NEW YORK COMES alive in the summer. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. There is an unflinching sense of desperation reflected in drill. 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.
This story is from the August 15 - 28, 2022 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the August 15 - 28, 2022 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Unmasking Diddy
The rap mogul shook off decades of rumored bad behavior with wholesome PR revamps. Now the allegations against him are his legacy.
Staging Sufjan
How playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury turned a classic indie-rock album into a Justin Peck-choreographed dance piece that's now Broadway bound.
Justin Kuritzkes Serves an Ace
With his first movie script for the erotic tennis drama Challengers, he has gone from struggling playwright to in-demand screenwriter.
To Brooklyn, by Way of Paris and Rome
A whirlwind week with Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri as she stages the brand's first New York runway show in a decade.
A Burlesque Family at Home
Showbiz couple Angie Pontani and Brian Newman’s high-spirited Marine Park house.
A Bistro With Shish Barak
Huda impressively balances its many influences.
THE 'DEBATE ME BRO
Mehdi Hasan's aggressive interviewing style landed him a Sunday show on MSNBC. Until he started talking about Palestine.
THE MAN WHO GOSSIPED TOO MUCH
For almost two decades, JOHN NELSON anonymously published blind items skewering the Hollywood elite on the blog CRAZY DAYS AND NIGHTS. Then his identity was revealed in the midst of a messy affair.
TODD BLANCHE IS A SURPRISINGLY COMPETENT LAWYER. AND HE'S ON TRACK TO KEEP HIS CLIENT OUT OF JAIL UNTIL THE ELECTION. IN DEFENSE OF TRUMP
TODD BLANCHE WAS looking for his man. Or it could be a woman, but probably not.
Self: Emma Alpern
In Outer Space Why do so many women believe their bodies are controlled by the moon?