He became obsessed with making beats, an entirely non-verbal mode of expression on October's brooding, distorted Back From the Dead 2 tape, released a week after the announcement that Keef was dropped from Interscope, he produced 16 of its 20 tracks. Yips, skrrrrts, and gurgles took the place of coherent language. He drowned the crowd-pleasing hooks of Finally Rich in Auto-Tune and promethazine (he’s blamed critically panned 2013 mixtapes Bang 2 and Almighty So on the latter) and probed the outer limits of vocal performance. Since then, the Chicago ex-pat has refused to be understood on any terms other than his own, rejecting anything remotely resembling his 2012 crossover hits in favor of abstraction and obscurity. Then again, Keef’s thorough immersion in his own universe of aesthetics echoes his musical agenda since the release of his divisive major label debut two years ago. He’s turned his Los Angeles home into his own private museum, obsessing over the minutia of presentation ( "Trying to see if I should keep what’s up up?")-this from the guy whose preferred mode of self-expression, not so long ago, was "Emojis". Last month, Keef helped curate a gallery show in collaboration with media company FRANK151, to which he also contributed original artwork. There’s a collage of Keef as a Viking skeleton holding America in a cage (he calls it "Americun Shakedown") a sketch of a dread-headed Mount Rushmore a triptych depicting a G-rated Keef engaging in water sports. Often, they’re depicted (by what seems to be Glo Gang’s in-house artist, a silver-bearded Angeleno called Bill Da Butcher) as members of a cheery cartoon solar system Blood Money, Keef’s cousin and the Gang’s eldest member, who was shot and killed in Chicago last spring, is memorialized as a tattooed moon with angel wings.
They’re mostly portraits of himself and his friends, in varying degrees of trippiness. The evidence is all there on Chief Keef’s Instagram which, in recent months, has been filled with dozens of commissioned and original works of art.
The anthropomorphic cartoon moon is in the seventh house, and Glo Gang has entered its Age of Aquarius.
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