The last time legendary the Memphis emcee  La Chat was in Brooklyn had the chance sit down with her for this interview.  This coming Saturday, April 28, La Chat  will return to Brooklyn for a performance at Public Assembly for  H.A.M., the best southern rap party in Brooklyn. If that isn’t enough to get you out of your house,  House of LaDosha will also be performing, and GIRL UNIT will be DJing.  It’s guaranteed to be a totally epic evening, so if you’re in NYC make sure to buy your tickets now.

Lil Kenny – Fresh N Fly
Lil Kenny – Swagg So Official
Lil Kenny – Let Em Know
Lil Kenny – I’m What It Is
Lil Kenny – I B Silly
F. Dot – Real Nigga
Choppa Da Goon – I Go Hard
Buck 20 Brick Boyz – We Ain’t Mad
F. Dot – Welch World (For Tha Hood)
DGainz & F.Dot – Waddown
DGainz feat. Vic Mone- I’m A Monsta
Choppa Da Goon feat. Sam u L & DGainz – Ya Man Ain’t Gotta Know
Buck 20 Brick Boyz – Neva Talk 2 Feds
Vic Mone – So Many To Choose
Choppa Da Goon – On My Grind
Billionaire Black – I Swear
Vic Mone – Still Goin’ In
DGainz & Billionaire Black – Wanna Be Me
Evon & I’man – Big Wheels
Vic Mone – They say
Sdot & Choppa Da Goon – Dat kush
Vic Mone, Billionaire Black & DGainz – Hypnotize Me
Billionaire Black – The Intro
Lil Durk – I’m a Hitta
Lil Durk – Gotta Go Hard
Kay One – Original
Billionaire Black feat Brittany & Sashagohard – Trust Me
DGainz feat. Buck 20 Brick Boyz, Vic Mone & Lil Durk – We Ball
Vic Mone- Same Ol’ Hoes
Vic Mone – Back In Dis Bitch (Murk Em)
Buck 20 Brick Boyz – Get It On
Sam u L – Stamina
Billionaire Black feat. 50 Shots – Rappin’ & Robbin’
Shady – Go In
Vic Mone – 9 5 Crazy
DGainz – Not At All
Choppa Da Goon – We On Live
DGainz – Canon Camera Shawty
Vic Mone – Too Good
Chris Mille – What’s My Name
Rocky Kicks – Magic “32
Chase N Dough – Double Moments
Buck 20 Brick Boyz – No Comparisons
King Louie & Boss Woo – Money Dance
King Louie – Where The Bitches At
Lil Durk – Fly Wit Me
King Louie – New Soul

YOU CAN FIND ALL THESE SONGS AND MORE @ YOUTUBE.COM/DGAINES1234
IF YOU NEED A BEAT HIT UP DGAINZ TWITTER.COM/DGAINZBEATS

30. Sweetz P f. M.O.E. and Link, “Trippy” (Prod. by Cardo)
29. Fat Trel, “Intro (By the Way”) (Prod. by Kane)
28. Dapp, “Headache” (Prod. DJ Kenn)
27. Sasha Gohard, “I Think I Like” (Prod. by Young Chop)
26. Action Bronson & Riff Raff, “Bird on a Wire” (Prod. by Harry Fraud)
25. DJ Kay Slay Feat. Torch, Gunplay & Ace Hood, “Got Damn”
24. Ty Money, “Ready to Ride” (Prod. by OKBTZ)
23. Kendrick Lamar f. Gunplay – “Cartoon & Cereal” (Prod. by THC)
22. Chief Keef f. X-Mane Shawty, “Save That Shit” (Prod. by Young Chop)
21. Feva f. Husalah and Franchise, “Handsome”
20. Lil Durk f. King Louie, “I Get Paid” (Prod. by Fya Starta)
19. Cash Out, “Cashing Out” (Prod. by DJ Spinz)
18. DJ Paul, “Cocky” (Prod. by J. Green)
17. BJ The Chicago Kid f. Kendrick Lamar, “His Pain” (Prod. by Sounwave)
16. Lil Durk, “L’s Anthem” (Prod. by Paris Beuller)
15. Young Thug, “Keep in Touch” (Prod. by London on the Track)
14. Lil Reese, “Haters” (Prod. by Dibent)
13. Teairra Marie f. 2 Chainz, “U Did That” Remix (Prod. by Rico Love)
12. 8ball and MJG f. Big K.R.I.T., “We Buy Gold” (Prod. by Big K.R.I.T.)
11. Gucci Mane f. Rocko, “Plain Jane” (Prod. by Mike Will Made It)
10. Jackie Chain f. Collie Budz and Jhi Ali, “Nice and Slow” (Prod. by Block Beattaz)
9. Nicki Minaj, “Beez in the Trap” (Prod. by Kenoe)
8. Chief Keef, “3hunna” (Prod. by Young Chop)
7. Starlito, “Substitute” (Prod. by DJ Burn One)
6. Chip Tha Ripper, “Out Here” (Prod. by Lex Luger)
5. Rick Ross f. French Montana and Drake, “Stay Schemin’” (Prod. by Beat Bully)
4. Gunplay, “Jump Out” (Prod. by DJ Speedy)
3. King Louie, “Bars” (Prod. by C-Sick)
2. Dr. Dre f. Kendrick Lamar, “The Recipe” (Prod. by Scoop Deville)
1. Chief Keef f. Lil Reese, “I Don’t Like” (Prod. by Young Chop)

Albums (incomplete – still have a bunch to fully process)
Boldy James, Consignment
Tree, Sunday School
Lil Durk, I’m Still a Hitta
Schoolboy Q, Habits & Contradictions
Jackie Chain, After Hours
Feva, Pay Da Fee
Gucci Mane, Trap Back
Young Thug, Came From Nothing 2
Rick Ross, Rich Forever

I’ll be answering some questions that piled up on the somanyshrimp tumblr after I publish this, so if you are curious about this story, feel free to ask through tumblr.

On DJ Kenn’s early influences and arrival in Chicago:

Kenn, who declined to give his real name for this article, is originally from the Yamagata Prefecture of Japan. He produced the beat for “Bang,” as well as several of Keef’s other songs. He discovered hip-hop as a teenager living in Japan, and became a big fan of Dr. Dre, Nas and Cam’ron. (“[Stillmatic and Come Home With Me] are classics to me,” Kenn said when asked about his favorite performers. “I used to listen to those every day.”) When he turned 18, around 2005, Kenn moved to Tokyo, and within two years followed a friend to New York City. “I always looked up to him,” he explained. “He was doing music with people [in the U.S.]. I was like, I want to do music like him.” The United States completely changed Kenn’s perceptions of hip-hop. “Right here, everything is life-sized,” Kenn said in a thick accent. “Radio, parties, or even clothes, anything. This is real. In Japan, it’s different. People get older and they start to listen to it. Right here, it’s like babies listen to hip-hop, they grow up with the rhythm.”

Kenn had planned to just spend a year in the United States, but within ten months of moving to New York, he flew instead to Chicago. He spoke little-to-no English, and knew no one in the city; he just knew he wanted to make music. He was wandering through Woodlawn, near 60th and Indiana, when a man discovered him and found him a place to stay. His name was Keith, and he was Chief Keef’s uncle. “He took me to an apartment right there across the street”–Kenn gestures out the front window— “and I stayed over there and started to do music. Keef came through, [Fredo] Santana came through, and we started recording.”

First impressions of 11-year-old Chief Keef

“First time I came to the studio, I didn’t fuck with a lot of people. But when Keef came to my studio, I was like, this boy…” he trails off, gesturing, as if to gather thoughts he hadn’t put into words before. “He’s different. Even how he talks, how he acts, how to rap [sic]. He was only 11 years old but he was different than everybody. How he talk, how he’s thinking …. [He] always comes with something new. Everybody is trying to do somebody [else] — no disrespect to anybody–but Keef, each song he comes with something new, just him.”

Breaking into the High School audience; the influence of DGainz; shooting the video for “BANG”:

“We used to pay attention to what Bump was doing. They was out hardcore in the streets.” In 2006 and 2007, Doe and Louie used to burn CDs and distribute them by hand: “Schools, bus stops, El stations, parties we would go to.” One of Louie’s earliest tracks became famous throughout the network of East Side High Schools when the star rapped about all the girls he had slept with, naming names. Lyrics and catchphrases could spread like viruses; Doe quotes a particular King Louie lyric. “You could walk up to anybody on the South Side this summer, ‘roll up the dope–’ [they respond] ‘where the bitches at.’” He continued: “There are so many schools on the East Side. The Kenwoods, the Dunbars. And the CPS’s (Chicago Public Schools), once you’ve got those, they spread around throughout the communities. Each person from that school might be from a different area. So they go back to that area and spread it. It’s like a domino effect. And the East Side has been at the forefront of that movement for a long time.”

King Louie’s rise coincided with the arrival of Duan Gaines, a hip-hop producer and pioneering street cinematographer who goes by the name DGainz. “I was working with my little cousin, producing and writing for him. The songs were nice songs, everybody liked them. I said, we need some visuals to them. So I bought a camera and it came natural.” DGainz is a humble 23-year-old, untrained in cinematography. He’s also the driving force behind Chicago’s underground street-rap scene as it’s made its way to the Internet for the very first time. His success was rapid and influential, and much of it occurred in the past year.

DGainz received a big boost when he was contacted by Louie this past summer. Louie had become the South Side’s biggest local star. Once DGainz dropped a dark, cinematic visual for Louie’s “Gumbo Mobsters,” the floodgates opened, and artists from across the city wanted a DGainz video. One of these artists was Chief Keef, who contacted DGainz directly through facebook.

They met at A.O.N. studios, which was located in an apartment and run by DJ Kenn. The video to “Bang” was shot in 30 minutes in the backyard of the studio. “I just wanted to give it the look that it sounded [like]. It had a grimy sound to it,” said Gaines. By the time Keef’s Bang mixtape was released in early October, the video for the title track had 70,000 views. By New Years Eve, that number would surpass 400,000, largely, according to YouTube statistics, through mobile views; kids were watching the videos on their phones. It had become the runaway hit of DGainz already-impressive videography.

Katie Got Bandz on her goals as an artist:

Katie Got Bandz, whose “I Need A Hitta” has in the area of 95,000 views to date, has been performing at dance halls, clubs and sweet sixteen parties since her track took off earlier this summer. Shot by Citi Boi Skills, another of the street cinematographers to rise in the wake of DGainz increased notoriety, the track made Katie — whose real name is Kiara Johnson — a local celebrity. She says she first noticed that her song was taking off when she started getting negative feedback. Like many of the artists behind these videos, there was no calculation to her success; her motivation to pursue a more serious career came from the sudden fanbase that urged her to keep recording. “I don’t really care about the fame or the recognition,” she says earnestly. “I want people to respect me for who I am, not for where I’m going, or just for the work people know me by.”

I spoke with a high school teacher who observed these artists popularity firsthand:

Lydia Merrill, a high school art teacher whose former students included both Katie Got Bandz and Sasha Gohard, could see the artists’ success firsthand. She first heard about Chief Keef through her students, prior to his appearance on WorldStar. She knew a few of her students were aspiring rappers, but it wasn’t until students started inquiring about a particular self-portrait hung on her classroom wall that she realized how big they had become. “Students were always asking me if that was ‘Sasha,’ and I would correct them saying, ‘no, it’s one of my former students, Yaniesha.’ Until one day someone told me about all the videos.”

On violence in the communities:

Alex Riley argued that this was simply the lifestyle of kids in the area: “Honestly, from where I grew up, and a lot of kids my age growing up, they have guns. Kids keep guns on them because they’ve got to protect themselves. And these kids be bad as hell, they do a lot of bad shit, so they can relate to what he’s saying. And ALL of them smoke loud. I’d say every kid born ’92, ’93, all the way up, only smokes loud weed. So everything he’s saying, they can relate to. That’s why they’re so attracted to it.”

Big Homie Doe echoed this sentiment. “It’s sad to say, but that’s what happens. That’s what goes on. A lot of these kids—people like me, Louie, Keef—grew up around situations like that. It’s sort of what people know. It’s not like people [are] looking on the TV and emulating anything. A lot of the gangster shit and all that started in Chicago, dating back to the Al Capone days. It’s deep-rooted here in Chicago. Even all our politicians are locked up. It’s something sort of in the water and especially in the blood of people here….Because if you’re there with them yourself, and be around [these neighborhoods], you’ll see what’s going on. And you’ll talk about the same things, too.”

Chief Keef on rap style:

“See, motherfuckers think I can’t do metaphors and ain’t about metaphors and punchlines. They–” he gestured at a fanbase, outside the apartment, “don’t want to see me do that. I don’t sit down and ‘think,’ I write about what’s going on right now, what we just did, what just happened. That’s what I write about. I don’t be trying so hard. I used to, ask him–” he points at DJ Kenn. “He told me to stop! Kenn was the reason. He said, ‘stop saying so much.’ That’s why I got comfortable and started–” he’s interrupted suddenly by someone knocking at his door; he signals them through the window, banging a vase against it to get their attention.

Chief Keef gets into rapping:

Keef grew up in Woodlawn, just a few blocks east of his grandmother’s residence. He attended Dulles Elementary at 63rd and King Drive, and all the people in his videos are people he’s known since he was young. His grandmother is a school bus driver; his mother still lives in the neighborhood. (“Fuck my dad,” Keef said brusquely; Keef has a daughter of his own now). Keef was raised on hip-hop; he remembers first hearing Beanie Sigel and G-Unit, and his earliest memories of rapping were into an old karaoke machine when he was around nine years of age. “Little-ass kids, about ‘05, ‘04. We used to freestyle, I used to be so cold, even when I was a little shorty. I used to be freestyling raw as hell! See now my brain’s fucked up from smoking so much loud, but I was raw! We had the blank tapes, put ‘em in there, got the little mic, got the beat playing, the weak-ass beats and shit. Called ourselves Total Domination.”

Chief Keef on his favorite rappers:

Since his sudden national breakthrough, Keef’s found some allies in unexpected quarters. In addition to avant-weirdo Lil B’s appearance on the “Bang” remix, critically-acclaimed rapper Danny Brown showed some enthusiasm for Keef recently on Twitter. But Keef’s hip-hop aspirations are well within hip-hop’s mainstream. “Gucci, Soulja, Future, Tity Boi, Young Jeezy, Yo Gotti. That’s about it,” he says about his favorite artists, before adding that in Chicago, all he sees is King Louie and his friends from the neighborhood. Later on, he raps the hook to Fat Trel’s “Respect with the Tec,” a song from another young, rising artist. Trel became a breakout street rapper last year, in part thanks to his own singular visual presence on YouTube.

DJ Kenn on being an outsider from Japan:

“To keep it real, it made me realize this is a whole other country, this is not Japan. And–I cannot speak [well]–it made me change a lot. Sometimes it was too bad. I used to think you can trust anybody, I was trying to be positive to everybody. It made me think, you can’t trust nobody. But at the same time, good friends are good friends for real. No matter what. It made me strong.”

Previous:
The Fader blog posts, 2/20-2/24
The Fader blog posts, 2/13-2/17
The Fader blog posts, 2/6-2/10
The Fader blog posts, 1/30-2/3
The Fader blog posts, 1/23-1/27
The Fader blog posts, 1/17-1/20 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 1/9-1/13
The Fader blog posts, 1/3-1/6 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 12/19-12/21 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 12/12-12/16
The Fader blog posts, 12/5-12/9
The Fader blog posts, 11/28-12/2

Previous:
The Fader blog posts, 2/13-2/17
The Fader blog posts, 2/6-2/10
The Fader blog posts, 1/30-2/3
The Fader blog posts, 1/23-1/27
The Fader blog posts, 1/17-1/20 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 1/9-1/13
The Fader blog posts, 1/3-1/6 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 12/19-12/21 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 12/12-12/16
The Fader blog posts, 12/5-12/9
The Fader blog posts, 11/28-12/2

“Speakin’ in Tongues” was a great beat wasted on a past-his-prime Cam’ron and never-going-to-have-a-prime Vado, because if given to another rapper, New York would have had its biggest rap song in years. Jahlil Beats delivers a similarly Eastern-style beat to 50 Cent, a display for both the dexterity of his flows and his still-intact pop sensibilities.

The Big 10 came out at the end of last year, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 50 Cent’s 50 Cent is the Future mixtape. While it was nice PR to connect his new mixtape with his classic work, the The Big 10 never comes close to besting his early 2000s material. In the last five years, critics and rap fans have made numerous arguments about how 50 Cent has fallen off, and while this isn’t as good as his older work, some of the songs are worth more than a few replays.

“Put Your Hands Up” should be all over rap station mix shows at 11:30 PM any night of the week; the elastic beat entices people to begin dancing. 50 Cent’s history of jacking beats means that he can hop from one style to another with relative ease. Here he treats the beat the way he did Drumma Boy’s “Down on Me,” slowing and speeding up his flow multiple times, never letting up until the end of the 2:28 running time. The song hasn’t received a real radio push, but considering 50 Cent has not had a hit solo song in over three years, this track would be a great one to get behind. It proves that 50 can be just as vital today as he was back when each successive song he and G-Unit released topped the charts.

This is off of San Jose rapper Antwon’s Fantasy Beds Mixtape. Peep dude’s bandcamp, some interesting things have been coming out of Natureboy gang and shit the south bay in general.

Previous:
The Fader blog posts, 2/6-2/10
The Fader blog posts, 1/30-2/3
The Fader blog posts, 1/23-1/27
The Fader blog posts, 1/17-1/20 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 1/9-1/13
The Fader blog posts, 1/3-1/6 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 12/19-12/21 (shortened week)
The Fader blog posts, 12/12-12/16
The Fader blog posts, 12/5-12/9
The Fader blog posts, 11/28-12/2