When I open my Zoom session with Chicago producer Young Chop, his display photo is a picture of him shirtless, flashing a wad of cash. “Boy, that ain’t never your Zoom picture! ” his manager Jessie “Jay Boogie” Green jokes. Chop flashes a beaming grin when he turns his camera on, riding in the passenger seat while traveling through his native Chicago. His trademark locs are gone. Instead, he’s rocking a small afro. He says he took the money-flashing photo at 18, in 2012, after reaping the rewards from his work with Chief Keef, a seminal rap figure who took drill music worldwide with Chop-produced hits like “Love Sosa,” which went diamond shortly before we spoke.
“How I feel about ‘Love Sosa’ going Diamond? I don’t even know,” he ponders. “It’s just crazy because my mouth dropped when I seen that come past my mentions. I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I was too happy.” While reminiscing on the record, he recalls that Keef initially recorded one verse to the song and then put it aside until he learned that French Montana wanted the anthemic beat.
“We was in the studio on some cool stuff that day,” he says of “Love Sosa’s” creation. “[Keef] was in the booth, and I was out in the control room, where I made the beat in five to ten minutes. He just had one verse to the song. He like, ‘Yeah, we going to finish it later on.’” But days later, when Keef heard French sought to buy the song, “He said, ‘Hell nah. Man, pull that shit up. I’m finna put another verse on it.’ And he finished strong.” Ten million units later, the song helped catapult the Chicago drill movement from a bubbling underground scene into a worldwide phenomenon. The drill sound has spread and morphed variants in the U.K., Brooklyn, and France — but it started in Chicago, with so many of its core moments created by Chop. It’s why some people give Chop titles like the “King” or “Godfather” of Drill.
“It’s a good name because I really crafted that in my mama’s room,” he says. “I wasn’t getting no sleep like that.” He estimates it took him two or three years to master Fruity Loops, his preferred beatmaking program, in high school. From there, it took him about a year to hone the dark, melodic allure of hits like “Love Sosa” and “Don’t Like,” which Kanye went on to remix (to Chop’s ire). By 2012, the Chicagoan had graduated from high school into rap stardom.
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Chop’s legacy is cemented as a drill forefather and, as such, one of the most important producers in hip-hop history. But his timeline has also been marked by a dark period in his life where grieving and reckless decisions took him where he’s called “rock bottom.” He doesn’t speak much on the gloomier aspects of his past these days, preferring to focus on new music. In January, he dropped A 4 Piece EP featuring the viral single “Chicken,” and he says he has plans to make more music with Keef. His return to music feels like a triumph from where he was several years ago.
Chop came home last December after spending over two years in Gwinnett County Jail on failure to appear and jumping bail charges stemming from prior probation violations. The jail stint came after what seemed like a public spiral, which included unprovoked shots at artists like 21 Savage and Meek Mill. During an April 2020 Instagram Live session, Chop streamed himself looking for 21 Savage in Atlanta. He was later arrested for reckless conduct after his Uber driver claimed Chop flashed a gun at a car that pulled up next to them, causing the people in the other vehicle to fire back. A week later, he was arrested on aggravated cruelty to animal charges after allegedly starving his dog.
Soon after, surveillance footage leaked of him on his porch shooting a gun. He became go-to content for the sensationalist underbelly of rap media during the early quarantine period, but it seemed like his life was unraveling. While refusing to engage Chop’s assertion that he was a “scary nigga,” Meek posted on X, “It’s obvious chop having some mental issues… y’all be gassing stuff so much y’all just gone ignore it! I been getting beats from him for years hope he get well.”
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Chop had just lost his grandmother, mother, and uncle in rapid succession, and in July of 2019, was open to media personality DJ Small Eyez about how the weight of their loss and feelings of isolation after cutting people off led him toward depression and anxiety. When I ask if grieving played a part in his actions during that time, I see his thought process shift in real-time. “Yeah, probably,” he quickly says before turning skeptical, surmising, “I don’t know. I don’t think that was that. It was just some whole other shit going on like it just be…that mood, it was crazy. No, that ain’t really have nothing to do with that.”
One thing he’s resolute about is regret for his actions during 2020. “I look back like that shit was stupid,” he says, reflecting that he was watching old videos from that period earlier and wondering, “What the hell? I was tweakin’. I don’t know what the hell that shit was, bro. I can’t even tell you in words how that [happened].”
When I ask him how he’s grieving his lost family members, he says, “I don’t know, I’m just chillin’ now. I don’t really think about it like that. [I] try not to think about that shit.” He had a similar answer when asked about the deaths of his Chop Squad Records artists Johnny May Cash and YB, who were killed while he was incarcerated — Johnny May Cash was his brother. It seems, like with many young Black men, he’s still processing his feelings on loss and finds it a sensitive spot to talk about.
During his time in Gwinnett County Jail, Chop says he spent a week in a mental health pod. He also says he got into “a lot of” fights. In one instance, while in a room awaiting hearings, he was slapped by another incarcerated person for no reason. Chop says that after retaliating and beating the man bloody, he pondered the aggressor’s mental health. “What the hell just made that man slap me like that,” he thought. The moment was illuminating — but not isolated. Last June, surveillance footage of Chop fighting a man in jail leaked. He says the tussle began because the fellow incarcerated person thought Chop was talking to himself when he was actually communicating on a tablet he was holding. The man screamed to the rest of the population that Chop was talking to himself, and things escalated into physical conflict.
But his carceral experience wasn’t strictly comprised of conflict; there was some creativity. He tells me he would often buy beats on his tablet and write songs he’d rap for everyone to hear. “I was loud as fuck. I didn’t give no fucks,” he jokes.
Chop wrote “Mop” from his A 4 Piece EP while incarcerated. The rest of the songs from A 4 Piece were made after he came home in December. The “First Day Out” song has become a staple for the newly-home-from-jail rapper, but Chop says he wanted to take his time with his musical output. The project’s soundscape demonstrates Chop in top form as a producer: “Chicken” interweaves his trademark dark keys and synths, while “MOP” takes an ethereal sample to the moon. Sharp drum programming characterizes the project, especially on “No Other Way,” where he slices up hi-hats over a discordant melody and lets us know, “I’mma stand ten toes down, bitch I ain’t runnin’.”
He tells me he’s working on a solo album to follow the EP. While he hasn’t been able to talk to many of the Chicago peers he’s come up with, he has communicated with Keef, who sent him some Glo Gang clothes and a computer mat to bolster his new Chicago home’s in-house studio (the hitmaker’s “fourth or fifth” home). Eventually, Chop plans to head to Los Angeles to work on new music with his greatest collaborator, Keef. “I told him we got to do a project. He’s like, ‘All right,’” Chop shares. “When I get to California, we gonna be working on it.“
In the meantime, Chop is working on his music and honing his video-directing skills. He recently bought a green screen and says he wants to make music videos for himself and others. “Watch,” he promises, “I’ma get good with that shit.” As far as his current musical approach goes, he promises freshness. “New money, just new everything,” he says. “An updated me. On some cool, laid-back shit. Not some crazy, rah-rah shit, you know?”
