Drill rap songs are number one with a bullet.
And that’s terrifying to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, cops and victims of the genre’s sometimes trigger-happy rappers, who glorify killing in their songs and are quick to reach for guns to settle disputes.
Adams’ call to ban drill rap videos from social media following the murder of rapper Jayquan McKenley, an 18-year-old who performed under the name Chii Wvttz and was shot dead in an ambush last week outside a recording studio in Bed-Stuy, has put the music under intense scrutiny.
Drill rappers are surging in popularity partly due to their flashy videos, which depict young thugs who wield handguns, splash around money and smoke blunts — and have no problem blasting their rivals.
And it’s deadlier than just aggressive videos. As Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez told Fox News, “We’ve had a number of shootings in Brooklyn recently that are directly related to drill rap … [The rappers appear] on Facebook Live and Instagram Live, and they’re taunting their rivals in the rival gangs’ territory, saying, ‘We’re here. Come get us. If we see you, we’re going to shoot you.’”
According to Soren Baker, author of “The History of Gangster Rap,” drill takes the rap to a modern level of violence.
“Drill is basically gangster rap driven by social media beefs and social media tactics,” Baker said. “It’s real-time reactions to music and violence. Artists have gotten killed because they say, ‘I have beef with this person and this is where I am.’ The efficiency of releasing these songs” — with their real-time taunts — “leads to the violence happening.”
“We gon’ pull up in that hooptie like we cops on ’em / With M16s, we gon’ put some shots on him,” sings genre pioneer Bobby Shmurda, who went to jail for seven years after he and members of his GS9 crew — known for firing randomly into nightclub crowds in New York and Miami — were indicted for murder, drug dealing and other crimes in Brooklyn in 2014. And the NYPD agreed.
James Essig, chief of NYPD detectives, has described Shmurda’s songs as “almost like a real-life document of what [GS9 members] were doing in the street.”
Adams wants social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, to stop the music, which has been around for more than a decade — claiming the genre promotes violence and has contributed to rising gunplay in New York. One victim, rapper TDott Woo (born Tahjay Dobson) of Canarsie, Brooklyn, was fatally shot in the head last month just after signing with the Million Dollar Music label.
“We pulled Trump off of Twitter because of what he was spewing,” Adams said. “Yet we’re allowing music, displaying of guns, violence. We’re allowing it to stay on these sites.”
At a press conference Wednesday, Adams seemed to walk back his earlier comments, stating that some “young men and women” told him, “We heard you said you were going to ban drill rapping.” Said Adams: “I did not say that … what I said [was] that violent people who are using drill rapping to post who they killed and then to antagonize the people who they are going to kill is what the problem is.”
His proposed crackdown comes in the wake of restrictions on British rapper Digga D, who now must hand over transcripts of any lyrics to UK authorities before being allowed to release a new track.
In 2018, he was sentenced to a year in prison for his role in planning a violent gang attack; music videos in which he can be seen shooting people and heard rapping about “banana clips” counted as evidence.
Shmurda’s lawyer told The Post that trying to muzzle his client and other drill rappers was the wrong approach.
“Censoring drill music is a distraction,” said Kenneth Montgomery, who helped represent Shmurda in the rapper’s criminal case, in which he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and weapons possession charges in 2016. “Bobby’s complications in life had to do with the community he grew up in. The music reflected what he saw in the community.”
Drill rap began in Chicago about a dozen year ago, with performers such Pac Man (shot to death at age 25 in 2010) and King Louie rapping about the violent worlds around them.
According to Rovaun Pierre Manuel, formerly the manager of Chief Keef, the biggest name in drill, the genre emerged as a way for inner-city kids with rap-star ambitions to convey their experiences through gun-strewn videos and explicit lyrics, delivered with deadpan vocals and aggressive drum beats.
Initiators of the music, Manuel told The Post, “were in the gang world. That gave them a kind of authenticity that other rappers didn’t have. The music didn’t create the violence. The violence created the music.”
According to Lou Savelli, an expert in gangs and gang culture who was the first supervisor of the NYPD’s Gang Unit, the music and violence are more in lockstep than proponents of drill like to acknowledge.
“One shooting I was looking at,” Savelli told The Post, “someone had mentioned a drill rapper had shot someone over one of their songs.”
While Savelli acknowledged that “not all kids who are drill rappers are violent,” he explained that “Their style is tough … It’s all about identity, acting tough and speaking tough on your videos. It’s about getting recognized. They put all their crap on social media. Some of the groups are selling drugs.”
Savelli talks about drill raps being centered around “calling out or disrespecting another neighborhood or crew or another rap group.”
When this kind of baiting gets matched with social media, as Mayor Adams pointed out, the cocktail can be combustible or even deadly.
On Jan. 27, a rapper who went by the name Nas Blixky (real name: Nasir Fisher) was shot outside of a Brooklyn bodega in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood. In the preview video for his song “PG 16,” dissing a rapper of the same name, Blixky is seen aiming a pistol at the camera. (PG 16 has not been connected to the shooting.) This came less than two years after his rap-crew mate Nick Blikxy was shot and killed in the same neighborhood.
Last December, drill rapper Kay Flock, 18, was charged with murdering a 24-year-old man outside a barbershop on West 151st Street in Manhattan. The disagreement was said to be gang-related.
As to whether or not these flesh-and-blood tragedies will lead to the toning down or outright banning of drill videos on social media, Manuel replied: “Good luck with that. Violence in drill videos is what sells. It’s what everyone wants to see.”
