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May 13, 2020
Forrest Stuart's Playlist for His Book "Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Forrest Stuart's Ballad of the Bullet is both an engaging and enlightening exploration of Chicago's drill rap scene. Reminiscent of Jeff Yang's hip hop-centric Can't Stop Won't Stop, the book examines the genre's history as well as its sociology and ethnography,
Ciaran Thapar wrote pf the book:
"The global cross-pollination of drill music is not a coincidence. Young people suffering from inequality and violence are harnessing social media to be heard and valued. Ballad of the Bullet is a detailed, sensitive toolkit for understanding cultural production in the modern city; essential reading for educators, community workers and music fans alike."
In his own words, here is Forrest Stuart's Book Notes music playlist for his book Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy:
In Ballad of the Bullet, I ask what happens when urban poverty meets digital social media. It’s about the ways platforms like Twitter and Instagram are transforming everything from street hustling to turf wars and teenage romance. Over two years, I followed a couple dozen members of a gang called the Corner Boys (or CBE, for short) as they came of age on Chicago’s South Side. Amid extreme poverty, looming police surveillance, and the ambient threat of violence, they developed creative online strategies for survival and street cred. They devoted themselves to making “drill music,” uploading their homemade, gun-filled songs and music videos to YouTube. With dreams of drawing enough clicks, views, and “likes” to punch their tickets out of poverty, they’re trying to commodify the exact “black super-predator” stereotypes pressing down on them. Unfortunately, many of the online personas they build leave them behind bars, seriously injured, or dead.
Despite the new technologies at the center of the book, the Corner Boys’ story reflects familiar themes. For generations, Chicago’s South Side has been marred by deep racial repression. And yet, black residents push back against redlining, race riots, and police torture with artistic resilience. They’ve pioneered the musical genres of soul, hip-hop, house, and, more recently, drill, as a way of resisting and adapting the conditions they face. The songs on this list convey the long lineage of South Side tenacity, and how their creative protests continue to drive global popular culture.
Kali Skrap, “Bad Luck”
Kali Skrap is a relative newcomer to the Chicago scene. The song isn’t drill music, but it kicks off this list for other reasons, like how Kali Skrap only needs one line to perfectly capture the perseverance of black Chicago: “What’s broke can still be strong.” I found this song in the final months of writing the book. It was on heavy rotation as I sat alone at my keyboard, pushing toward my deadline. The lyrics were a constant reminder of the care I needed to take in showing the Corner Boys as the complex, multi-faceted, resilient people they are. It doesn’t hurt that it’s such an epic track. I always feel my confidence growing through the builds and drops. With autotuned vocals washing over the simple but stirring chord progression, it’s the perfect anthem for that long morning slog to the L train.
Chief Keef – “I Don’t Like (feat. Lil Reese)”
Throughout my two years with the Corner Boys, I heard this song more than any other. In the words of the Corner Boys, “This is what started the drill movement.” I devote several pages of the book to this 2012 song, its creator, its music video, and its role as a beacon of hope for youngsters’ digital aspirations. Chief Keef was only 17 years-old when he made “I Don’t Like.” The shaky, homemade video—recorded in Keef’s grandmother’s living room while on house arrest—quickly went viral on YouTube, racking up over ninety million views. Audiences flocked to what they assumed to be an unadulterated glimpse into the iconic black ghetto. By the end of the year, Keef had inked a $6 million record deal and had mainstream rappers—including Kanye West—scrambling to collaborate. Thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of other teens have been trying to emulate his trajectory ever since. The song makes Keef the “Godfather” of a genre that has spread to nearly every continent. Its historical significance aside, the song embodies the defining characteristics of Chicago drill’s early years—thick 808 kick drums, dissonant synthesizer key stabs, rapid fire hi hats, and slow, circular rhyme structures that lock you into a head bouncing groove.
El Hitta, “Aww Yeah”
El Hitta is the face of today’s Chicago drill music sound. He’s one of a handful of young men ushering in a second generation of the genre, slowly loosening Chief Keef’s grip on the scene. For the five or so years following “I Don’t Like,” drill artists competed to see who could pack their songs and music videos with the most weapons, drugs, and cash. Stories of gunplay dominated their lyrics. But now, as part of an effort to enter the wider pop music culture, drill artists are offering fuller portraits of their lives and neighborhoods. These are less about body counts, and more about the pain and trauma that have shaped their lives. Some, like El Hitta, are abandoning the “drill” label altogether, instead referring to their genre as “pain music,” or “reality rap.” This is my favorite of El Hitta’s small but growing discography. From the first seconds of the track, it just pulls you in. The piano keys give it an emotional, soundtrack feel (which makes even more sense when you watch the music video). Through his octave-bouncing, autotuned vocals and half-sung-half-rapped cadence, El Hitta tells a story of growing up, slow to heed his mom’s warnings, learning the dangers of the streets on his own, leaving him with lasting scars. To some, the lyrics might feel simplistic. To me, they’re just efficient. There’s a lot packed into them—like when El Hitta describes the deprivation of his community by asking the listener: “Do you know how to eat without dropping a crumb?”
Morrison, “Shots”
One of my favorite music journalists, London-based Ciaran Thapar, blew my mind when he sent me a link to this song some months back. Of all the songs on this list, this one has to be seen, not just heard. Stop what you’re doing right now and pull up the music video on YouTube. That’s not the South Side you’re looking at. It’s the countryside—as in, the English countryside. Yes, those are sheep running across that field. This is drill music today, some eight years after Chief Keef catapulted it beyond of the South Side. As the genre spread, the globe’s most marginalized youth—including aboriginal teens in Australia, Somali refugees in Vancouver, and black Caribbeans in the UK—took it up and reworked it to fit their own biographies and experiences. In this case, it’s Morrison, a white, formerly incarcerated East Ender. He’s masterfully layered drill’s traditional talk of hustling over wobbly UK grime-inspired basslines, all while eating pie and mash, and petting his pit bull. This is what the globalization of culture sounds (and looks) like.
Curtis Mayfield, “Little Child Runnin’ Wild”
Back to Chicago. This is, without question, one of best of the Chicago soul songs pumped out by Curtis Mayfield, alongside other pioneers like Mavis Staples and Gene Chandler, during '60s and '70s. More than any of Mayfield’s other hits, this song reminds me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I can’t help but draw a line connecting Mayfield, composing music in his studio with his band, to drill’s teenage producers, making drill beats on laptops in their bedrooms. We can hear it in the minor keys and orchestral strings. We notice it in the themes of hustling and societal neglect. And culturally, we shouldn’t forget that this was the lead song on the Super Fly soundtrack—a film rivaled only by Shaft as the king of the Blaxploitation genre. Just like Chief Keef’s songs following “I Don’t Like,” Super Fly’s caricatured portrayals of black urban life scored big profits for major (and majority-white) studios.
Marshall Jefferson, “Move Your Body (The House-Music Anthem)”
Chicago is the birthplace of drill music. It’s also the birthplace of house music. Full disclosure: I’m a rabid house music fanatic—a lifelong “house head,” as we’re called. This Marshall Jefferson classic from 1986 might not be the first house music song, but it’s arguably the most famous. We usually trace the genre back to the 1980s, and to the legendary Near South Side dance club, the Warehouse (where house music got its name). Spaces like the Warehouse were the lifeblood for black gay Chicagoans, offering safe haven and musical escape. There, dancers built community and DJs stretched the limits of audio technology. By feeding drum machines and multiple turntables into the club’s sound system, they found new ways to stack disco, funk, and R&B tracks to construct entirely new songs on the fly, in real time, driven by that trademark, pounding 4/4 tempo. All night long, clubbers jacked their bodies to sonic creations that had never existed before that moment, that would never exist in that same form again. “Move Your Body” oozes with the spirituality that kind of spontaneity produces. It’s no wonder Warehouse alumni describe those late-night parties as a religious experience.
Frankie Knuckles & Jamie Principle, “Your Love”
If Chief Keef is the Godfather of Chicago drill music, Frankie Knuckles is the Godfather of Chicago house music. Arguably the most famous of the Warehouse’s resident DJs, Knuckles had a knack for creating tracks like this—synth-layered, strings-building, smile-inducing, disco-reworked gems. I was in Chicago when Knuckles tragically passed away in March of 2014. Clubs across the city observed a minute of silence at 2AM sharp the next weekend. It was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had. Imagine a packed Friday night dancefloor suddenly coming to a complete halt, hundreds of sweaty dancers bowing their heads in complete silence. No one dared utter a single word.
The Magi (Chris Nazuka & Derrick Carter), “Come on Clap Your Hands”
Derrick Carter is the face of Chicago house music today. This anthem is one of Carter’s from two decades ago, but it embodies the shift in the genre’s characteristic sound, which was helped along by newer, better production technology. In the hands of people like Carter, the sound got a harder and faster—locals describe it as “boompty.” DJs and producers started cutting the signature disco and funk samples into catchier, shorter loops, sometimes lasting only 4 counts before repeating over again. In this case, it’s a five second slice of Prince’s “Uptown,” joined by The Crusaders’ “Cosmic Reign.” In true Chicago fashion, Carter took what he inherited from the past and refashioned it into something new.
Chance the Rapper, “Paranoia (feat. Nosaj Thing)”
Chance the Rapper has become a figurehead of Chicago’s backpack rap genre. It’s yet another scene that’s been incubating on the South Side for years, only recently receiving the global recognition it deserves. In many ways, Chance’s socially conscious lyrics and Chief Keef’s gunplay music videos are parallel responses the same social conditions, albeit using very different messages, and from very different starting points—Chance is the middle-class son of one of Barack Obama’s political aides. I’ve often thought that Chance’s rise to stardom had a lot to do with his image as Keef’s antithesis, as one of the South Side’s “good kids,” who rejected gangs and illegal street hustling in favor of more socially approved ways of pulling himself up by his bootstraps. It makes Chance far more palatable—certainly less “intimidating”—in the eyes and ears of mainstream audiences. We might see it as a musical form of what the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham famously called the politics of black respectability.
Vic Mensa, “16 Shots”
The title is a reference to the brutal murder of Laquan McDonald by the Chicago Police Department. In October 2014, officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 bullets into the 17-year old black boy, continuing to fire even after McDonald lay lifeless on the ground. The city withheld the dashcam video of the incident for over a year, giving rise to city-wide protests under the chant, “16 shots and a cover up!” This is Mensa’s tribute to McDonald, his show of solidarity with the protesters, and an angry middle finger to the police department and city leaders. The song is raw. It tells detailed stories of Chicago police officers storming through neighborhoods, bloodying the lips of schoolchildren, all while receiving bonuses and commendations from their superiors. With not-so-thinly veiled talk of violent resistance, the lyrics pull no punches. As Mensa confesses, “This ain’t conscious rap, this s*** ignorant.” Just when you think the song couldn’t get any heavier, it ends by stripping down to the low rumble of a synthesized organ, and a voice narrating the second by second details of McDonald’s death. It’s a difficult listen, but, like the voices calling out from the South Side, it sorely needs to be heard.
Forrest Stuart is associate professor of sociology and director of the Ethnography Lab at Stanford University. He is the author of Down, Out, and Under Arrest. Find him on Twitter at @ForrestDStuart
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