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.
