![]() What distinguishes drill from other forms of hip-hop is its combative energy and its particular concern with gang conflict and murder. Named after a slang term for attacks between gangs, drill is ominous hip-hop with lyrics – like trap and gangster rap before it – about drug dealing and street crime. Less than 50 years later, Chicago's deeply disenfranchised black communities gave birth to drill, a rap sound that has since spread to London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Stockholm, Sydney, Dublin, Seoul and Kumasi. – The exhilarating songs of street protests – How rappers are resurrecting punk spirits But by March 1967 he himself admitted that much of his work had already been undone. ![]() King left in 1966 after agreeing an improved housing plan with the mayor. Much of Chicago's black population lived in slums on the south and west sides. He found a deeply divided city, not governed by the Jim Crow laws which separated southern states, but equally segregated by socio-economic disparity and divisive housing plans. Here, you’ll hear from several members of this new generation coming out of the five boroughs, some of whom are currently incarcerated, and the stories of pride and pain they’ve been fighting for their lives to tell for as long as the city passes the mic to them.In 1965 Martin Luther King arrived in Chicago, looking to expand his civil rights campaign beyond the American South. If there is as much violence engulfing New Yorkers as he (and other mayors before him) says there is, then the art produced by the city’s lifers can only report the truth: Living here is to be at constant odds with loving it here. They combed through lyrics and music videos for clues of any crime, leading to artists being pulled from the lineups at major rap festivals in the city, shows being shut down hours before opening, and, increasingly, mass indictments targeting gang affiliates, an unavoidable birthright for far too many of the city’s children.Įarlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams, incensed by the murders of two local drill hopefuls, met with several members of the scene for a summit on what the city can do about drill and the role he suggests it has played in an uptick in bloodshed throughout his constituency. It took less than a year for the NYPD to direct its so-called hip-hop unit to surveil drill on social media. In New York, on any given day this summer, you might hear a high schooler cut through a bustling McDonald’s on Atlantic Avenue to announce to her friends that South Bronx star B-Lovee just posted something hilarious on Instagram and then immediately clock his friends Dougie B and Kay Flock wailing through a car’s speakers on their hit with Cardi B, “ Shake It.” But as popular as drill has become since Canarsie’s Pop Smoke welcomed the city to the party in the spring of 2019, it has also made countless enemies. Like all hip-hop, it is a culture born of suffering and a desire to alchemize the pain, and so, like many rap scenes before it, the music and those making it have been misread as causing harm instead of working through harm done. There is an unflinching sense of desperation reflected in drill. It got its name from the kill-or-be-killed mentality (the word literally means “to shoot”), a code wherein black-and-white ideas about morality are sacrificed in the name of survival. ![]() ![]() Drill - pushed into the mainstream by artists like Chief Keef and translated as far and wide as London and, later, Brooklyn and the Bronx - created a potent, grisly language for a community to talk to itself about what it meant to call a metropolitan war zone home. Just over a decade ago, a sprawling ecosystem of mainly teenagers in Chicago’s South Side who grew up with trap’s mixture of no-holds-barred realism and aspirational escapism found a way to distill the conflicting feelings of their neighborhood into a new rap subgenre. It’s open season for the good and the ugly, and for the past three years, summer in the city - the whole city - has sounded like drill music. All that pent-up kinetic energy from the long winter collects, then the fire hydrants crack open and the colliding pressures coursing through each block and borough burst onto every sidewalk.
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