tortured and tormented Chicago song. It is a song we need to listen to carefully.”
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Def Poet Kevin Coval, Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Dissects the Controversy Surrounding Rapper Chief Keef in More Sh!t Chief Keef Don’t Like: A Meditation on Youth, Violence, and the Legacy of Racism in Chicago.
Release Party on Friday, Oct. 19th, at 7 pm, Young Chicago Authors, 1180 N. Milwaukee, 2nd Fl.
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Read excerpts “Hipster Blogs Wave Their True Colors” and “Why Chief Keef Don’t Like Fake Gucci.”
Listen to free audio download of “Chicago (Keef)” produced by Saba of Pivot.
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Kevin Coval is the author of numerous poetry collections and chapbooks, including the American Library Association Book-of-the-Year finalist Slingshots: A Hip-Hop Poetica and most recently, L-vis Lives! Racemusic Poems, described as a “stunning, and very personal, piece of literary work that should be required reading in every high school in America” by Impose magazine.
In his early twenties, Coval founded Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, now one of the largest youth gatherings on the planet, recently the subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name. Coval currently serves as Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, the non-profit home of Louder Than a Bomb, and numerous other youth writing and hip hop programs.
He is a native of Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute and is a frequent contributor to WBEZ: Chicago Public Radio. His next work is Schtick: Jewish Assimilation and Its Discontents, forthcoming from Haymarket Books in April 2013.
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See also:
* Rhymefest vs. Chief Keef
* Lupe Fiasco: Chief Keef Scares Me
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Comments welcome.
Posted on October 15, 2012