Chief Keef - Bang 3

Chief Keef
Bang 3
2015

Vibe Hip Hop for the most part can be grading, repetitive and at it's worst completely formulaic. Chief Keef on his new record Bang 3 takes the worst of this genre and turns it on it's head and makes something incredibly solid. Where a lot of vibe music will default to posturing or bragging as the only way of communicating Keef instead goes with aggression. In a scene known for it's laying back, Chief Keef refuses to slouch and instead takes the same beats, adds a ton more bass, and grounds his lyrics directly in the street. The result is palpable, where you would usually sit back and let this music flow over you, Chief Keef makes you deal with it head on. Cheif is in a new phase of his career; after years of putting out just ok mixtapes and other projects it seems like He has finally decided that a clear vision and direct approach rather than being all over the map is what it takes to make an album like Bang 3 happen. "I Just Wanna" has some of the most interesting production molding and shifting from a normal track into some kind of vampiric opera towards the end, it is followed by "Yes" which swells in and out producing one of the best bangers on the record.

Chief Keef is also much more concise than usual on this record. At only 14 tracks very few of which are over four minutes Bang 3 seeks to have more pop appeal, however the result is also a more focused project. Chief is forced to use his words and beats wisely rather than meander and the constraint leads to higher efficiency of words. The one slip up here could be his 80s-ish ballad "Ain't Missing You". Probably in an attempt to recreate P Diddy's "I'll be Missing You" with a touch of Tupac's "Changes" the song just comes across as far to contrived for it's own good and suffers from an overload of gun shoots, police sirens and heart monitor sounds. That aside the rest of the record stays in the same vein as what came before and continues to expand on what Chief Keef is trying to do. Bang 3 probably is not an all time great, but it is a move in the right direction, especially for Chief Keef but also for Hip Hop as a whole. Vibe music which has struggled to develop past the box it put itself in will benefit from this album, the times, they are a changin.

7.9 out of 10