“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. 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. But my brother’s immediate response at that early date felt closer to my own: “He’s so self-possessed.” 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. In the years since, interviewers invariably describe Keef as petulant, incoherent, difficult, or drugged-out. 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. I don’t sit down and ‘think,’ I write about what’s going on right now, what we just did, what just happened. They-” he gestured at a fanbase, somewhere outside his grandmother’s apartment, “-don’t want to see me do that. “See, motherfuckers think I can’t do metaphors. 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. I first met Chief Keef one unseasonably warm day in late January roughly six years ago, while he was on house arrest.
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