Wet ‘Em Up
London music is moving like it never used to. Its timbres are fluid in a way they never were before. Britain’s sonic lexicon has liquefied. While UK drill’s drum programming may pinch from the past, its instrumental textures are totally new. UK drill is tidal, but by no means oceanic — unlike liquid drum & bass or ambient jungle it doesn’t immerse you, it submerges you. Drill drags you down and drowns you.
One of the most common sounds in the genre is an alien noise like a cross between a jet stream, waves and rusting metal. Tracks using it — Russ, Taze and Loski’s “Olympic Chinging”, Incognito x LooseScrew’s “Lightwork Freestyle”, Russ and Taze’s “MB” — sound like swirling whirlpools thick with sea foam, algae and coagulating human blood. They can make you feel like a limp, lifeless body being flung between a flurry of rapids or they even make you think of Moses parting the Red Sea — red, of course, with blood.
Conflict becomes completely recalibrated in UK drill’s new soundscapes. The genre’s main metaphors for fighting aren’t solid sounding at all — violence has become vaporised and viscous; opponents get “smoked”, “splashed”, “splattered”, “wetted” and “dipped”. The martial mechanics seen in Zack Snyder’s 300 (the film that inspired the name of the drill collective Harlem Spartans) are audible in UK drill instrumentals too. 300 creates a violence without velocity or visceral consequence; sword slashes and swooshes are slowed down and stretched out in the film so that they’re rid of impact, instead what you get is an ambient anti-kinesis. Drill’s soluble soundscapes often work in the same way.
There were at least two modes of physicality that existed in British street music before UK drill. On the one hand, of course, there was carnage (the jackhammer battering of Waifer’s “Grime” for instance), but on the opposite end of the spectrum you also had sex and sensuality (Groove Chronicles remix of Myron’s “Get Down”, say). Yet for all of drill’s wetness, it’s almost asexual. You’ll get lyrics where, instead of the usual boasts about how good looking a performer’s sexual partner is, artists will go to great lengths to explain just how freakishly ugly theirs is. For drill artists, violence acts as a kind of displaced eroticism. Weapons and conflict are referred to with suggestive and phallic terminology like, “long pole”, “stick”, “pump”, “get touched”, “poke” and, hilariously, “fist him”. AM even refers to a gun that didn’t fire as “celibate”.
One particularly niche sexual pathology routinely brought up in lyrics is the habitual rejection of vaginal sex in favour of fellatio. As Digga D puts it in “Next Up? (Part 1)”, “bitch pull up your drawers, I only want head”. The gang culture surrounding UK drill has become such a parody of masculinity that even vaginal sex is considered a bit gay.
No Future in England’s Drilling?
These tendencies in UK drill — its moves into ooziness, the occasional subliminal drive to dematerialise and dehumanise — complicate the genre’s relationship with the new musical futurism. It’s tempting to say that during the twenty-first century, as American rap was transforming from a tough street sound to something druggy, flamboyant and futuristic, that British street music made the complete opposite journey, but that’s not entirely true. London music is in limbo really, triangulating between the metal machine rhythms of the twentieth century, the futurist soundscapes of the twenty-first and a present-day grounded gang-realist rapping.
Nowhere is UK drill’s cautiousness about the future more starkly manifested than in its rejection of Auto-Tune. In Brooklyn drill (a US spinoff of its British namesake) Auto-Tune is fairly common — Lil Tjay’s “Zoo York”, Pop Smoke’s “Invincible”, Smoove L’s “OUU AHH ‘3 Wordz’” — while it is almost unheard of in UK drill. In the 90s, UK producers had been at the vanguard of experimenting with new musical technology. Jungle artists for example sped up, slowed down, spliced and generally subverted breakbeat samples in a way that American hip-hop producers rarely, if ever, did. But in the twenty-first century most UK drill doesn’t even use Auto-Tune; the most important sonic technology of the modern era.
It’s hard to pinpoint why exactly British rappers are so tepid and trepidatious about Auto-Tune, even as their idols in America, Africa and Jamaica have made the pitch-correcting technology the focal point of their sound. Gang culture has become far more central to UK music than it was previously, so possibly Auto-Tune’s somewhat feminising effects on the voice (smoothing it out, making it melodic, etc.) don’t sit well with a sense of criminal machismo which had previously been dissolved away in the hazy daze of 90s MDMA-fuelled raves (ecstasy, or “Molly” as it’s known in America, is a go-to drug for modern Auto-Tuned trap rappers). Or maybe performers abstain from Auto-Tune precisely because of its outlandish connotations. They now see themselves as documentarians of grim gang culture and the effect’s alien abstraction and augmentation of the voice detracts from that.
But UK drill’s emergence in the mid-late 2010s coincided with that of a real-life, present-day dystopia; a cyberpunk now-future of orange authoritarians, bot armies, tech-savvy jihadists, deep fakes, information warfare and hacktivism… The future’s become woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist and into the everyday phenomenology of virtual life — and this all expresses itself in UK drill, intentionally or otherwise. The Guy Fawkes masks adopted by the hacktivist group Anonymous, for example, often make their way into drill videos, and ISIS, along with other similar organisations, are huge points of reference for drill artists. Like ISIS, performers portray themselves as swarming bands of balaclava- (and keffiyah-) donning young men brandishing machetes and weapons to camera. They name check Boko Haram and Osama Bin Laden and refer to localities in London such as Brixton and Kennington as “Baghdad” and “Gaza Strip”, imbuing the urban warfare taking place between gangs with a geopolitical gravitas.
“Half of jihad is media” was an oft-repeated ISIS slogan which you can see mirrored in UK drill’s online presence, as gangs broadcast their knife intifadas against one another through social media’s voluntary surveillance culture. YouTube music videos and Snapchat streams get used in deadly provocations by drill performers as they film themselves hanging around rival gang territory. There are also videos posted online of artists “caught lacking” — caught off-guard, unarmed and unaccompanied — in which they can be seen getting beaten, attempting to run away or being coerced into disavowing their gang allegiances on camera.
Society has become so desensitised to musicians “sticking it to the man” that old forms of youthful rebellion just don’t wash — our tolerance levels are so astronomically through the roof that only the most extreme outlaw behaviour can even begin to tickle us. Drug use is blasé, lewdness is by the by and artists making political proclamations certainly doesn’t horrify parents, grime performers like Stormzy actually get positive write-ups in high-end broadsheet newspapers for insulting politicians and prime ministers. As if we’re living in some horrifying near-future satire of entertainment-sadism the only way kids can now piss off their parents is to partake in a depraved culture that cultivates and catalyses real-world homicidal criminality; a culture in which audiences watch CCTV and phone footage online of your favourite artists attempting to murder someone or tragically bleeding out on the pavement after being stabbed to death.
Satan’s Playground
UK drill is the sonic representation of the London schoolyard. However diabolical the genre can be — however evil — its rappers are rarely not charming. They’re rapturous in the joys of nihilism, turning violent lyrics into delicious jingles: “stick in my shank and twist it, ballistic”, “hit him with the ching then I’ll go get him with the chong”. The murderous onomatopoeia used in the genre — “skrr-duh-duh-duh”, “eugh eugh in man’s face, eugh eugh in man’s chest” — is presented so whimsically that you can’t help but smile almost maniacally while listening to it. You’ll get these demonic dances, mimicing stabbing motions, that are so satisfying it’s nearly impossible to resist doing yourself. Imagine the world
as a Lord of the Flies nightmare in which the rules of society have collapsed like a chaotic classroom when the teacher has walked out: that’s UK drill. The Purge, a film franchise about legalised street bloodshed, is a go-to reference in drill lyrics, and the genre taps into the same wish fulfilment of emotionally infantilised violent anarchy that these films do.
A lot of the cheeky feel of UK drill rapping comes from what could be called its “carni flows”, vocal cadences that mirror the riotous and ricocheting drum patterns found in dancehall, soca, Afrobeats and UK funky (Hard House Banton’s “Sirens”, Lil Silva’s “Pulse Flex”, etc.). Listen to Taze, Russ and Oboy in “Karma” (aka “The Purge”), lines like “man just dodged the whip and then licked it” are similar to jump rope rhymes or childish “neh-neh-nuh-neh-neh” taunts. Because drill’s drums are so stiff while, conversely, the rest of its arrangements are so amorphous, you actually end up dancing to the vocals and not the instrumental; the whole axis on which music usually works is inverted.
This rhythmic bounce is bolstered by UK drill’s phonetic buoyancy. Sounds rebound and flick off the tongue with a Mary Poppins relish for the rat-tat-tat of assonant monosyllables. It’s not hard to imagine the faux-British tones of Dick Van Dyke in the Mary Poppins movie wrapped around Mizormac lines like “Bits and bops with the mandem kotch/Ty got nicked for the nicest glock” or “They make money to splash on the hotties/We love swammies and big boy dotties/Dip dip donnies and kidnap puppies/The slogan’s money and run down bodies” (from “DJ Khaled” and “Kent Nizzy” respectively).
Cryptolects such as cockney rhyming slang and Polari were secret languages historically used by criminals (thieves, bookies and gamblers, prostitutes and homosexuals) to communicate without being understood by law enforcement, and UK drill’s verbal opacity works in much the same way. Zone 2’s “Everywhere”, for instance, features the lines “Roll up, sweet corn then ghost with bro, one-four on the most/I tell bro-bro, ‘Come and do the dip, dip, ‘nough dip, splash’, tryna leave ‘nough holes” — a depiction of gang violence that, to most people, sounds closer to nonsensical, jabbering incantation than to lyrics. “Ssshhh”, tellingly, gets used in drill a lot too to replace the names of people, weapons or specific criminal acts in songs so artists don’t incriminate themselves through their music.
Let’s Take It Back to South London
Everything there is to love about London can be found in drill’s linguistics. Its multiculturalism is evident in how rappers rapidly switch between Americanisms (“feds” — police), Jamaican patois proclamations (“bun” — burn) and Cockney English (“muppet” — idiot, “melon” — head). It’s juvenile humour comes across in its schoolyard slang (“neek” — a nerd/geek) and in lyrics about “custard creams” (cookies usually served to toddlers). There’s even a residual upper-class quaintness in there to through off-kilter buzzwords like “diligent” and “obnoxious” that are surprisingly common in the genre — it’s almost as if the English language is possessed by the ghost of a publicly-educated Victorian schoolboy that lurks in its syntax and materialises itself whenever any effort or attention is used.
But real London, proper London, is being strangled, it’s suffocating. Like the West Bank, it doesn’t exist as a cohesive whole, but rather as fractured scraps blotted across the map, isolated cantons cut from one another by the crawling sprawl of a coloniser. Artisanal coffee shops, hipster hangouts, apartments for the affluent — the stench of gentrification is unbearable. But UK drill reminds us what’s amazing about the place: its rhythms, its humour, its people. It really is the sound of the city. A sound that, somehow, went on to conquer the world…
GIVING NOTHING BUT ENERGY: BROOKLYN DRILL
Know That I’m Dreaming
Shimmering amid swelling, celestial strings, an angel sings. Its voice quivers, shivers and then pirouettes before retreating back into a thick mist of reverb. As the track progresses it becomes hard to discern what exactly you’re hearing. Listening to the drums you might say it was UK drill — you can certainly hear some of the genre’s fidgety rhythmic intricacy in there — but it’s not that straightforward. There are these big, clunky claps that aren’t as nimble as the rhythms in UK drill; they’ve almost got a lumbering stadium rock quality to them. You also have those strings that are at once wistful and triumphant. They’re far too expansive — far too Hollywood-scope — for the sombre solipsism of modern British street music. One you hear the vocals it’s clear this music definitely isn’t British. They’re American and a little Quavo-esque with all that Auto-Tune and vocal reverb, except the rap’s fractured rhythms are delivered with the frightening, cut-and-paste aesthetic of a ransom letter, it’s just not Quavo’s style — the vocal psychedelia’s too grounded. So, what is the music then?
Well, it’s “Invincible”, the opening to Pop Smoke’s magnum opus, the mixtape Meet the Woo 2. The track is a mission statement. It announces Brooklyn drill as a powerful sound in its own right, irrespective of its British and Chicago namesakes. Just the title alone, “Invincible”, clues you into the fact that the genre doesn’t share UK drill’s fixation with death-wish street defeatism, it’s full of an audible bravado that leaps out of its bombastic beats and rowdy vocal performances. As Pop Smoke’s name indicates, the music pops — it’s punchy, not placid — and it’s been far more successful than UK drill in becoming actual pop music too.
There’s an infectious aspiration in Brooklyn drill tracks, an implacable hunger to succeed that you absorb as a listener. This drive to strive and be larger than life comes across in the genre’s embrace of frag rap’s cosmic sonic frills. Artists use Auto-Tune and gargantuan reverbs in the same way as Migos do: to make themselves sound like gods. Unlike UK drill artists, for Brooklyn rappers, stratospheric status is attainable. Pop Smoke was actually able to go toe-to-toe with certified super-stars in tracks alongside Travis Scott (on “Gatti”) and Quavo (“Shake the Room”).
Brooklyn drill has taken the two modes of “street” in the 2010s — UK drill and the orchestral trap of Lex Luger/Chicago drill from earlier in the decade — and reimagined them through the dematerialised lens of frag rap. Unlike those used on old Lex Luger trap tracks, Brooklyn drill’s strings — heard on Lil Tjay’s “Zoo York”, for example — are floating and foggy, not aggressive and aggravated. UK drill’s drums nicked at the skin by foregrounding the restless syncopation in their rhythms, but the ghost notes in Brooklyn drill have been hushed so they sound like a distant shuffling of rustling papers more than they do barbed wire wrapped around your eardrums. The carni flows favoured by British rappers give way in Brooklyn drill to fragmented vocal snippets and flickers — as in Fivio Foreign’s “Big Drip”, “Demons & Goblins” and “2 Cars” — which are then vaporised to become otherworldly bursts of reverb-drenched inter-stellar cloud on tracks like Pop Smoke’s “Christopher Walking”.
There was a recessive gene in UK drill, traces of something mystical in the music that never truly manifested, which can be heard in its toe-curling bass sounds, its seraphic reverbs and its general matra-like repetition. But with Brooklyn drill these have been bought to the fore. The genre sparkles with something more magical than its British counterpart. UK drill’s coiling bass becomes serpentine in Brooklyn drill. Its cathedral reverbs are re-contextualised as hallowed and heavenly next to the dragon-scale Auto-Tune and spectral vocal interjections.
With Brooklyn drill really you’re torn between two separate realities. You’re there with one foot through the inter-dimensional portal and one firmly cemented to concrete streets. Pop Smoke’s rapping is earthy and growling, but his selection of soundscapes is in keeping with his name, it’s suitably smoggy. Listening to the aeriform organs on “War” you’re consumed by amorphous immateriality.
Hope You Remember Me
Drill, in its broadest sense, isn’t a proper genre, it’s an aesthetic stance. It’s an urge to return to documentarian street reality during a decade when rap became increasingly fantastical. An audi
ble Rorschach test that various locales read entirely different sounds into. Chicago drill and UK drill didn’t share much in common sonically but they were kindred in their attitudes and psychology. In that respect drill is Darwinian, not just in its “survival of the fittest” outlook, but in the way it resembles a lifeform adapting and evolving to changing environments and circumstances. Chicago drill was merely the common ancestor of these diverse set of sound-species.
Brooklyn drill — contrary to its borough-specific name — arose from two transatlantic cultures interacting online: American rappers using UK beats. At first glance, this kind of Internet-driven globalisation of ideas is worrying; you can’t shake the feeling that it’ll ultimately result in the emergence of a drab, homogenised global monoculture. There’s a fear that all the world’s fascinating sub-cultures — in all their glorious distinctiveness — are going to be completely diluted as they’re engulfed and ensnared in the Internet, to the point where you can’t recognise one from another.
Luckily drill has shown that global interconnectivity can actually have an invigorating effect on music and relatively regionalised scenes. Through the Internet, drill has traversed the globe, but it’s been completely reimagined upon coming in to contact with different people in different locations. The variety of drill genres that have emerged diverge from one another sonically, socially and in the psychological outlooks they inspire. They’re informed by the differing sensibilities — music tastes, senses of humour — and circumstances that are found across the world. The incentive structures for an artist in Brooklyn, for example, are completely different to those for a rapper in Brixton. There’s a real path to stardom informing almost everything about Brooklyn drill, which in turn makes it completely unique. For a whole two decades New York rap had been pretty much moribund, at least in terms of being an innovative force, but drill has revived and revitalised the music coming from the city, putting the Big Apple back on rap’s musical map.
Neon Screams Page 5