Chief Keef and Drill Music: When Chicago’s Violence Got a Soundtrack

Drill music turned Chicago’s South Side gang violence into the most discussed sound in American music — and made a 16-year-old on house arrest into a star with an Interscope deal. Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” launched in January 2012 from a South Side basement. By spring it had been remixed by Kanye West. By fall it had named a genre. The conditions in Englewood that produced it remained unchanged.

Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like,” released in January 2012, was a three-minute track recorded in a basement on the South Side of Chicago. By spring it had been remixed by Kanye West, and within months it had charted on the Billboard Hot 100, given a name to an entire musical genre, and made a 16-year-old from Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood into the most discussed rapper in America.^1^ Keith Cozart — Chief Keef — was recording “I Don’t Like” while on house arrest for pointing a gun at a police officer. He would be arrested again before the year was out.

What Drill Is and Why the Flatness Was the Point

Drill is a subgenre of hip-hop that emerged from Chicago’s South Side around 2011 and 2012. It is defined by specific sonic characteristics — dark, minor-key trap beats produced primarily by a producer named Young Chop, sparse arrangements, 808 bass — and lyrical content that is relentlessly specific about gang violence: specific blocks named, specific people threatened, specific deaths referenced. The lyrics are not metaphorical. That specificity is the point.^2^

The producers most associated with drill’s early development — Young Chop and later Metro Boomin — built beats that matched the tone of the neighborhoods they came from. Chicago in 2011 was experiencing a homicide surge that would peak at 506 murders in 2012, the highest number since 1997. Englewood, where Keef grew up, consistently ranked among the city’s most violent communities. Drill didn’t romanticize that violence — it reported it with the flatness of someone who has stopped being surprised.

Chief Keef Built an Audience of Millions Before Any Label Showed Up

Chief Keef joined the Gangster Disciples-affiliated Black Disciples street gang as a teenager. His early YouTube videos — shot in his grandmother’s house, showing a teenager with no obvious production resources rapping in his living room — accumulated millions of views before he had any industry backing. The rawness was the appeal. When Interscope Records signed him in a deal worth reportedly $6 million in mid-2012, they were licensing something that had already found its audience without them.^3^

“Finally Rich,” his major label debut released in December 2012, sold 50,000 copies in its first week. It reached number 29 on the Billboard 200. The album featured production from Young Chop and contained lyrics specific enough that Chicago Police Detective Kevin Watson told reporters the tracks constituted a “diary of a gang member’s life” and that officers used them as intelligence about gang activity and disputes.^4^

Drill Made Legible What American Culture Had Been Ignoring

Drill music made legible something that American mainstream culture had been successfully ignoring: that the violence in Chicago’s South Side gang neighborhoods was not random or senseless, but was structured, purposeful within its own logic, and embedded in relationships and territories specific enough to be named in lyrics. The music was evidence.

It also revealed who audiences were. Drill’s mainstream success — the Kanye remix, the Interscope deal, the eventual global spread of drill to London, Brooklyn, and beyond — showed that the same violence that was being reported as tragedy in Chicago news coverage was being marketed as entertainment to consumers who would never live anywhere near Englewood. That gap between how violence is covered and how it is consumed is not unique to drill music, but drill made it unusually visible.

The moral panic that followed was predictable. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio singled out drill music in 2019 as a contributor to violence, and the NYPD sought to restrict performances and social media posts by drill artists — an approach that multiple civil liberties organizations challenged as unconstitutional and racially targeted.^5^

Where Drill Sits Now

Chief Keef has been arrested multiple times since 2012, including for DUI, drug possession, and failure to pay child support. He largely relocated to Los Angeles and later to a more international touring circuit, and his influence on American music — not just drill but trap broadly — is difficult to overstate. Producers who studied his early work are credited on records by Drake, Future, Post Malone, and dozens of other artists.

Drill has spread globally. London drill, which emerged around 2015 and 2016, developed its own distinct sound influenced by UK grime while carrying the structural DNA of Chicago. Brooklyn drill, associated with Pop Smoke before his 2020 murder, brought drill’s aesthetic into a new geography and a new homicide.

What drill exposed — and what its commercial success required everyone to look at — was that American popular culture has an enormous appetite for the products of desperation, as long as desperation is packaged correctly. Chief Keef came from Englewood. The beats were built on the South Side. The record deal came from Interscope. The profits went everywhere. The conditions in Englewood remained. That transaction is as old as the blues and as current as this year’s streaming data.

The Gangster Disciples gang that shaped Chief Keef’s world is covered in depth in this series. The Folk Nation vs. People Nation piece explains the alliance structure embedded in drill lyrics. See the Chicago Gangs hub for the full series.

Part of Chicago Gangs — ← Back to series hub

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Sources:

1. Balaji, Murali, ed. Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means. Lexington Books, 2013.
2. Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
3. Soderberg, Brandon. “The Education of Chief Keef.” SPIN Magazine, October 2012.
4. Chicago Police Department. Gang Intelligence Report: Social Media and Gang Activity. City of Chicago, 2013.
5. New York Civil Liberties Union. Rap Music Censorship: A First Amendment Challenge. NYCLU, 2019.