Ke$ha, Chief Keef, Guns, and Edible Arrangements

There’s a teenage rapper/gang member named Chief Keef. He sings or rather pontificates with a blunt in hand about “That Shit I Don’t Like.”

It’s an awful song, but I understand why it’s popular. It has a self-empowering and hateful hook, which children of privilege from Danville to New Canaan can blast while commuting to their respective private institutions of higher learning.

Chief Keef grumbles for a few minutes and let’s us know exactly what it is that he doesn’t like. It’s mainstream rap’s answer to the a Facebook status update.

It’s nothing new. Celebrating hatred, endorsing uneducated and disenfranchised youth who preach and practice all the typical stuff: misogyny, violence, smoking blunts the size of corn on the cob, etc. These topics pre-date N.W.A.

On the other end of the spectrum is Ke$ha. Her song “Die Young” which twelve year old girls have been singing for months was pulled from the air. The words “Die Young” have been used in dozens if not hundreds of other songs, but they are suddenly relevant in the discussion about Newtown.

To me this plays like a thinly veiled publicity stunt. Why pull a highly publicized and overplayed song unless you wanted to rejuvenate it with some fresh buzz for the sake of sales? How many twelve year old girls listen to radio stations or even know what they are? I mean, Ke$ha didn’t get yanked from Spotify or YouTube. We’re talking about Ke$ha fans not Merle Haggard fans.

The esteemed Chief Keef is unreserved on the subject of guns and killing, and I quote:

My gun, don’t make me beat it

I’m cooling wit my young niggas

A lot of kush, a lot of guns nigga

You see you us you better run nigga

Bullets hot like the sun nigga

Or:

Kill y’all then forget yall

I feel like popping red dots

Big guns that knock ya head off

Ke$ha is talking about dancing, I think, and living as if she was going to die young. As in carpe diem or the ubiquitous: Y.O.L.O.

Chief Keef on the other hand isn’t speaking in the conditional. It’s not a hypothetical situation. He’s simply and almost incoherently making threats at whoever is nice enough to support his cause.

Essentially, Chief Keef should fire his label’s marketing team for not pulling his song off the air while Ke$ha should probably send over an edible arrangement to her team.

Fact: Chief Keef posted a picture of himself reaping the rewards of having female fans on Instagram. And you were upset that Instagram owns a picture that you took of some pad thai…

Fact #2: Chief Keef had to shoot the video for his aforementioned song inside his house because he was on house arrest for being involved in a shoot out. You know, with guns and stuff.