Chicago
A city whose rap story stretches from lyrical tradition and soul production to drill and multiple internet-era movements.
The RRL read
Chicago’s rap history cannot be reduced to one scene. Kanye West maps the city’s soul-sample and auteur branch; G Herbo carries one side of the drill generation into adulthood; Chief Keef adds the youth-led internet breakthrough whose influence traveled far beyond Chicago. The city page can hold those branches together without pretending they are the same sound.
Artists in this story
Chance turned Chicago mixtape momentum into one of rap’s clearest independence experiments — then had to rebuild in public when the model stopped feeling invincible.
Chief Keef sounded like Chicago’s next kid for about five minutes. Then the rest of rap spent years catching up to what that kid had already changed.
G Herbo came out of Chicago drill rapping like survival had details the headlines were missing — then spent the next decade explaining what those years did to the people who lived them.
Kanye kept changing the sound, scale and presentation of rap albums. The harder part now is talking honestly about that influence without pretending the damage around the later years is separate from the story.
The producers behind this part of the sound
The names behind the records, scenes and eras connected to this story.
Go deeper from here
Clips, stories and RRL originals tied to this part of hip-hop.
