Jennie McGrath
Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy by Forrest Stuart is a fascinating read for anyone looking to better understand how the self can be created and fictionalized through social media and how people can use the images they create online to find fame and success despite living very different lives than they portray online. This book tells the story of a group of young men in Chicago who are making a career out of pretending to engage in gang violence and other elements of the violent criminal lifestyle stereotypically associated with Chicago’s struggling Black neighborhoods.
Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy is an ethnographic study of drillers in Taylor Park, one of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods struggling with poverty and gang violence. A driller is a type of rapper who capitalizes on the world’s fascination with violent gang activity to become famous on YouTube and other social media sites for their music videos displaying their lifestyle. They create an online persona characterized by violence and gang activity. These drillers are young men from struggling neighborhoods who play up their involvement in gang violence to gain an audience. They seek to transport their fans to their world through their music and especially through their music videos which is what they put the bulk of their resources and efforts into producing. Stuart found that the reality of these men’s lives is radically different from the image they cultivate on social media. Much of their content is fabricated collectively by groups such as the Corner Boys who pool resources such as money, guns, and online fame to create their driller personas and find success through online content creation. These men are not constantly riding through rival territories and actively participating in violent crime much of the time, but they fake that lifestyle online because of the fame it brings them.
This book accomplishes many things, but perhaps the most important one is that it exposes the way that social media can be used to create a public persona that reflects an entirely different life from the one that person is actually living. Stuart’s research and the relationships he builds throughout it show that drillers do not live the way they claim to online and put a lot of effort into faking a lifestyle that people want to be able to experience from the safety of their own homes through their phones. It shines a light on both the fetishization that goes on online and the lengths people will go to to fake some facet of their identity on the Internet.
The drillers are pandering to a group of people who find gang violence and the hood lifestyle to be fascinating, flashy, and sexy and Stuart illustrates this extremely clearly in Chapter 6, Digital Slumming. The digital slummers he investigated were all affluent white people looking to experience a taste of the drillers’ lifestyle without really having any understanding of what it is actually like to live in Taylor Park. For example, one of the drillers was flown out to visit a huge fan in Beverly Hills who was shocked and disappointed to discover his idol was actually homeless and not raking in cash all the time. These findings should be meaningful to readers because they make clear that a person’s social media is not a clear or truthful representation of their life. This book should encourage readers not to compare their lives to what they see on social media because much of it is staged. Social media is a space for people to create a new version of themselves and that’s perfectly fine. The harm comes from taking that representation too seriously.
The Corner Boys exploit the naivety of their viewers to gain fame online by simply showing the people what they want to see. They film content whenever they are in an exciting setting or have access to materials associated with gang violence such as weapons and drugs. Most days for them are decidedly ordinary, but they save up this false content full of apartments they don’t live in, guns they don’t own, and drugs they don’t sell to put on the Internet in the hopes of convincing their fans that they lead these exciting, dangerous, and exotic lives. Ballad of the Bullet exposes the amount of deception that happens on social media sites and the reason for it. On social media, everyone is constantly fighting for attention and the drillers have captured their share of the attention by fictionalizing and dramatizing their lives. By understanding that not everything on social media is real, readers of this book can be more intentional about the attention they give to social media and the ways they let what they see online affect their sense of self.