Chief Keef

At seventeen, ranking his top 25 songs for Complex, Chief Keef gave Gucci Mane the list's only entry that wasn't his own — naming 2008's Gucci Sosa his favorite tape and lifting its title outright for his own alter ego. "I was a big fan of Gucci [Mane] and Lil Wayne," he told Grammy.com years later. "Still am." The nickname outlived the borrowing: in 2014, with Gucci sitting in federal prison on a firearms charge, the two released Big Gucci Sosa anyway, the student cutting a full mixtape alongside the rapper he'd named himself after.

listen: upstream & heresource: Grammy.com — Chief Keef on 'Almighty So 2' (his own testimony on Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne as influences) ↗share

2009

LemonadeGucci Mane

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2012

Love SosaChief Keef

listen forCue up Gucci Mane's 2009 hit "Lemonade" and Chief Keef's 2012 "Love Sosa" back to back and the family resemblance is in the hook, not the beat: both songs build their choruses out of a short, sung-more-than-rapped phrase repeated until it turns into a chant — Gucci's drawled "lemonade," answered by a children's choir, against Keef's "These bitches love Sosa" looping over Young Chop's ominous strings. Neither artist is selling bars here; they're selling a phrase you can shout back.

By 2013, Chief Keef had stopped writing lyrics down entirely — a choice he traced straight to Lil Wayne. "I started trying to get on my Wayne shit," he told XXL. "Wayne inspired that." It wasn't just the freestyle method; it was the whole apparatus around it, including the prescription cough syrup Wayne was famous for sipping through the Carter years. Keef named the debt again a decade later: "The old Lil Wayne, I still even rap like that," he told Grammy.com. "If you listen to 'Jesus,' I got his flow — some Lil Wayne, the old Wayne, inspiration."

listen: upstream & heresource: Grammy.com — Chief Keef on 'Almighty So 2' (his own testimony on Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne as influences) ↗share

1999

Tha Block Is HotLil Wayne

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2024

JesusChief Keef

listen forChief Keef named the exact song: play Lil Wayne's 1999 breakout "Tha Block Is Hot" against Keef's 2024 "Jesus" and listen for the vocal cadence, not the words — Wayne's habit of riding just behind the beat, drawing out vowels until a rapped line starts to slide toward singing. Keef borrows that same lag and slur wholesale, though he pushes it further, letting words blur toward mumble where Wayne still keeps every syllable legible.

Waka Flocka's bellowed ad-lib "Squaaaaaad," the signature holler off his 2010 album Flockaveli, spread across hip-hop and pop culture alike — but Chief Keef got there first, clipping it to one syllable, "Squah," and folding it into his own vocal toolkit. The debt ran deeper than a word: Pitchfork called Keef's breakout mixtape "undeniably the child of Waka Flocka Flame and producer Lex Luger's indelible Flockaveli," and Vice put it more bluntly — "Chief Keef's national rise in 2012 would not have happened had he and the rest of the Glory Boyz not spent the bulk of their childhoods absorbing all of 1017 Brick Squad's output."

listen: upstream & heresource: Vice — Why Waka Flocka Flame's 'Flockaveli' and His 'Squad' Ad Lib Will Never Be Forgotten, 2024 (ad-lib lineage, critical consensus quote) ↗share

2010

Hard in Da PaintWaka Flocka Flame

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2012

I Don't LikeChief Keef

listen forPlay Waka Flocka's 2010 "Hard in Da Paint" against Chief Keef's 2012 breakout "I Don't Like" and the shared architecture is obvious inside the first bar: both tracks bury the vocal under a wall of ad-libs shouted as loud as the hook itself, over a stripped-down, minor-key beat built almost entirely from 808s and ominous strings. Waka is screaming where Keef mutters, but the underlying idea — let the ad-lib carry the energy the words don't — is the one Young Chop carried wholesale into Chicago drill.