Pain Music (part two)
How Drill - the sound of Chicago's streets - rewrote the rules of the music business (continued)
This story follows on from last week’s newsletter, ‘Pain Music (part one)’.
On my first morning in Chicago I took a walk towards Michigan Lake and the park which looks out over its waters. I’d organised to have lunch at a diner with David Drake, the first journalist to break the story of drill in the press. When he started writing about it, 16-year-old Chief Keef, or “Sosa”, was starting to grab headlines.
“Hip-hop’s Next Big Thing is On House Arrest at his Grandma’s: Meet Chief Keef” goes the title of Drake’s interview in Gawker magazine from March 2012. A portrait of Barack Obama, who was a community organiser on the South Side in the 1980s, hung in Keef’s grandmother’s living room while he was living there under house arrest. He’d been charged with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.
Keef’s anthem “Bang” had thrust him into local fame. Its video showed him and his friends looking menacingly down the camera lens, pulling gun fingers, their dreadlocks swaying from side to side, celebrating fraternal force amidst weed smoke in the boarded-up projects.
“Keef taught a whole generation of people how to use YouTube to leverage power within the music industry. YouTube became a clear glass window into these conflicts that have existed in communities across Chicago for generations, but that nobody had been able to see before,” Drake explains.
“Until then, it seemed the only way rap music would break to the masses was through a small bottleneck of blogs. There was a fashion world approach to it, where these publications would define what’s cool: this year you should listen to A$AP Rocky, the next year Future, and so on. The music industry was chasing what was populist, but not popular. It became this feedback loop. No matter how hot you were in your city as a rapper, it was difficult to crossover nationally. But these kids from Chicago were doing traffic on YouTube that was dwarfing big artists with backing from labels. There was this growing feeling that the industry was out of touch. Blogger power wasn’t representative any more.”
In January 2012, Keef was released from house arrest. The website WorldStarHipHop posted a video of a child dancing to one of his songs, “Aimed At You.” It went viral. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know what song the kid was vibing to. Their search brought them to Keef’s catalogue. In the spring his song “I Don’t Like” broke the internet. By May, Kanye West had remixed it, stamping it with a golden seal-of-approval—one Chicago star platforming the next. I was in my final year as an undergraduate in Bristol, in the west of England, and I remember the song’s uncompromising bass shuddering from club speakers at the weekly student hip-hop night.
“I watched it unfold before my eyes,” says drill rapper Tay600, who was a couple of years below Keef at their Englewood school. “His views started getting bigger. He started doing millions. He suddenly had four, five cars. He was the first one out of all of us to wear designer brands. We hadn’t seen that kind of money before. The transition was mind-boggling. We started to think: if he can do this, anybody can.”
Chief Keef’s lyrics were laced with threats and carefree references to drug-taking, guns and womanising. His raps were lazy and unapologetically off-beat.
Since hip-hop began in New York in the 1970s, MCs have honed their voice, timing, flow and wordplay to get ahead of competitors, like an athlete exercises, or an actor practices lines. Inspired by the slurred style of southern rappers—New Orleans legend Lil Wayne, in particular, whose music dominated global charts in the 2000s—Chicago drill brought a new value system to this training.
As demonstrated by Keef, an apparent disregard for rehearsal, a lack of craftsmanship, mattered. Drillers needed to come across like they had stepped into the recording booth from the street. It was a simple formula. They went out to do a drill, then they entered the studio to make drill music; to yell about their actions, embrace the catharsis of spoken-word, and watch their view counter on YouTube zoom upwards.
“He was the nexus of a lot of different lines. He’d be difficult. He’d not turn up to meetings or video shoots. He was refusing to fit the role of what was expected from a performer. It was a whole generation of artists saying: I don’t have to do this industry shit if I don’t want to. It’s like Miles Davis when he turned his back on the audience. It was a true power shift away from label power. If Keef didn’t show up to a $30,000 video shoot, what were they really gonna do? All he needed was a 23-year-old videographer, a 19-year-old producer, a manager from around the way. His label had very little control,” Drake continues.
Before turning 18, Keef signed a three-album deal with Interscope Records for $6 million. He became label-mates with Eminem, 50 Cent, Dr Dre, and Diddy. His debut album was named: “Finally Rich”.
Before the 2010s, achieving tens of thousands of YouTube views for a music video was impressive. Artists like Keef and his contemporaries would be amongst the first to achieve millions. Everything was being recalibrated—including the way music was listened to, sold and transmitted.
Spotify was still in its infancy: it expanded to the United States in July 2011, with under 7 million users worldwide. It now has hundreds of millions. YouTube views did not yet count towards chart positioning; they are now a key metric for measuring music industry success. Chicago drill predicted an economic disturbance, whilst reinventing hip-hop’s function and form.
To write his book, Ballad of the Bullet, Professor Forrest Stuart spent two years hanging out with teenage gang members on the South Side. I’ve met Stuart so he can drive me around his old haunts—between the hollowed-out projects and the pristine, ivy-gripped buildings of the University of Chicago.
“I discovered all this flexing on social media,” he recalls. Some of the young men had never even used a gun. Yet they borrowed firearms from elders to stockpile photos and videos of themselves holding weapons, which they would drip-feed onto Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In doing so, they were establishing their personal brands.
“I’d be driving them across town in my car, and when we’d pass a rival block they’d start taking selfies out the window, pretending they were on their way to do a drive-by. Another time I was sitting with a young man who was babysitting his pregnant girlfriend’s children. We were in his living room, watching music videos on the television. But when I checked Instagram, he was there posting photos pretending to be in the blizzard outside, protecting his block.”
According to figures released by Chicago police, in the six square miles of West Englewood there were 45 gang factions in 2015. In the same year, Stuart found that 31 of these factions had filmed and uploaded a drill video onto YouTube. This equates to one music video for every two blocks.
“We’ve gone from an environment of scarcity, where digital content was dominated by gatekeepers, to one of abundance, where everyone is making content. Rappers have to be innovative to cut through the noise. Drill artists showed us how successful cultural production operates when we have too many cultural products. And one way you cut through is to convey authenticity. In this era of abundance, people want the realest stuff—stuff that hasn’t been picked up by the traditional tastemakers. With drill, it was no longer the slick content that got noticed, it’s what was real and rough. So these young men developed lots of ways of being seen as authentic. One of those is by associating with someone who has already proven their authenticity. Maybe someone a few blocks away just got locked up for flashing a rocket launcher on social media? Get on a track with them!”
YouTube has since evolved to deliver personalised user experiences. If you are a football fan looking for football content, you probably don’t want to be shown videos of cats. By using machine learning, Stuart says, “YouTube figured out what your tastes are and delivers content to you to keep you engaged. Cultural gatekeepers used to be people. Now the gatekeeper is the algorithm.”
Drill rappers gamed the algorithm. “They figured out that if they could get their name next to the name of someone who is popular on YouTube, they can blow.” Like Jo Jo did successfully, if with fatal consequences, a lesser-known artist might have a chance at their video being clicked on by consumers, or even better, responded to by their target.
In 2012 and 2013 the “diss video”—where rappers would call out others—became a type of release. It created a wave of successful artists, and arguably increased the capacity for low-profile or musical feuds to turn into high-profile, violent ones.
Businesses and politicians now invest in algorithms to influence consumers and voters. It’s become normalised that when we use social media applications, we are nudged towards products that match our tastes, and pieces of news that affirm what we already think, to keep us scrolling.
Drill exploded because of a similar masterful grasp of technology. Instead of Silicon Valley coders, however, it was poor, African-American communities in the Chicago projects proving they were ahead of the curve.
“Let’s say you’re left-wing, and you vote liberal, and you are pro-immigrant rights and pro-gay rights. The more the machine learns about you and these preferences, the less of any opposing view it is going to show you. They are designed to get narrower, and the narrower they get, the more of a bubble it creates,” Stuart finishes.
“Being a drill rapper involved thinking about how to poke into the filter bubbles and headphones of white, middle class kids on YouTube.”
I’m in the passenger seat of a car passing through Austin, on the West Side—one of the largest, poorest and most violent neighbourhoods in Chicago. I look at my phone to check a Twitter account called ‘Spot News’, which uses a police radio scanner to track crimes in real time. The latest tweet says there has been a shooting. “One dead, one injured,” it reads, specifying a street corner.
It takes eleven minutes to drive there. I climb out of the car near some police tape stretched between trees. A child pokes her head out of a nearby window to watch. An elderly woman carrying two heavy bags of groceries hobbles by. Two police officers lean against a low wooden fence.
In May 2019, Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor of Chicago. She ran a campaign focused on curbing violence. It was hardly new, but it was popular. She promised to treat violence as a “public health” issue. This contested philosophy, exported around the world—including to Glasgow and London as a theory with which to battle knife crime—sees violence as a symptom of widespread social breakdown. It advocates measures such as improving healthcare and educational opportunities, understanding and curing the psychological impact of trauma on families, and providing employment to steer young men away from the streets.
A total of 14 recorded homicides take place during the nine days of my trip. One week later, on what is known as one of Chicago’s hottest and therefore bloodiest weekends, the July Fourth holiday, six people are killed and 66 injured by guns. Proximate tragedy and death is constantly in the air of my conversations. One sound engineer called Spaceman tells me he has the unreleased music of over 45 dead rappers on his computer hard drive.
“Gangster music has always been a part of Chicago culture. But when the media started shedding a light on all of these young guys doing what they’re doing, it gave it national coverage,” says Bo Deal, an outreach worker at the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a community organisation in Austin which seeks to intercept violence. As a teenager in the 1990s, Deal was one of the most feared gang members on the streets of the city. He says the violence associated with drill predates the genre’s inception, even if the music has given it a louder voice. “The younger generation ain’t doing nothing but emulating what they heard from us. The principles have remained the same. Chicago been gangster, since before I was born, since before Al Capone, even.”
The title of Alex Kotlowitz’s 1991 nonfiction book There Are No Children Here, about two brothers growing up in the now-demolished Henry Horner Homes, in the Near West Side, is taken from a line spoken by the boys’ mother, Lajoe Rivers. “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.” The book is handed out as reading to students of Chicago high schools.
“When I was out in Horner every day, there was a very different texture compared to now,” says Kotlowitz. His most recent book, An American Summer, about people affected during a recent summer of violence, fills nearby bookstore windows when we meet for coffee in Oak Park, a leafy suburb.
Chicago used to be much more murderous than it is now. In 1991 there were 929 homicides. In 2019 there were 491. But back when he was reporting, Kotlowitz says the violence seemed more contained within certain patches. “It was completely out of sight, out of mind. People were disconnected from the rest of the city. The violence is considerably less now, but because it is more public, it feels just as intense.”
With a rate of 20.7 homicides-per-100,000 people in 2018, Chicago fell at number sixteen in the rankings of most murderous cities in America. As high as this is objectively, compared to the likes of St Louis or Baltimore, which have nearly three times this rate, relatively speaking its position is surprisingly low. Chicago is, after all, consistently imagined as the most violent city in America. It is referred to as “Chiraq” by rappers.
The city’s semi-true, semi-mythologised reputation explains drill’s capacity to springboard into cultural consciousness. It is laced with inconvenient truth as well as exaggerated bravado.
On my last day in Chicago, I meet 24-year-old El Hitta, one of the leading new generation of Chicago rappers.
“The drill era went on for so long, people was waiting on something else,” explains Hitta, who is tall and smiley. Tattoos cover his neck and arms. “Now it’s monkey see, monkey do. You got a lot of people talking about their life story in the trenches, but they’ve never even been in the trenches, they’re just doing it because they think it’s finna help them move faster and get famous. But if you know music, then you know who has been through what they talk about, through the pain, you know?”
Over the last decade drill music has been emulated across North America, from Atlanta to Toronto, and repurposed in cities around the world. Brooklyn drill—initially popularised by the late Pop Smoke, who was shot dead in his home in February 2020—fuses UK drill-style instrumentals with East Coast swagger. It is now one of the most popular movements in American rap. Meanwhile, London’s drill scene and its remote, DIY infrastructure has become one of the English capital’s most successful exports in a generation. DJ L’s marching band drums can be heard in sung pop songs and mainstream radio advertisements alike. (I am currently editing this article in Delhi, and I keep hearing their tinny rhythms blare from the speakers of cars and bars, with Punjabi vocals laid over the top.) What started as a Windy City secret is now wide open.
“Back then it was more of a thrill thing. People from Chicago were finally getting noticed. Now, people still love drill, but they also think it’s a liability. A lot of people have died out here,” says Rooga, another new-generation MC I speak to. He is careful to define himself as “someone who can make drill rap, not a drill rapper”.
In Chicago, as in London and elsewhere, police have long used drill music and videos as evidence in criminal court cases. They track the social media accounts of the most wanted rappers and videographers. After the passing of his brother, Swagg Dinero was imprisoned for handling a firearm in a music video. During my trip, I was meant to see El Hitta perform alongside Gunna, NBA Youngboy and Kevin Gates at the United Centre, where the Chicago Bulls play basketball. But the concert was cancelled by police fearing violence.
On my walk back to my hotel one night, I saw a fight break out between drunk fans leaving a Rolling Stones concert. One man was bleeding from his head. The police were nowhere to be seen.
Alongside names like Calboy and Lil Zay Osama, El Hitta embodies what Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre calls the “melodic new sound of Chicago street rap.” For some artists from drill’s first generation—including Jo Jo’s original provocateur, Lil Durk—and younger artists coming up, musical expression has respawned, yet again. Whilst still immersed in the same immovable themes of violence and drugs, a vulnerable style of commentating on the pain of street life is now taking centre-stage. If drill exposed the city’s hidden trauma, the new rap wave might be therapy for its post-traumatic stress.
During my trip, the most popular face of this movement, a 20-year-old from the North Side called Polo G has shot to number one in the official charts for “Top Rap Album” in America. It marks a new age for the wider acceptance of Chicagoan talent. His songs play from Uber radios and bar speakers. His lyrics are more reflective and poetic. “I come from a dark place, I’ll never be there again,” he states on “Effortless”.
“I started off doing drill, but I started losing too many people,” Hitta continues. “So I felt like I should switch lanes and talk so people feel me instead of fear me. I realised I could really speak to people if I say what I have to say in a certain way. So I make heartfelt music.” His biggest hit “Aww Yeah”, from 2018, is a triumphant ode to surviving adolescence.
Swagg Dinero still fights to uphold Lil Jo Jo’s legacy. “At the end of this shit, I want it to be like, that young man was super talented. He went too early, he got taken away too soon. I just want everyone to know that shawty was a real mogul. If he could have changed things I believe he would have changed things to stick around.”
In the evening after seeing El Hitta, I head to LSD Studios in the bustling South Loop. David Drake, DJ L and I are hosted there by VIIbez, a sound engineer who records for many of the biggest names in Chicago rap.
“The music still holds that same feeling that we felt back when Chief Keef and G Herbo was rapping at the start. But it’s more melodic now. The street and the pop records merged. It is much easier to feel what the artists have gone through now. When you’re singing, it’s felt ten times as hard,” VIIbez explains.
I ask whether people still use the term “drill” to describe Chicago music. VIIbez raises one eyebrow and laughs. In 2020, drill might be the hottest thing elsewhere. But in its home, it’s old news.
“Nobody in Chicago uses that word. Now we call it street music, hood pain, street pain music,” she says. She leans over to the computer keyboard to play Polo G’s “Pop Out” on YouTube. It now sits at over 300 million views.
“That pain that is so real, so organic, that you can’t help but to feel it.”
By Ciaran Thapar
The original version of this article was published by Tortoise in 2020. It has been lightly edited for republication in ALL CITY.
Super enlightening read, looking forward to next week’s piece!
You might find this interview interesting: https://www.billboard.com/music/features/youngboy-never-broke-again-cover-story-interview-1235208827/