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The Village is comprised of Kembe, Isaiah Rashad, Jean Deaux, Alex Wiley, Monster Mike, and others. Most are from urban Chicago, coming up from nothing – and now all of them are reaching people across the nation with their music

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Kembe loves his Backwoods, a brand of cigar that seems to be popular among Chicago rappers

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Kembe followed an unusual path to where he now is: he dropped out of school at 15, smoked a lot of weed, and started rapping and being happy

His mom didn’t approve of the direction his life was headed and wanted him to go back to school. However, Kembe stuck with it and kept spitting – and you see where he is now

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Kembe’s smoking & driving (Soulo probably wouldn’t approve)

Interestingly, one of the songs that helped Kembe gain his initial following was a collaboration with Alex Wiley and Chance the Rapper titled “Mo Purrp”

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Kembe drops his second TDE collaboration in as many days, this time with first-time collaborator Ab-Soul. Kembe’s close friend and Village mate Alex Wiley adds the hook.

Wiley broke news of this collaboration in a tweet months before it dropped

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Kembe joins Village Mate Isaiah Rashad in his distaste for the label of freshman. Zay has said on wax that he “ain’t tryna be no freshman” and has warned not to put him on Freshman covers (but XXL did anyway)

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Kembe has a vision and money to get to, so you know he’s going to make it. Kembe puns on the phrase “the planets aligned”, usually meaning that the time is right for something great to happen, tweaking the phrase to reference 777 The Village; the message remains, though, as Kembe X is on his way up

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Kembe really was diagnosed with A.D.D. back when he was 12, and he recently dropped a song to make sure you got the message

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Even though Kembe was the first rapper from The Village (and one of the first of the New Chicago, for that matter) to gain notoreity – back in 2011, with his mixtape Self Rule – a couple of his Village mates and even more of his Chitown homies have since gained more of a following than him

Kembe isn’t worried about this at all though; he knows patience is a virtue (although he resents it), and is taking his time to master his work before putting it out. You can see this in the fact that he has only released one 7-track project since Self Rule. Rest assured, though: Kembe’s been in the lab

https://twitter.com/Alex_Wiley/status/467721243089588224

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