E.F.
In Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy, Forrest Stuart examines the phenomena of drill music and the lives of its creators in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Taylor Park. Stuart’s analysis ties together the conditions of struggling urban neighborhoods with the attention economy and democratized production afforded by social media to illuminate the phenomena of drill music, making this book an important read for anyone interested in understanding urban disadvantage, social media, and their intersection.
Stuart’s ethnographic work rawly exposes a powerful cultural force in some of America’s most disadvantaged communities, illuminating the senseless cycles of violence that the new context of social media and the old systems of the carceral state help perpetuate.
Stuart’s book explains how drill music has become one of the few avenues for economic opportunity for young men in impoverished urban communities. He details the history of the dissolution of corporate gangs and the drug economy as it affected Taylor Park. The growth of the service economy provides only low paying, low skilled jobs where urban youth face patronizing bosses and inflexible schedules, while the underfunded school systems routinely fail to prepare students for higher education. Without options for gainful employment in the traditional economy, and without recourse to the financial rewards in the largely disintegrated drug trade, young residents of Taylor Park are left with few attractive options. Many turn to petty crime to make cash, but drilling offers even larger potential rewards.
Stuart details the growth of social media-enabled online connectivity and the accompanying democratization of cultural production. The ability to easily create and upload one’s own content to social media platforms has caused an explosion in content production. Stuart explains how disadvantaged urban communities “have become sites of intense cultural production,” with Black teens producing the most online content of any racial group. The wide-open nature of online cultural production is radically accessible, but consequently the internet is hypersaturated with content. In order to stand out, drillers have found their niche: capitalizing on what Stuart describes as the online “market for the representation of urban gang violence.”
Drillers create music with violent lyrics that boast of a dangerous and luxurious lifestyle, accompanied by music videos and social media presence to corroborate their claims. However,
Stuart found in his field work that most of the time, drillers’ online displays of violent gang life are overblown or contrived. These personas of gangbanging criminals are carefully cultivated to attract attention. Much of it is from outsiders, but some is from local audiences who interact with drillers’ content as a way to connect with peers or feel safer in violent neighborhoods. And while there is the potential that drillers’ music goes viral, the production is not without its costs. Stuart argues that “the images that amateur cultural producers commodify in the hope of upward mobility become a source of their continued marginalization.” Their drill music and social media feuds reify the stereotypes that contribute to the disadvantage of their communities.
Not only does drill music strengthen negative stereotypes, it can endanger its creators in a number of ways. The hyperviolent nature of drill music and its dissemination online often leads to online conflict with rivals that have real-life consequences. With their public personas of violent gang members, drillers put themselves and their friends at greater risk of recognition and retaliatory violence. Additionally, drill music can get drillers in trouble with the law, and lyrics have been used as evidence of their criminality in criminal and probationary court. And the very market that provides drillers with the attention that provides the possibility of success also exposes drillers to voyeuristic outsiders. Some of these privileged consumers seek to form relationships with the drillers for the transgressive thrill, but uneven power dynamics often result in exploitation.
Stuart illuminates conditions of urban poverty and violence in the wake of corporate gangs’ collapse. His study of drill music exposes how in their absence, social media has “altered the very meanings and functions of gang violence.” Through an examination of cultural content creation in the attention economy Stuart shows how the limitless quantity of online content and drillers’ disadvantage combine to produce the exaggerated violence of their music. He convincingly argues how drill music provides proof of the digital disadvantage that shapes the online lives of youth and tends to compound existing inequalities. The fame and success that some drillers experience often proves to be short-lived, as the content that got them famous becomes evidence against them in court or the provocation for actual violence. Stuart’s work compels the reader to reflect critically on their position in the sphere of digital (dis)advantage, and how that shapes the stakes of the content they produce and consume.