12/5/2023 0 Comments Drill rap names![]() ![]() It took less than a year for the NYPD to direct its so-called hip-hop unit to surveil drill on social media. In New York, on any given day this summer, you might hear a high schooler cut through a bustling McDonald’s on Atlantic Avenue to announce to her friends that South Bronx star B-Lovee just posted something hilarious on Instagram and then immediately clock his friends Dougie B and Kay Flock wailing through a car’s speakers on their hit with Cardi B, “ Shake It.” But as popular as drill has become since Canarsie’s Pop Smoke welcomed the city to the party in the spring of 2019, it has also made countless enemies. Like all hip-hop, it is a culture born of suffering and a desire to alchemize the pain, and so, like many rap scenes before it, the music and those making it have been misread as causing harm instead of working through harm done. There is an unflinching sense of desperation reflected in drill. It got its name from the kill-or-be-killed mentality (the word literally means “to shoot”), a code wherein black-and-white ideas about morality are sacrificed in the name of survival. Drill - pushed into the mainstream by artists like Chief Keef and translated as far and wide as London and, later, Brooklyn and the Bronx - created a potent, grisly language for a community to talk to itself about what it meant to call a metropolitan war zone home. Just over a decade ago, a sprawling ecosystem of mainly teenagers in Chicago’s South Side who grew up with trap’s mixture of no-holds-barred realism and aspirational escapism found a way to distill the conflicting feelings of their neighborhood into a new rap subgenre. It’s open season for the good and the ugly, and for the past three years, summer in the city - the whole city - has sounded like drill music. All that pent-up kinetic energy from the long winter collects, then the fire hydrants crack open and the colliding pressures coursing through each block and borough burst onto every sidewalk. ![]()
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