Rising Chicago rapper King Louie is having a great month. The first day of May Kanye West‘s label, G.O.O.D. Music, released a remix of “I Don’t Like,” a track by another Chicago hip-hop sensation, a 16-year-old MC by the name of Chief Keef. The song features drops from Chief Keef, Kanye, Pusha T, Jadakiss, and Big Sean, and Kanye takes a moment of his contribution to rep his hometown and shout-out a few local hip-hop artists, including King Louie: “Chief Keef, King Louie / This is Chi, right?”

That’s just the beginning: Yesterday Chicago hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive broke the news that King Louie signed a deal with Epic Records (and its parent company, Sony), which will release his official debut album, Dope & Shrimp, in conjunction with Lawless Inc. And on Sunday King Louie and a number of his peers will play a concert that will be filmed by MTV2 for a Chicago-centric episode of its “Sucker Free” program.

Needless to say, there are plenty of great things coming King Louie’s way, but when I reach the 24-year-old rapper on the phone–a week before his deal with Epic/Sony was officially announced–he’s waiting for a flight home from L.A., and he’s only got one thing on his mind: His 4-year-old daughter, Layla. “I really miss my daughter right now,” he says. “I’m ready to get home right now.”

King Louie’s musical style is heavily influenced by a bombastic style of hip-hop from the south known as trap, but home is where his heart and head are: He reps his East Side neighborhood in his songs, he’s got a tattoo of deceased local rapper and friend Pac Man on his neck (“I just got that out of respect for my brother,” he says), and he has nothing but positive things to say about the other MCs that are putting the spotlight on Chicago’s rap community. “Community is very important, and everybody’s supporting everybody, rocking with a movement,” he says. “You can’t be stopped.”

In a profile on King Louie for hip-hop blog So Many Shrimp from last fall, the site’s founder, freelance journalist David Drake, wrote that the MC is “the right artist at the right time, poised to become Chicago’s street rap savior.” It’s taken years for King L to arrive at that place–seven or eight years, by his count, since he first started rapping–during which time he’s released some seven mixtapes, including his latest collection, The Motion Picture. (He titled the mixtape Motion Picture because “the stuff that I go through, the things that I see and I experience, it’s like movie s***,” he say
King Louie dropped his first mixtape, Boss S***, in the fall of 2007, and began selling his music out of the trunk of his car and in Chicago Public Schools, where his profile began to rise. As David Drake’s Gakwer profile on Chief Keef points out, the city’s network of schools became a major channel of distribution for street rappers and a breeding ground for a diehard local fanbase–which, according to King Louie, more or less makes sense. “There are schools everywhere in the city,” he says. “Everybody in the school listens to music.” Louie knows this first hand, having attended Hyde Park Academy for three years before graduating from an alternative school in 2006.

After graduating King Louie focused on building a following through one-on-one mixtape sales until a couple years ago when he was struck by a car, which sent him up in the air and into the hospital. Louie says he landed on his mouth, leaving his teeth in disrepair, both of his legs broken, and both of his lungs bruised. It took the rapper about three or four months to make a full recovery. “I had to learn how to walk again and all that s***,” he says. “When I came back out I tried to go harder than I was before I got hit.”

One of the new methods of self-promotion King Louie began to explore was making music videos. His first video was for the song “I’m Arrogant,” the lead-off track from his 2010 mixtape, Man Up, Band Up, and others followed suit. Along with offering a new channel for promotion, music videos gave King Louie a system to measure his growing fanbase: YouTube views. Suddenly King Louie not only noticed how large his following was, but he had exact numbers to underscore his surging popularity.

Now, not even two years after posting his first video to YouTube, King Louie is one of a number of Chicago hip-hop artists landing big record deals: YP signed to Universal Republic in February, producer Young Chop (who made the beat for Keef’s “I Don’t Like” and contributed to King Louie’s Motion Picture) signed a production deal with Warner Brothers in April, and Lil Durk and Lil Reese signed to Def Jam a few weeks ago. Even more Chicago rappers are expected to nab deals in the not-too-distant future. King Louie got flown out to L.A., where he worked on his new deal with Epic/Sony, cranked out some new tunes, did an interview with MTV, and swung by a dentist to get his teeth fixed (“got me a new grill, shout out to the label,” he says).

It was during King Louie’s time in L.A. that Kanye dropped the “I Don’t Like” remix, and Kanye’s shout-out to the MC was a pleasant surprise. “That was dope,” King Louie says. “I wasn’t doing all this workin’ and the rapping for nothing. Somebody heard it, and somebody relevant heard it.” For King Louie, who had never even spoken to Kanye, that shout-out is one of many recent events that have bolstered his career choice and given him the evidence that his years of hard work have gone a long way. ”It feels good. I’m proud of myself as a young black man,” he says. “Where I come from, I’m doing something positive and constructive with myself. I’m just happy.”