THE defining document of hip-hop’s current evolutionary state isn’t a song, or a music video or a concert. Years from now cultural archaeologists will do much better to look back over the Twitter account of the 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who’s been exploding, or imploding, depending on how you look at it, one short burst of text at a time.

Last month Lil JoJo, an aspiring rapper who had a feud with Chief Keef, was murdered, and afterward a message that appeared to be mocking his death was posted on Chief Keef’s Twitter account. Amid an ensuing outcry, he later suggested that his account had been hacked and proceeded to fill it up with a stream of uplifting aphorisms that were the opposite of his usual boasts, as if he had actually been hacked, but by Oprah Winfrey or Joel Osteen.

Around the same time Chief Keef, who has spent much of this year under house arrest because of gun charges, threatened the older Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, who in a fit of reckoning the previous week expressed grievous concerns about the younger rapper’s nihilistic music. Keef threatened on Twitter to “smack him like da lil bitch he is.” Again, after an outcry, he said his account had been hacked. Finally, also last month, Chief Keef was relieved of his Instagram account after posting, also to Twitter, a photo of himself receiving oral sex from a woman.