Some of the Same People Celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary Seek To Criminalize This Subgenre

On July 20th, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a series of free hip-hop concerts to commemorate the genre’s 50th anniversary. On the surface, this seems like a gesture of goodwill and harmless promotion, but it’s actually pretty hypocritical, given that Adams has blamed drill music for gun violence in the city. His hatred of the subgenre is indicative of a larger trend of drill artists being persecuted by association and banned from performing.

Drill rap came about in southside Chicago around the early 2010s. It is the musical sibling of trap and gangster rap, typified by its dark, often violent lyricism, gritty nihilism, and trap-style drum patterns: in other words, everything that strikes fear into the heart of White America. Drill is abrasively black, a sound that stereotypically evokes a backdrop of Black-on-Black crime, street gangs, and gun violence.

However, like all music genres, drill is merely human expression. Drill artists paint harrowing images of harsh realities under white supremacy and an anti-culture that seeks to exterminate people like themselves through overwhelming force; its lyricism is a war memoir. And no further proof for this embattlement exists in the current war against Drill waged endlessly by conservatives and liberals alike.

As reported by Vulture, drill rappers are routinely profiled and removed from music venues by law enforcement in ways musicians of other genres never get. Much of this recent profiling in New York City comes from Eric Adams cracking down on drill rap. He sees it as a dangerous precedent for gun violence. Drill rappers like 22Gz have spoken out against the witch hunts, arguing that drill is a voice for the unheard to express anger at a system that doesn’t care about them.

Eric Adams, a conservative masquerading as a progressive, has a long history of waging an ugly, hateful war on people who look like him. He is in full support of stop-and-frisk (a policy born from systemic genocide of Black and Brown people), wants to criminalize homelessness, and approves of torturing people in prison. His hatred of drill rap is merely the next logical step in his crusade against Black communities and culture.

Drill rap, like all of hip-hop, is born from Black expression, and any attempts to stifle that expression are part of a larger indictment on Blackness in general. To this day, rap lyrics are used in court as evidence to prosecute rappers—treatment no other music genre gets. America celebrates hip-hop as a commodity, even as it brutalizes many of its people. Eric Adams is anything but pro-hip-hop and anything but pro-Black people.

(featured image: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)