A month ago I had no idea what drill rap was. Then I read a review of a new book, Ballad of the Bullet, in The Economist. Thanks to the wonders of Covid librarianship, the school’s copy was shipped to me a few days later, and I then read a thoroughly engrossing and impressive piece of scholarship.
Eight years out of his UCLA PhD, Forrest Stuart is now a sociology professor at Stanford, but in the interim he taught at the University of Chicago and ran an after-school program aimed at helping community members cope with the violence of their surroundings. Once he was exposed to the rappers from the neighborhood who were trying to follow the path blazed by Chief Keef (Keith Cozart), Stuart embedded himself with them and saw firsthand the intersection of a sliver of opportunity amidst crushing poverty, social media popularity (driven by taunts of bravado), and street violence resulting from that bravado being challenged or usurped. The artifice of created personas, distributed via free online channels, fueled both multiple trappings of success (a new variant on sex, drugs, and rock and roll) and physical constraints on movement outside one’s turf.
Much as “reveal codes” taught a generation of people HTML 20+ years ago, so too was the YouTube/music playbook open for all to read. Cozart unleashed a fierce style of rapping, shaped by the brutality of his surroundings, that stood out from most other types. The videos reinforced the harshness of the sonics and were not the product of hundreds of thousands of dollars in production expenses. Authenticity and a Darwinian epistemology were paramount. As Stuart summarizes the movement, “If there is a dominant message running through virtually every drill song, video, and related content, it’s an appeal to superior authenticity: I really do these violent deeds. I really use these guns. I really sell these drugs. My rivals, however, do none of this.” (p. 6) Copying Cozart’s visual style, production techniques, distribution channels, and lyrical subject matter was straightforward, and Chicago became the home of a musical subgenre that has spread to London, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. As of 2016, 31 of 45 gangs in a six-square-block area had uploaded YouTube content. (p. viii)
Paradoxes abound. In contrast to the one Laptop Per Child school of thought, the teens Stuart observed were extremely adept at social media from a smartphone orientation; laptops for tasks such as video editing were hard to come by. Rather than learn conventional school subjects, the “drillers,” as Stuart calls them, were focused on social media. This focus took several forms. Primarily, one broadcast one’s persona via YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. The fact that these were personas sometimes escaped police and prosecutors, who took social media posts literally, then used them as evidence of activity that may or may not have actually transpired. (Stuart notes the difference between black teens posing with firearms and white counterparts who were tolerated, celebrated, or applauded by police.) In addition, social media was also used as operational intelligence, predicting opposing gang members’ whereabouts, ideally unsuspecting and/or unaccompanied. Drive-by shootings could follow.
Second, for all the national fame (at different times in the book Stuart’s drillers travel to Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Los Angeles), being recognized even a block or two outside one’s home turf could be extremely dangerous. One consequence was to be “found wanting,” as one was forced on camera to renounce one’s gang superiority, walk back one’s prior claims (a certain kind of poser was known as a “computer gangster”), and commit other emasculations.
Third, the benefits of fame tended to be more social than financial. Much as most blues musicians were never paid royalties by record labels, drillers often uploaded their videos to sites owned by videographers, producers, or other people more expert in managing Google’s revenue-sharing. Cash payouts could come when rappers were “featured” on another aspiring artist’s videos, but cash also was expended on said videographers and recording studios. In addition, other entities cashed in on the drillers, ranging from bloggers who highlighted social-media “beefs” that could in these quarters escalate to violence to Google and Facebook themselves. Instead, the benefits of local fame — “clout” in the nomenclature — could be as simple as getting respect from one’s family (one rapper had been kicked out of his mother’s house before finding fame and being let back in) or getting attention from females in the court of teen public opinion.
The book’s insights are many. While there may be posturing that suggests drug dealing, for many teens climbing the hierarchy of the “corporate” gangs of the ‘80s is no longer an option: established dealers distance themselves from the social media frenzy and no longer stake out a newcomer to the operation with product and a market to prospect. The teens depicted in the book actually lost money in their brief experiment with dealing, through friends-and-family discounts, stolen stashes, and too many in-house samples of the product.
Rather than make money on drugs, the drillers quickly learn algorithmic scaffolding: unknown rappers can capitalize on better-known acts by posting “diss tracks” that use big viewership numbers to pull the newcomer along, albeit at real risk: you can only insult a national name so many times before retaliation comes. Elsewhere, the stereotype of the “digital divide” is tested, found wanting, and replaced by a more nuanced view of “digital disadvantage” among the urban poor. Micro-celebrity for these YouTubers is not of the same variety as that of travel “influencers” or fashion bloggers: they can’t quit if the rewards are insufficient or the blogger gets bored. This all-in pursuit of fame can be two-edged: as teens grow into adulthood and perhaps seek to leave gang life behind, erasing one’s social media presence, linked as it is to the gang, can be much more difficult than getting the tattoos removed.
There is much more to applaud. Stuart reflects carefully and usefully on the dangers of ethnography as voyeurism or self-aggrandizement. Ballad of the Bullet has much to teach about poverty and its potential remedies, about race and racism, about the atypical adoption (and consequences) of digital technologies. Most centrally, the highly consequential intersection of online fame with street-level mortality fuels new insights in the larger inquiry into online video’s many externalities. Forrest Stuart brings stand-up credibility, clear prose, and reflective insight to a corner of the Internet few adults will have encountered. His book broadened my perspective markedly, and I recommend it enthusiastically.
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