Jim DeRogatis Concern-Trolls America By Linking Chief Keef With Newtown Shooting

By Jon Graef in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 19, 2012 7:20PM

Longtime readers and admirers of certain Sound Opinions’ hosts and former Chicago Sun-Times music critics know that there are two Jim DeRogatis’ (DeRogati?), especially when the current WBEZ blogger goes into what can be described as ‘righteous crusader’ mode.

There’s the tireless, truth-to-power-speaking reporter of the Ticketmaster monopoly days and, in more recent years, of relating conflict-of-interest-heavy Lollapalooza deals and sleazy Congress Theater doings to incredulous readers who otherwise might not have known about them.

That Jim is a Jim that will undoubtedly go down in history as one of rock music’s greatest critics.

(Speaking of which: in the interest of full disclosure, this writer interviewed DeRogatis for a school project while I was obtaining my master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia College Chicago. The man was quite generous with his time and in his answers, speaking to me for at least 45 minutes, if not an hour and change).

On the other hand, there’s the other Jim.

The other Jim is an aimless rhetorical rhinoceros of foolhardy self-righteousness, plowing his horn against logic and reason in an ill-defined, seemingly endless quest to validate a point that, while originally having merit, was lost on his readers many, many paragraphs ago. In short: a contrarian for contrarian’s sake. This is the Jim that picks fights with Dan Sinker, for instance.

Guess which Jim showed up to review the new Chief Keef album, Finally Rich?

We’ll give you a hint, in the form of his opening paragraph:

If, in the wake of the horrific happenings at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, a soulless, amoral and blatantly sensationalist musician released an album glorifying the deranged mindset, unspeakably selfish and evil worldview and embrace of indiscriminate violence that led to the mass killing of 26 innocents, the condemnation of that dubious art would be instant and universal, regardless of whatever imagined merits it might have beyond its abhorrent subject matter.

On Tuesday, a 17-year-old South Side rapper born Keith Cozart but better known as Chief Keef will release Finally Rich, his major-label debut for the morally vacuous Interscope Records. The album is a bleak, nihilistic celebration of street violence, gang culture, drug use, disrespect for women and the worship of the almighty dollar above all humanistic conscience, arriving as Chicago nears the end of a year that’s seen an epidemic of violent killings in African-American neighborhoods every bit as tragic—and preventable, if the political will was present—as those in Newtown, Conn.

This is not to equate the words of Chief Keef with the actions of the Newtown assassin.

Holy shit. Did Jim DeRogatis just concern-troll all of America?

After contextualizing Chief Keef’s rise, and taking to task the likes of Interscope Records and Pitchfork Media for enabling that rise, DeRogatis brings down the critical hammer on Keef in a distinctly DeRo-y way.

Chief Keef is a thick-tongued, mush-mouthed rapper with little grace and stilted flow who stumbles through generic, unimaginative, frequently plodding and numbingly repetitive backing tracks bragging with little imagination and forced conviction about his bad-ass self and utter disregard for anyone else in the universe. The cynicism is bottomless.

From there, he wraps up: "If, in the wake of the horrific happenings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, an artist glorified that violence, condemnation would be universal. And so it should be for Finally Rich."

Let’s not focus so much on DeRo’s take on Finally Rich (which, let’s be fair, is his take, and no amount of shit he gets, here, or on any social media channels, can or should change that. If it does, that’s not critical engagement. That’s bullying. Kanyesoapboxdrop) so much as the woefully misguiding, unclear connection that ties the criticism together.

DeRo's point is that an album filled with the implicit celebration of the perspective of an Adam Lanza-type killer would be condemned; therefore, an album implicitly celebrating the violence that's robbed 463 Chicagoans of their lives should be condemned too. Never mind the fact that Newtown and Chicago's year of violence, while both representing profound institutional failures, are completely different contexts. You can't just go about comparing them because they both involve guns.

DeRo's humanity is in the right place. He's concerned with gun violence, and concerned with how music reflects morality. Let’s give him that. But since his engagement with Keef's work seems cursory at best, he's grasping at straws. And when he does so, he goes into a logistical free fall, and he makes some outlandish claims as a result.

For example, in one paragraph, he seemingly calls out the white privilege of Pitchfork editors for lauding Keef's authenticity while later bemoaning the fact that he'll be a victim of reverse racism for not lauding Keef himself. In doing so, he makes some silly assertions.

Of course, [panning Chief Keef] carries the risk of being dismissed as clueless and chronically out of touch—a “rockist” (code for “racist”) who doesn’t understand hip-hop culture unless it’s of the positive (code for “boring,” “feel-good” and “phony”) variety that, as noted here before, previously characterized much of the rap music that brought the national spotlight to Chicago in the past, courtesy of artists such as Kanye, Common, Rhymefest, Lupe Fiasco and Kid Sister.

He's right to point out the false choice between backpacker and gangsta rap. But even the most ignorant of hip-hop fans could point to Kanye West, Rhymefest, and Common's back catalog and say that, while there's a lot of social positivity, they're hardly beacons of political correctness either. (Rhymefest, after all, bragged about how his bringing his johnson out in public could cause an eclipse.)

Let’s be real here: If Chief Keef had any creativity of language, or anything resembling a discernable amount of self-reflection about his violent deeds or decaying surroundings, he’d be Freddie Gibbs.

Pointing this out would be a fair criticism. But DeRo doesn’t point this out. Doing so would involve citing more than one lyric from Finally Rich (a lyric which one commenter said he doesn’t get correct), or citing specific album tracks. But no. DeRo just goes off and off.

There's an irony to this. He could have tied Newtown and Finally Rich together.

How?

Here's a lyric from "Citgo," a bonus track off the deluxe version of Finally Rich. A certain passage is highlighted.

With niggas I don't play round My boys shoot up the playground So please don't get sprayed now Sirens on the way now

So, in a way, he had it. But because we got Rhino Jim, and not Right-On Jim, we'd never have known otherwise.

Meanwhile, others have wrestled with the moral questions of Keef's music in a more direct, more honest fashion.

Here, for instance, is a paragraph from Kyle Kramer’s three-star review for RedEye:

Certainly, there's always been a level of moral maneuvering involved in liking Chief Keef's music - the fact that an interview at a gun range with Pitchfork is at the center of his latest legal troubles is just one indication that peoples' reasons for their taste in music are not always tasteful. The mental gymnastics required to enjoy the music remain complicated, and it's understandable that some may look at "Finally Rich" and ask, "How can I root for an album that feels like a record label's attempt to monetize a community's pain?”

Or let’s take a look at David Drake’s fascinating, illuminating cover story about Keef for Complex Magazine. What Drake does brilliantly is break down the history of gang violence near where Keef grew up (he's from Englewood, and has a grandmother in Washington Park), the ascension of Keef's brand of rap music, and the demolishing of public housing, to tie together how Keef came to be.

It's an essential read. Here's a key paragraph:

Chief Keef’s newsworthiness comes, in part, because of his how music is positioned across all kinds of faultlines: cultural clashes, racial segregation, economic divides between haves and have nots. But perhaps the most potent catalyst for controversy is his age. His youthfulness grants him an innocence even as it forces society to recognize its own complicity. If he was an adult, he could be dismissed as a “thug” and victimizer. If he was completely innocent, his actions could be waved off as those of a child, and someone might try to save him. Instead, he sits right at the intersection of victim and self-made aggressor…

With Keef there are onion-layer levels of generational conflict, jagged tears between old and new hip-hop heads, within generations of gangster rap, and within Chicago’s streets.

Finally, here's RubyHornet's Alexander Fruchter, talking about an incident earlier this year involving Lil' Reese. The context may be different, but the words apply all the same:

I think few, if any, mentioned that the person shown in that video footage, which was over a year old, was not yet old enough to vote, drink, and could barely drive. That doesn’t make any of it right… But, we must remember that Lil’ Reese is a teenager, and teenagers do things like that when they don’t have the proper guidance, when they grow up in a culture of violence, and when a phrase like, “they didn’t stop making guns when they made yours,” rolls off the tongue like it’s nothing.

So, there were a lot of different ways DeRo could have gone with this. But he went with the way that he did. And all we can really do is sit back and go, "well, that's our DeRo." And hope that, next time, he actually reviews the album as is, and not the album that he imagines he heard.

Also, as always: If you're burned out on Keef, may we remind you: cute kids rapping about how they'll change the world.