New York City mayor Eric Adams held a summit with a group of drill rappers on Tuesday night and clarified he doesn’t actually want to ban their music, days after he appeared to blame the music scene for the recent shooting deaths of two young New York rappers and suggested drill videos be pulled from the internet. He now says he wants to work with the artists to address gun violence, amid a period of soul-searching in one of music’s most controversial communities.
Drill, named after the Chicago slang word for “kill”, was created in the early 2010s by rappers from some of Chicago’s most neglected neighborhoods, and features lurid stories of gang life – often laced with explicit threats against their rivals – over energetic, ominous instrumentals. The genre is known for its culture of “authenticity”, sometimes taken to an extreme: performers have been known to carry out the violent acts named in their lyrics, sometimes even while streaming on social media. These associations haven’t kept drill’s distinctive style from going mainstream, influencing acts such as Cardi B, Drake and Travis Scott, and spawning spin-off locales around the world, including in London and Paris.
Brooklyn drill rapper Maino, who helped organize the meeting with the mayor, posted a short clip of the event on Instagram, showing the rappers gathered around Adams. “I just wanted to create a conversation with the mayor … so he could get a real perspective and a real understanding of what drill rap is and so that we can have some real dialogue and really start to make things happen,” said the rapper in the video.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the mayor denied ever calling for a ban on drill music, but said he was concerned about “violent people who are using drill rapping to post who they killed, and then antagonize the people who they are going to kill”. The mayor added that he and those at the meeting “will be rolling out something in the next days to deal with this issue”.
Brooklyn is home to a significant drill movement, which combines musical influences from Chicago’s and London’s drill scenes, and became part of the unofficial soundtrack for local Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. But, as with these other urban epicenters, Brooklyn drill has also been marked by bloodshed.
The scene reeled when one of its biggest stars, Pop Smoke, was shot and killed during a home invasion in 2020. But this year has already seen three brutal attacks. On 27 January, 22-year-old Brooklyn drill rapper Nas Blixky, real name Nasir Fisher, was shot in the head and left in critical condition. Three days later, on 2 February, an up-and-coming rapper named Tdott Woo, born Tahjay Dobson, was shot and killed outside his home in south-east Brooklyn just hours after signing a record contract. He was also 22. And days after that, an 18-year-old rapper, Chii Wvtzz, AKA Jayquan McKenley, was shot dead outside a recording studio in central Brooklyn.
Bleezy DOD, a 27-year-old rapper from Brownsville, a low-income area in Brooklyn, said the shootings have been deeply painful for the community. “People was becoming stars. We dream of taking care of our families, and getting out of here, and it was taken away from them, and that ain’t right,” he said.
Bleezy attended the mayoral meeting, which he described as lively and productive. There, he and other drill artists explained to the mayor that their music isn’t inherently violent. “We tried to tell him the genre is all about the beat,” he said. “It has a grime to it, a different type of sound; it gives you a different type of energy. There’s no such thing as drill lyrics.”
Two others at Adams’ meeting were Rashid Littlejohn and Jelani Wray, respectively the founder and coordinator of Guns For Grants, a nonprofit that offers college grants to attend Brooklyn’s St Francis College to teens who surrender firearms. The mayor seemed “excited” about the idea, said Littlejohn, who hopes that the initiative could become a model for future city legislation.
We got a chance to have a conversation with the mayor @FivioForeign @mainohustlehard #drillrap pic.twitter.com/h6YdIBNrzd
— Bleezy (@BleezyDOD) February 16, 2022
Littlejohn, the former director of a Brooklyn after-school program, said he decided to start the program after a group of teens in his program were arrested for weapons possession while filming a drill music video, and feels “conflicted” about the drill scene.
“I’m all for creativity, expressing where you come from, expressing your story and what goes on in your neighborhood,” he said. “But I do think that over the last ten years, drill rap has kind of taken a turn to be what we in the culture call ‘too authentic’, you know, where it’s not just music, when we’re talking about real names, real lives, real people who are being affected by not just the music, but what’s happening outside and in the streets.”
Jabari Evans, an academic and rapper originally from Chicago, now an assistant professor of race and media at the University of South Carolina, came to understand the roots of drill music while working with young people on Chicago’s South Side. “Many of these youths have been sort of shut out of systems that should be there to help them become better individuals, but instead we have these individuals left to their own devices,” he said.
In Chicago throughout the 2010s, the violence coupled with the visibility of drill artists “created a level of panic in the city for local politicians”, said Evans. The city under Rahm Emanuel’s mayorship tried to stamp out drill music, strong-arming venues into dropping drill performances and even setting up a police division to surveil drill artists – efforts that Eric Adams should regard with caution, he said.
In Bleezy’s view, the music isn’t the cause of violence, but in many cases an escape from it. “We’re all in poverty, so nobody has opportunities. The pandemic hit, everybody feels left out. In these projects, these houses of people are all bunched up to four corners. Everything’s segregated off. We already feel like we have no outlets and no way out, so our only hope is the music.”
