Back From The Dead

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“2012, that’s my year,” Chief Keef predicts on “Winnin,” one of <i>Back from the Dead</i>’s many standout tracks. He couldn’t have known how right he was. By the time his second mixtape premiered that March, the 16-year-old was a minor viral sensation. But <i>Back from the Dead</i> launched the dread-headed rapper into the stratosphere. Suddenly, all anyone could talk about was drill, the newly minted trap offshoot that lurched to its own sing-song rhythm, and which had been bubbling up on Chicago’s South Side for a couple of years now, just outside the media’s view. <i>Back from the Dead</i> was an ideal intro to a sound that would soon dominate hip-hop. But it was also an immersive crash course in the lingo and worldview of a teenager growing up in a neighborhood the media often uses as a shorthand for American gun violence. As soon as <i>Back from the Dead</i> came to life, Keef’s musical ascent became a hotly contested topic: Did he represent the most exciting regional rap movement of the new decade? Or was he the embodiment of his city’s worst ills? Whatever the case, Keefmania would hit hip-hop like a bomb, and the songs on <i>Back from the Dead</i>—produced entirely by Young Chop, a chief architect of the drill sound—held up to all of that national scrutiny. “I Don’t Like” is the tape’s splashiest number, a towering anthem of pure, unfiltered negativity that, even before the Kanye West remix, would play on local radio for hours on end. And listeners willing to dig past the hits will find such gems as the howling “I Don’t Know Dem,” or the surprisingly pop-friendly anti-romance bop “Save That Shit”—both tracks that sound just as innovative and vital today.

via Apple Music