The Met have compiled a database of over 1900 drill videos, and routinely request their removal of hundreds of those. Platforms like YouTube are also cooperating with the authorities in taking down drill videos. Nielson says it both plays into stereotypes about the inherent criminality of young Black men and assumes they cannot be fictional authors or observers in their music using figurative speech or wordplay, only recounting what they have done or want to do. This, says University of Richmond Professor Erik Nielson and co-author of Rap on Trial, is “an extension of a centuries-old dynamic” of punishing Black expression.
There does not have to be a specific link between a song and an act of violence to be convicted of “inciting violence”. The most visceral are the various criminal orders, including “gang” orders, which can forbid everything from entering particular places or areas to performing music. The police have long seen Black music as synonymous with violence, with drill artists the most recent target. These cases by their very definition attract widespread attention. This is not to say that drill as a musical form cannot be used as a means to inflict pain and harassment on people: in one case from 2017, the family of a 14-year-old who was shot outside a playground were harassed online by young men who made some drill about his murder.
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Konan wrote in 2019 about how he saw rappers making it onto TV was a “huge inspiration” and that being involved with music was his way of avoiding the violence he saw around him. But the picture is much more complicated than the one painted by the police, who cla im this music created by young Black men incites and instructs violence.ĭrill artists have consistently argued that their music allows them to express their feelings about the poverty, crime and trauma they see around them.
At the start of 2019, Skengo and AM became the first musicians in the UK of any type to be convicted for performing a live song, when they were sentenced to nine months and suspended for two years for breaching an interim gang injunction – a criminal order introduced in 2009 that allows courts to place restrictions on people involved in gang activity, such as banning them from particular places. It is one of the most high-profile examples of how the lives and careers of drill artists are disrupted by policing, usually because of perceived or sometimes actual proximity to gangs. His Kafkaesque world was the subject of a BBC documentary last November, Defending Digga D, where the 20-year-old performer is shown having c heck-ins with the police every three hours, subject to recall to prison without a stated reason, has to get his lyrics approved by the police, and even required to move away from his home in London and into a hostel in Norwich. Now, they're targeting drill artists by monitoring their music and using their lyrics as evidence to link them to crimes.ĭrill artist Digga D is embroiled in an unrelenting legal battle to make music. The police have long seen Black music as synonymous with violence. Now, they're targeting drill artists by using their music as evidence to link them to crimes.