I first met Chief Keef one unseasonably warm day in late January roughly six years ago, while he was on house arrest. He wore flannel pajama bottoms, a black t-shirt, and rosary beads, and we sat in the sunlight of his grandmother’s Chicago living room next to a portrait of Barack Obama while I asked him questions about his music. “See, motherfuckers think I can’t do metaphors. They—” he gestured at a fanbase, somewhere outside his grandmother’s apartment, “—don’t want to see me do that. I don’t sit down and ‘think,’ I write about what’s going on right now, what we just did, what just happened. That’s what I write about.”

When we left, I asked my brother, who’d tagged along to take photographs, what he thought of the rapper who was — though we didn’t know it — on his way to becoming Chicago’s biggest star since Kanye West. In the years since, interviewers invariably describe Keef as petulant, incoherent, difficult, or drugged-out. Online, it was suggested he suffered from a learning disability, and message board rumors proliferated that he was autistic, as an explanation for his awkward on-camera behavior. But my brother’s immediate response at that early date felt closer to my own: “He’s so self-possessed.”

Chief Keef Finally Rich Album Sales

It’s no longer original to suggest that Chief Keef ended up being more influential than most expected when he burst from obscurity in 2012. “Influence,” after all, is an easy concept for a writer to apply, as it requires minimal investment — “influential” doesn’t mean “good,” or even “important” — and the scantest evidence. Music flows forward in an ever-broadening conversation, and ideas are constantly pilfered and improved upon, from even the least captivating artists. Any star who has been influential has been influenced, and every rapper who achieved any sort of fame over the past decade is described as “influential” at one point or another: Drake, Lil B, Odd Future, ASAP Rocky, Young Thug, Future, Migos.

Chief Keef — who currently is locked up in juvenile detention for 60 days — also received at least $300,000 to cover the cost of recording “Finally Rich,” which sold 50,000 copies during the first week it was released in December. Chief Keef’s deals all depend on album sales. By Chief Keef 2018. Get it as soon as Mon, May 17. FREE Shipping on orders over $25 shipped by Amazon. Double Albums; Amazon Global.

But I’d contend that over the past six years, since Chief Keef first emerged, his impact has more directly defined the sound, shape, and tone of hip-hop writ large, than any other artist. (Kanye West — whose remix of “Don’t Like” both propelled and obscured Keef’s original — remains a powerful artistic barometer, but his biggest aesthetic impacts predate Keef.) Keef’s emergence was a paradigm shift that marked the arrival of a new generation, a sea change in the music’s sound, in how it was covered, where it came from, and how the industry marketed their artists. It’s especially impressive because he’s done so from an obscured position, invisible in the broader musical discourse. And the bulk of this influence came not from his work in the mainstream spotlight of 2012, but in his work after — when the popular consensus was that his career was over, a misfire, the product of opportunistic media hype.

When Keef’s 2012 debut label record, Finally Rich, sold just 50,000 first week physical copies, it was taken as consensus that his actual impact within hip-hop had been modest — that once again, the industry had overvalued online conversation and controversy over the tastes of listeners in the “real world.” But the truth was that for a new generation in the “real world,” social media and streaming meant his most devoted fans simply weren’t listening to CDs.

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It seems obvious today, when streaming numbers drive the industry. Streams are a reliable predictor of ticket sales, and predict artist signings at both major and indie labels. Sales numbers, in 2018, are conjured through a complex formula incorporating streams and CDs, and for the vast bulk of hip-hop artists, those streaming “sales” dwarf CD sales. But in 2012, the Apple Music streaming service did not exist; Spotify had only been available in the United States since July 2011, and had only 5 million users worldwide by December of the following year. (Today it claims 70 million.) YouTube, where the majority of Keef’s fanbase consumed his work, had no impact on Billboard chart positions until February 2013, just as mainstream attention in Keef was beginning to wane. (When he did receive notoriety afterwards, it tended to focus on his list of ultimately minor legal infractions.)

In fact, his impact was meteoric. It can be witnessed in a comparative chart of Google search volume, which at its peak dwarfed the peaks of his contemporaries, who are now seen as more “mainstream” stars. Larry Jackson, the A&R who signed Keef to Interscope before leaving with Jimmy Iovine to work on Apple Music, put his new kind of stardom in perspective, telling me: “Week over week at Interscope, he was the most active social media artist we had. Bigger than Lady Gaga, in terms of mentions and online activity. Bigger than Maroon 5. He was a social juggernaut. There was nobody who had the kind of gravitational pull he had online. He was the first.”

During this period he took a radical new approach to the sound and composition of rap records, a prolific series of blueprints emulated by the many artists who followed in his wake. Unlike Soulja Boy — whose populist teen groundswell was one of Keef’s own inspirations — Keef developed a complex, cohesive, evolving aesthetic language, a style of both music and marketing, which was readily emulated over the next five years at home and across the country. Keef took a magpie approach to songwriting, building songs from the loose pieces of his influences: a one-off money-machine adlib from an obscure Yo Gotti mixtape cut would become a Keef signature; an obscure piece of D.C. slang would become the inspiration for a new song. This is how rap works broadly: pieces of linguistic and cultural detritus become the building blocks for even its greatest artists. Keef’s approach showed a sophistication and cultural knowledge that dwarfed most of his peers, pulling loose pieces from artists across the country and not only crafting an original rap style, but creating a seemingly endless variety of new forms from the rubble.

Keef had reoriented hip-hop’s center of gravity, pulling the genre into his orbit.

All of this interest occurred during the 2013-2016 period in which mainstream press attention to Keef was at low ebb. And yet interest among his core fans — including many of the artists who would become the next generation of stars themselves — remained high. It’s not hard to hear Keef’s influence on each of them, the Bush or Silverchair to his Kurt Cobain. One needs to look only at the 2016 XXL Freshman Class, the cover story focusing on the new generation of hip-hop stars. Each seems borne from a single strand of Keef’s creative DNA, a reflection of a different side of his sound, residents of a world he created.

Lil Uzi Vert was a Philadelphia fast-rapper two years Keef’s senior who completely reinvented his sound in the wake of Keef’s turn toward melody, as can be heard on “Love Sosa”-aping “Senor Guapo,” or the Bang 2 echoing “7AM” — a heavy influence Uzi has freely admitted. In 2013, before Uzi Vert’s name had earned any attention nationally, Danny Brown articulated what would be his entire sales pitch, in an interview with Pitchfork when describing Chief Keef: “To me, Chief Keef is totally punk rock. Like, the melodies he uses on his album– it’s like he’s not even rapping no more, he’s just singing. You could swap those synths and keyboards with guitars and fucking crazy drums and he’ll be a rock star.” But he wasn’t just singing; Atlanta’s Playboi Carti built a style that picked up on the drier sound of Keef’s wall-of-sound adlibs, fixated upon them.