A third look at Chief Keef and an attempt to review his latest release, "Back from the Dead 2"

Before reading this blog, please consider reading my first two thinkpieces on Chief Keef, his music, and his affect on Chicago: Chief Keef: Chicago's homegrown bad-boy and Not another aimless Chief Keef blog: The follow-up blog to my June essay on Chicago's hottest rapper.

Chief Keef's Back from the Dead 2, the sequel to the 2011 mixtape that placed him on the rap/drill map, arrives over a year after the release of the mixtape Almighty So, the last project of any kind the rapper released. During this yearlong period, Keef was releasing full-length songs, music videos, and snippets of tracks (most of which never amounting to full songs - anyone remember the loads of snippets we got for his proposed sophomore album Gloyalty?), battling an addiction to the infamous Sprite/codeine cough syrup concoction known as "lean," serving a stint in rehab, arrests, connected to a shooting in Chicago's north side, mourning the death of his cousin and featured artist on his label, and making repeated announcements for the release of his mixtape-turned-sophomore-album Bang 3 that never came to fruition. With this kind of track record, it's no wonder why Keef was dropped from Interscope, the label that gave him the freedom to create his own venture Glory Boyz Entertainment (now known as "Glo Gang"). Keef, on those notes alone, proved to be an artist still infatuated with the tumultuous life of the streets rather than settling down to become firmly focused on the quality of his music and his roster of proposed albums and mixtapes.

Give Keef credit where credit is due; for the two years he was committed to Interscope, he managed to flip small music video budgets into rap sensations on Youtube. His music video for "Love Sosa," arguably his biggest hit next to "I Don't Like," has garnered over four million views and was made on a shoestring budget, consisting of half a dozen or so teenagers dancing in Keef's living room, toting visible (and sometimes invisible) weaponry. He wasn't a large investment for the company, but it was fair to expect some kind of return on investment. Note that with his Big Cartel website, boasting expensive jackets, shirts boasting all-over prints, joggers, and belts, and he is turning into a teenage entrepreneur who knows how to turn slang into a brand.

Nonetheless, Keef proved to be far too inconsistent for the label's own good. On top of that, the style on his earliest mixtapes and debut album Finally Rich - a dark, brooding one, combined with glossy but addicting production and nihilistic lyricism romanticizing gang life and uncontrollable violence in the city of Chicago - transformed into a nearly incomprehensible, zombie-like array of guttural mayhem with the release of highly-anticipated mixtapes Bang 2 and the aforementioned Almighty So. This sort of style has now left in favor of a more erratic style, that, paradoxically, goes from sounding sleepy to downright angry and violent, cycling unevenly between the two and set to monotonous production, most of which done by Keef himself.

Such a style makes up Back from the Dead 2, an underwhelming endeavor that Keef fans will unfortunately try to defend and justify rather than just calling it out for being the mess that it is. It's hard to blame them, as they (including myself) have waited for some sort of acceptable compilation of songs since October 2013, and the one they're faced with at the moment is an overlong mess of tracks mostly disposable in sound and quality.

"The Keef formula," as I have theorized when my mind drifts in my classes or during normal, everyday activities, is that, first off, numerous songs are released as stand alone tracks and music videos, questionably showing up on future mixtapes. These tracks range from solid to forgettable, but I have yet to encounter one that was atrocious in any way. The second part of this theory is that the mixtapes are crowded with songs with basic names (in this case: "Dear," "Stupid," "Cuz," "B's," "Swag," etc) and bear a quality that feels rushed and ill-managed, with songs often clouded by obnoxious and distracting shouting from the likes of DJ Holiday.

Back from the Dead 2 adheres to this formula quite well, cycling between marginally amusing, to vaguely tolerable, to guttural and uninteresting, to wholly juvenile and exhausting at twenty-one tracks deep. Songs like "Feds (Intro)" and "Moral" accentuate the kind of craft I'm looking for with Keef, as they are entertaining and bear flows and verses that allow one to get lost in their sound and their pace. Either they're fun and enchanting, or maybe I'm still shocked I can coherently understand Keef without the obnoxious and intolerable mixing we got on Almighty So.

However, songs like "Who is That" are depressingly juvenile and downright stupid, as they try to evoke a new stylistic approach for Keef's music while simultaneously trying to get us to accept deplorable lyricism like, "I'm smoking on that piss-pack, it smells like I just got done taking a piss." "Who is That" goes down as the absolute worst Keef song in the books for not only infusing together a broken style failing to achieve any kind of haunting or subversive qualities in the way of drill music, but also for its horribly childish lyricism from a rapper who is mature and brave enough to rap murder threats and blatant threats to rival gangs.

Then there are tracks like "Swag" and "Wayne," which sound so beaten and broken in their instrumentation, it's as if the instrumental was run through a virtual shredder and the sounds of the machine were mixed into the final product. Seeing as these songs were predominately written, sung, and produced by Keef, the blame circles back to him as the prime reason why Back from the Dead 2 is such a lackluster mixtape. What we needed were more songs like "Fool Ya," a track released weeks before this mixtape and was effective in generating a competent sound and delivery, or even a more fleshed out version of "Leanin'," a snippet I'm sure will never see the light of day as a full length song.

Keef has four more projects planned for the next three months; Mansion Musick, a mixtape due out November 28th, Bang 3, his sophomore album due out December 25th (keep in mind, it was also due out in the fall of 2013, Christmas 2013, April 2014, and June 2014), UFOverload 2, a mixtape due out on December 25th or December 31st, and Thot Breaker, a mixtape due out February 14th, 2015. Odds would say one of those has to be at least passable, but with three underwhelming mixtapes in a row, even with one coming after a yearlong break, I fear I'm losing hope quite quickly.

Recommended tracks (in order): "Moral," "Feds (Intro)," "Dear," and "Smack DVD."