Young Chicago

Today, frost coats the flameless candles of at least one curbside vigil in Chicago. Countless denizens mourn the loss of friends and family slain in the city’s ceaseless crossfire. The endemic poverty of many African-American neighborhoods – partially a result of racist redlining by the Federal Housing Administration – has begotten such high levels of violence, both gang related and not, that Illinois representative Monique Davis asked the state’s governor to call in the National Guard in 2013. Two weeks ago, three men were killed and five were wounded in a series of weekend shootings in predominately black neighborhoods.

For those who’ve followed Chicago rap for the last 20 years, the piercing Greek chorus of gunshots and sirens is saddening but unsurprising. (See the early records of rappers like Common, Twista, and Crucial Conflict, who chronicled the warfare in their neighborhoods in the ’90s.) Yet over the past three years, national press coverage of the escalating violence in Chicago has, for the first time, coincided with a keen interest in Chicago rap, or at least one branch of it: drill.

Bred in the city’s most dangerous Southside neighborhoods, drill is a direct descendant of Atlanta’s trap rap. Though the subgenre has no specific sound, punishing percussion akin to the sound of semi-automatic weapons and sparse, ominous orchestration are frequent. More common are the fatal (and fatalistic) lyrics, the localized slang, and the chilling temperament. Still, to say drill rappers only glorify the gangster rap triumvirate of guns, drugs, and gang violence isn’t entirely accurate. These are realities they claim to have known their entire lives. The music is engaging for this ostensible authenticity and terrifying for how little the narrators appear to be terrified.

Though some news outlets correlated rising body counts in Chicago with the rise of drill, major labels weren’t deterred. After Interscope signed drill superstar Chief Keef in 2012, other imprints followed suit. Epic signed King L; Def Jam signed Lil Durk and Lil Reese. However, roughly two years later, Keef is the only one to release his commercial debut. This October, he was dropped from Interscope.

“That drill shit over with. Everybody has their own style now. They don’t all rap like Keef no more,” says Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, whose murky, psychedelic Body High mixtape examines the line between powerful pusher and powerless fiend. “Chicago evolved. The music is better now. They just don’t realize it. They’re so stuck on all that violent shit.”

Even without this year’s XXL Freshman issue, the most visible envoys of that evolution are obvious: Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa. Chance the Rapper’s 2013 mixtape Acid Rap, full of unwieldy wordplay, incisive social commentary, and production that fuses a mélange of disparate genres, garnered widespread acclaim and led to sold out shows across the U.S.; Mensa’s near equally heralded INNANETAPE, released that same year, enabled him to license his deftly executed hip hop-meets-house single “Down on My Luck” to Virgin EMI.

Both rappers remain in the spotlight, but this year has seen a proliferation of powerful and promising music from likeminded, hometown peers: Lucki Eck$, Mick Jenkins, Saba, NoName Gypsy, Max Wonders, Jean Deaux, Dally Auston – the list goes on. With singular sonic aesthetics, dynamic and often poetic deliveries, and unique, insightful perspectives on problems both personal and societal, they’ve elevated Chicago rap to creative heights previously unseen. Their emergence, in conjunction with the ascendance of drill, can only be called a Chicago rap renaissance. Currently, they are among the most important young voices in their city and the genre.

To believe this recent wave of talented Chicago rappers is purely coincidental would be foolish. Websites Fake Shore Drive and Ruby Hornet, both invaluable resources for Midwestern rap, were among the first to bring them to the attention of those outside of the city; but there was a time before the blog buzz. While drill rappers filmed menacing music videos and signed record deals, the aforementioned MCs in the previous paragraph embedded themselves in a tight-knit rap community, one largely born out of two local, youth-oriented open mics: Lyricist Loft and Young Chicago Authors (YCA). “They are two central locations in the city that basically helped change the way the city functions. They had the hottest artists coming weekly,” says Saba, who delivered one of the best guest verses on Acid Rap. “It was like a training camp almost.”

Held on Wednesday nights at YOUmedia, a space located inside downtown’s Harold Washington Library, Lyricist Loft saw hordes of young rappers and poets (and their peers) in attendance. Among the hundreds present each Wednesday were standouts like Mensa, Chance, Jenkins, and Saba, who hit the stage to freestyle and test their latest material.

The same was true at YCA, which takes place on Tuesdays in Wicker Park and was run by Kevin Coval, a Chicago raised poet/author and co-founder of Louder than a Bomb, the world’s largest youth poetry festival. In addition to booking early shows for rappers like Chance and Saba, Coval’s instruction has no doubt informed the more poetic aspects of the music.

“I would just encourage rappers to concentrate more on the craft, and for poets to also really garner from the culture of hip hop those aesthetic innovations into their practice on the page,” Coval says. “So those blurring of lines in some ways is intentional because it’s just what was in the mix.”

For all who attended, YOUmedia and YCA were creative havens outside of home and high school, places to rally around a shared interest with people their age. And, crucially, the open mics were the first time they had ever performed in front of a crowd. “As a rapper who has nothing – not a fan, not a mixtape, not anything – when you go to a place like that with a bunch of opportunity there you’re going to continue to go and try to take advantage of everything that’s in front of you,” Saba explains.

In some cases, poets and other attendees took notes and began rapping themselves. “I was just really inspired by what they were doing with language and with rap,” says NoName Gypsy, who originally attended both open mics as a spoken word poet before turning to rap. Though she’s released little material since her appearance on Acid Rap, her forthcoming debut mixtape, Telefone, remains among the most anticipated releases from the Chicago scene. “The way they would tell stories and freestyle was very hot to me.”

Gypsy’s words offer some insight into the proceedings at both spaces, but Coval perhaps best captures the weekly atmosphere of YCA, and, by extension, Lyricist Loft. “There is that constant excitement and enjoyment that comes from seeing people grow and emerge… [T]here would be this almost this tangible vibe, the excitement about what NoName might bring this coming week,” he says. “There was that moment before Saba’s tape [Comfort Zone] dropped where he would bring in new verses from that project and people would be like, ‘Oh shit! This is really coming together.’ For me, I think week to week, it’s the most exciting cultural space in the city.”

If either Chicago open mic event has a clear rap antecedent, it is Los Angeles’ Good Life Café. In the early ’90s, while much of the press surrounding L.A. focused on the police brutality, the gang rivalries, and the funk-inflected gangster rap born out of those harrowing happenings, a group of highly literate rappers attended the Good Life each week to freestyle and perform. (It’s also rumored that rappers like Ice Cube and Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony dropped in and adopted the innovative vocal deliveries on display.) For evidence of the talent once housed under the roof of the small health food store, you need only listen to the work of seminal L.A. underground rap groups like Freestyle Fellowship, the Pharcyde, and Jurassic 5, all of whom had members in regular rotation there.

The parallels between the current climate in Chicago and that of ’90s L.A. – the varied rap styles, the gang violence, and the media coverage – are easy to make. Back then, many attempted separate to those who made gangster rap from their Good Life counterparts, to make it seem as if they were from entirely different worlds. However, a majority of those on stage at The Good Life were raised in the same neighborhoods as N.W.A. Today, the same is true for many of the Chicago rappers who commuted to the open mics in downtown and Wicker Park. “I know drill people. I know that life. I grew up next to those people,” says Mick Jenkins, who’s impassioned, jazz imbued 2014 mixtape The Water[s] will probably make many year end lists. “I don’t really try to separate myself from them. We just make different music.”

His thoughts eerily echo Freestyle Fellowship’s DJ Kiilu, as told to Brian Cross in 1993’s It’s Not About a Salary: “[We] may have gone to different clubs, but we know guys like Ice Cube, we know gangsters, Crips, Bloods, dope dealers. We live in the ghetto, we didn’t grow up in Beverly Hills, it’s just that we heard something different.”

Still, some have used the words “non-drill” to label the music made by Jenkins and other Chicago rappers of his ilk. Though this is apt to a certain extent, the subject matter of drill rappers and their “non-drill” counterparts is often the same. The former are ostensibly on the corner, the latter are watching life on that corner and analyzing it. It is the shift in perspective that defines their division.

Unfortunately, like the Good Life before it, YOUmedia’s Lyricist Loft is no more. And while many of the rappers mentioned here are either too old or too busy to attend YCA, the open mic continues to grow and evolve. “YCA, when I started going there, was a lot more poetry based,” NoName Gypsy says. “Now YCA is way more rap based. The ratio between rap and poetry now, after all these rappers have started getting bigger, is really interesting.”

In addition to shaping the work of many of the rappers mentioned here, these foundational open mics created a dialogue and kinship between artists from the city’s various rap crews and collectives: Treated Crew (Wonders), Save Money (Chance, Mensa, Auston), Pivot Gang (Saba), Free Nation (Jenkins). Now, the number of collaborations between members from the different crews is too high to count.

“You see everybody all the time,” Jenkins explains. “You kind of record in the same three places, so people run into each other all the time.” Among those recording studios are Classick Studios and Soundscape Studios. The latter belongs to Closed Sessions, Chicago’s most prominent independent hip hop label, which was co-founded by the former EIC of Ruby Hornet Alexander Fruchter. While local rap labels like Molemen Records have existed since the late ’90s, Closed Sessions is the first to embrace these new artists on a local level.

That said, a majority of Chicago rappers still largely record in home studios. Saba’s open room basement studio has become a second creative breeding ground of sorts. NoName Gypsy, Lucki Eck$, and Dally Auston all record there regularly. It’s also where Saba recorded most of his Comfort Zone mixtape, arguably one of the best rap mixtapes of the year, both for its lush, piano driven instrumentation and penetrating lyrics. “We record in some of the bigger studios every now and then, but the most organic shit that we make still comes from the basement,” he says.

Of late, Saba’s work and that of those who attended the open mics, has undoubtedly influenced younger Chicago rappers. “I just kind of jumped that bridge [of going to the open mics] and went straight into trying to record and learning how to self-record,” says 17-year-old Max Wonders, who released his promising sophomore mixtape The Wonder Tape earlier this year.

Sadly, despite the rebirth of Chicago’s rap scene, history remains cyclical. Like Kanye West, Common, and Chief Keef before them, Chicago’s rising rappers have already begun to move away from the city (i.e. Chance the Rapper and Max Wonders). Saba, NoName, and Lucki Eck$ all plan to move in the near future. “We don’t have a [major] label out here. We don’t have a big press syndicate. Our radio is not what New York radio is,” Jenkins explains. “There are just a lot of reasons for n**s to leave,”

One could argue that the moves might lead to the dissolution of this creative community, but others have a more positive outlook. “This is more like a life question than a Chicago rap question. Once you hit a certain age you have friends that you don’t talk to for years. But sometimes when y’all get up, it’s still like nothing changed,” says Saba. “So that’s a part of life. It’s a good thing though. When friends are too busy, that’s always a beautiful thing.”

For now, all Chicago rappers seem busy. Despite being dropped from Interscope, Chief Keef recently released two mixtapes. Lil Herb’s Welcome to Fazoland is one of the strongest rap records of the year, drill or otherwise. Saba opened for A$AP Mob on the final night of Red Bull Sound Select’s 30 Days in LA concert series and plans to release new material in coming months. NoName Gypsy’s Telefone is due out any day, and Jenkins signed with independent label Cinematic Music Group. Jenkins plans to stay in Chicago, to find solutions to the problems facing his community, and to use his growing influence to fortify the future of Chicago rap. “You’re only going to keep getting introduced to dope artists. They’re going to have a platform because we are all friends. We’re not going nowhere,” he says. “I don’t what [the future is] going to look like, but it’s going to be bigger.”