“I passed the streets with flying colors” he boasts on “Bad,” another highlight, and the past tense is clearly intentional. But while it’s not quite JAY-Z-on- American-Gangster-style reminiscence, even the more vividly violent songs here feel like they were made at a remove. In contrast to Thot Breaker and with the exception of the weirdly tender standout “Negro,” the record is decidedly drill, and on the imperial beats for “Mailbox,” “Cook,” “Get It,” and others, Keef teleports back to his old life. Rich produced more than half the songs on Dedication, with standout turns from StuntMan (“Keke Palmer,” “Text”) and Ness (“Glory Bridge”). The second verse of “Told Y’all” includes the immortal line, “Pull up in all white like a Nazi,” and there’s a funny couplet on “Keke Palmer”: “Hopped on yo shit and killed it, like ‘Whose song is this?’/All up in my DM, man, ‘Who mom is this?’” Keef admires Lil Wayne, and while he doesn’t share Weezy’s technical ability, he does share his role model’s gift for the unexpected left turn, the hilarious surprise.Ītlanta’s D. His deadpan sense of humor remains well intact. His verses are not compulsively crafted or alive with brilliant wordplay they’re compelling mainly for their turns of phrase, for the sudden jokes or changes in perspective. It’s that willingness to admit to vulnerability, to having emotions other than fury, that keeps Dedication interesting throughout.
The rapper, who has lived in California for the past several years, thinks for a moment, and then confesses to missing the city in its entirety. In a recent interview, Snoop Dogg asks Keef what he loves the most about being from Chicago. Glimpses of his school days surface on “Keke Palmer,” where there’s an early reference to blue books on “Text,” he recalls toting a BB gun in his lunch bag in second grade and on the fearsome throwback “Glory Bridge,” he’s thinking about how fly he looked at school. There are several indications of Keef’s growth on Dedication, but nostalgia is the principal element that unites the record’s grab bag of styles and approaches.
But five years later, with Keef matured and mellowed, it’s easier to listen to his current music and pick up on the charisma that caused one of his deeply passionate Chicago fans to threaten to beat the hell out of anyone questioning his reputation back in the day. In his hometown paper’s good-faith review of his major label debut, Finally Rich, the writer Greg Kot asserted that Keef’s sole innovation had been to appear colder than any other contemporary gangster rapper, and dismissed his mumbled verses as “robotic, deadpan, stoned.” It was a fair assessment, if a stingy one. Keef’s unconstructed approach to rap has earned him ferocious critics, in addition to those who would summarily dismiss him for being simply a bad influence, a media spectacle, or both. It’s a worthy capstone to a year in which Keef has released four solid-to-great solo projects, resurrecting his reputation and career.
His latest full-length, Dedication, is a testament to how much he’s grown-not necessarily as an artist (though that’s there too), but as a person. But Cozart is 22 now, and in industry terms, his arrival might as well have been a decade ago. The lightning to the thunder that was “I Don’t Like” was a WorldStar video of a kid excited that Keef, who had been sentenced to house arrest for unlawful use of a weapon, had been released-the first hint of the enthusiasm that would accompany the rapper’s initial rise. He was 16 years old then, and for many, he was inextricably linked with the crisis of gun violence in his native Chicago. Keith Cozart has been known to the public as Chief Keef since 2012, when his first hit, “I Don’t Like,” vaulted him into the national consciousness.
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