Pitchfork, the famous website for music snobs, has made Chicago rapper Chief Keef’s career a little bit more difficult lately. I had never heard about the young rapper, but he is apparently becoming famous, especially because of his home-made, low budject video for ‘I Don't Like’, in which the guy doesn’t do much beside smoking a lot of weed with friends and repeating the n-word a thousand times….but wait, the guy is also passing around a gun! Anyway Kayne West liked it so much he remixed it!
But the problem with these rappers is that they always mix their art with their life, as Chief Keef filmed the video while on house arrest after pointing a gun at a police officer. And to add to the picture, Keef posted some tweets shortly after ‘Lil JoJo’, another Chicago aspiring rapper, was shot to death in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood early September. He sent tweets like ‘Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted To Be Jus Like Us #LMAO’, and then pretended his account was hacked, but whatever, the police is doing an investigation because of an ongoing rivalry between the two rap gangs…. What a mess!
However, this didn’t prevent Pitchfork to do an interview with Chief Keef for their ‘Selector’ series. I haven’t seen the video – Pitchfork has since taken it down – so I just can relate on other websites’ description, but they meet the rapper in a New York gun range to do some freestyle and fire some rounds, and everyone agree that Keef holding a gun was highly insensitive to Chicago’s recent crime victims.
So the guy has a problem with gun violence, is mocking another rapper’s violent death, and Pitchfork films him shooting guns! Pitchfork editor in chief Mark Richardson has since published some apologizes:
‘"Selector" is a Pitchfork.tv show in which we interview rappers and watch them freestyle over beats. We often try to conduct these shows in unusual locations, and several months ago we interviewed Chief Keef at a gun range in New York City. This concept was rushed and never should have happened. We're proud of the "Selector" series as a whole and its production will continue, but this particular episode was insensitive and irresponsible.
Pitchfork's roots are in Chicago and many of our employees and several contributors live in the city. The horror of the gun violence that has plagued our hometown is something we all take very seriously. Many people have pointed out that this episode could be seen as trivializing gun violence, and we feel they have a good point.
Given recent news regarding the shooting of Chicago rapper Lil Jojo and the investigation of people involved in Chicago's rap scene, this seems like the right time to express our regrets regarding that episode. We apologize for this mistake and have removed the video from our archives.’
Yes but it may have been a little late, Keef was under house arrest and couldn’t associate with gang members or handle a gun! Prosecutors have asked Keef to be placed in juvenile detention (the guy is only 17), and the judge will decide of his faith on November 20th
He is so young, weren’t any adults there? I guess there were, so in this case, shouldn’t they be held accountable for this last stunt? Who is advising this teenager? It looks like the police was waiting to jump on the occasion, and whoever is his manager is really stupid.