“It’s like being locked up,” Chief Keef, 18, tells Billboard, in his first interview since he entered rehab. “And when I’m locked up, I don’t want anybody to come see me. I won’t let my family come here. I haven’t seen my 2-year-old daughter.”
The Chicago rapper, born Keith Cozart, is staring out a large bay window in the wood-paneled upstairs den at Wavelengths Recovery, a private sober-living home at an undisclosed Orange County location. Keef’s been here for the past two months, ever since a judge sentenced him to 90 days of rehab after he tested positive for marijuana in October while on probation for a gun charge. The sentence began at Promises, the Malibu detox of choice for A-listers like Britney Spears, until Keef got fed up. “I had to stay with 30 motherfuckers — and I don’t like people,” Keef says. “I ain’t no friendly-ass ni—a. I won’t shake your hand if I don’t like you. Don’t speak to me.”
At Wavelengths, he’s supervised 24 hours a day in a regimen focused on sleep training, nutrition and spirituality. Hollywood stars like Denzel Washington have visited him, and he can leave for approved excursions — mainly to the recording studio, where he’s finishing his second album, “Bang 3,” due March 3. Keef says he hasn’t even been in the water, just steps away. “The beach is cool, but it’s just water,” he says. “I can’t do salt water — fucks my eyes up.”
The sunny SoCal beach feels a world away from Keef’s home base, the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago, one of the most dangerous areas of a city plagued by gang violence. Growing up there, Keef was a magnet for trouble early on. In 2011, after building a fan base in local high schools, he was arrested for unlawful use of a weapon and aggravated assault after a run-in with the police, and sentenced to house arrest at his grandmother’s apartment. Rumors swirled that he’d been killed in a police shootout, and when a fan-made video featuring a young child going berzerk over the rapper’s return was picked up by Gawker and WorldStar Hip Hop, Keef’s buzz went national. His nihilistic videos for “Bang” and “I Don’t Like,” featuring him and his shirtless friends waving guns and smoking weed, attracted millions of views. In 2012, “I Don’t Like” was remixed by Kanye West and his G.O.O.D. Music crew, helping the song reach No. 10 on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Digital Songs chart. Keef and the local gangsta-rap scene he represented, known as drill, became hip-hop’s newest fascination, and major labels wanted a piece of the action. He quickly inked an eye-popping deal with Interscope worth a reported $6 million.