When DJ outfit Groupie Love, aka rapper Vic Mensa and producer Smoko Ono, played Emporium in Wicker Park late Monday night I managed to catch a little bit of their set. I didn’t stick around long enough to catch Mensa roll out “U Mad,” his latest unreleased collaboration with Kanye West, but I did see Mensa bust out a track Chief Keef dropped at the beginning of October called “Faneto.” Released a few weeks before Keef’s public fallout with Interscope “Faneto” has slowly evolved into an underground hit—it’s garnered more than six million plays on YouTube alone. “Faneto” has also become a soundtrack for six-second Vine videos, a magnet for MCs looking for a song to remix and hop on, and an energy-acceleration button for DJs eager to get crowds to turn up.
The “College Craze 3” Vine is one of many six-second loops highlighting peoples’ love for the song. Late last month local rap blog Kollege Kidd compiled hundreds of clips of fans going nuts to the track into a 62-minute YouTube video called “Chief Keef Faneto: The Movie,” which the site published under the title “Is Chief Keef’s ‘Faneto’ Bigger Than ‘I Don’t Like?’” The video doesn’t exactly make a case for either song being bigger than the other considering it’s all about “Faneto,” but it was enough to get the attention of bigger music outlets such as Fader and Stereogum—and, in a way, that could help the track cross over (although that might have already happened: the video’s netted more than 80,000 views in less than two weeks). At the very least “Faneto: The Movie” shows ASAP Rocky rocking Keef’s track, which isn’t a bad cosign.
