vernacular politics and neighbhourhood nationalism in london’s drill scene

Lily Rodel

Drill is a sub-genre of rap, originating in Chicago, that has since flourished in the same London council estates that produced grime, with artists often in their teens. This article uses drill lyrics, videos, and musicality to provide a rich, ethnographic portrayal of the experience of the built environment. For a group that lacks representation within formal politics – young, working-class, black men – and has been continually demonized within mainstream media, drill is a form of ‘vernacular politics’ where socially excluded young people can amplify their voices, express their experiences of citizenship, and express a counternarrative to the criminalisation of drill. Ultimately, I find that the violent territorialism and hyperlocalism featured in drill music reflects an increasingly claustrophobic experience of the built environment as a result of neoliberal housing policy.

Anthropology can shed light on how housing and access to housing is a contested domain where experiences and understandings of citizenship are formed, negotiated, and materialized (Alexander, Bruun, and Koch 2018). This essay looks at how neoliberal housing policy impacts the experience of citizenship for young people living in inner-city London council estates. I argue that anthropology can offer an insight into the intersection between policy change and lived experience. The neoliberal ‘regeneration’ of social housing - the replacement of post-war social housing with high-end new developments - has pushed socioeconomically marginal communities to the outskirts of London (Watt and Minton 2016). Those who remain live in increasingly confined communities amidst the progressive privatisation of public space. I examine these issues using the genre of drill rap as a lens. Drill is a sub-genre of rap originating in Chicago that has since flourished in the same London council estates that produced grime, featuring “monotone beats and glinting synths, with bleak, charismatically delivered lyrics,” (Hancox 2019b) with artists often in their teens. I argue that drill provides a rich, ethnographic window into and a sonic reflection of the experience of the built environment (Hancox 2019a). For a group that lacks representation within formal politics – young, working-class, black men – and has been continually demonized within mainstream media, drill is a form of ‘vernacular politics’ (Koch 2016) where socially excluded young people can amplify their voices, express their experiences of citizenship, and amplify a counternarrative to the criminalisation of drill. I argue that the hyperlocality reflected by drill music provides an insight into how young people navigate their place and sense of belonging within their built environment. Within the shifting neoliberal configuration of the relationship between state and citizen, where responsibility for housing issues is framed in individualised terms, align their sense of citizenship with their neighbourhood or ‘block’.

In this essay, social housing provides the backdrop to drill rappers’ – who are predominantly young, black, working-class and male - experience of citizenship and belonging in London. ‘The block’ (council estate) is heavily featured in the music videos and lyrics of drill rap as a key material and symbolic context. By tracing housing tenure trajectories from the post-war welfare state to the increasing privatisation by New Labour, Coalition, and Conservative governments (Watt and Minton 2016), I argue that not only does social housing provide the backdrop, but also a crucial site for the ongoing construction and negotiation of citizenship for drill rappers and Black youth in London. Housing has frequently been viewed as the materialization of a social contract between the state and the citizen, one which gives citizens the right to certain resources in return for certain responsibilities towards the state (Alexander et al. 2018). This essay explores what happens to the experience of citizens occupying social housing when government policies intentionally dismantle the social housing sector in favour of ‘regeneration’.

Regeneration and Social Cleansing: New Labour Housing Reform

"The developers rocked up[...] and the hood got chopped and the natives cropped and the ends got boxed up, then the price got knocked up/
Foreign investment raising the stock up, so the rent got propped up, and it kept getting topped up/
So the heart got ripped out, and rinsed out/
Some got shipped out, got kicked out... power, money, and big clout's what it's about." 

Slow Your Roll, Dizzee Rascal (2017)

From the mid-1990s onwards, New Labour sought to replace social housing, particularly in inner-city London, with high-end developments in order to ‘modernise’ the city, reversing urban decline brought on by neglect from previous governments in order to attract middle-classes who had moved to the suburbs (Hancox 2019a). This neoliberal state-led gentrification involved the wholesale demolition and re-development of council estates in favour of the construction of luxury flats, described by many as effectively “social cleansing.” (Watt and Minton 2016: 122). Council house tenants were asked to leave their communities and relocate to social housing in the suburbs or other UK cities, otherwise risking being declared ‘intentionally homeless’ (ibid). Those who remained were subject to increasing surveillance and restrictions on large gatherings in public space, codified in law through the infamous Anti-Social Behavioural Order (ASBO), which has since been reborn as the Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO). Hancox argues that these policies disproportionately affected those living in cramped, overcrowded housing, creating the effect of confinement (Hancox 2019a). This lack of mobility for the working class is further intensified by London’s public transport – the most expensive public transport in the world. Dizzee Rascal, a rapper from Bow who popularized grime – of which drill is derivative of - told BBC London, “Coming from where I come from, you didn’t feel a part of London,” (BBC London Radio 2010). Ultimately, this drive towards privatisation and demunipalisation in the name of urban renewal contributed to a further sense of marginalisation for socioeconomically deprived communities in London. As suggested by Dizzee Rascal, members of these communities are excluded from the official narrative of London: they are “excluded from its most famous parts, the parts the tourists see, the parts the middle classes negotiate with ease and confidence,” (Hancox 2019a: 8).

“Where we're from, you know how hard it is to better yourself/Upper class won't understand 'cause you inherited wealth/No opportunities, this is our community.” Ban Drill, Krept & Konan (2019)

Alongside New Labour urban renewal policy and what has been described as ‘class war conservatism’ from Coalition governments (Hodkinson and Robbins 2012), the social contract between state and citizen has been redrawn. Notions of power and responsibility between the market, government agents, and citizens themselves have been transformed (Alexander et al. 2018). Rather than viewing working-class communities as deserving of outside help and guidance from a welfare state, the institutionalisation of ‘self-help’ through policies such as council tenant self-management reconstitutes the citizen as self-responsible and, theoretically, self-empowering (Hyatt 1997). The responsibility for addressing housing issues is continuously reframed by both policy and political discourse in decontextualized, individualised terms by market-led mantras of choice and empowerment (Hancox 2019a). Yet this focus on individual responsibility obscures structural issues such as race within a moralising discourse of respectability, self-discipline, and deservingness (Alexander et al. 2018). As Watt and Minton note: “The severity of the housing crisis is determined by where one stands in relation to hierarchical configurations of race and class,” (Watt and Minton 2016: 205). Furthermore, they suggest that the children of London’s multi-ethnic working class are most likely to experience precarity in housing and even homelessness (ibid). Krept & Konan’s lyrics touch on the effect of structural inequalities in their lives growing up in council housing in London; despite the broader neoliberal rhetoric of ‘self-help’ or the ‘enterprising self’ (Rose, Osborne, and Barry 1994), socioeconomic class stands as a barrier in the way of individual ‘opportunity’ whilst housing policy actively displaces racialized working class communities.

In a context where the state is no longer seen as responsible for providing resources for marginal communities, and the locus of responsibility is shifted on to the individual, the effects of structural inequality are often characterised as individual failings or moral deficits. Drill rap and by inference, drill rappers, have been represented as a social ill that is the cause of waves of violent and drug crime in London (Fatsis 2019). Cressida Dick, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police service, labelled drill as a genre that “glamourizes gang or drug-selling life, taunts rivals, and normalises weapons carrying” (The Telegraph 2018) and issued a series of bans and CBOs against drill artists. Yet members of affected communities, as well as academics and critics, have pointed to structural inequalities – such a shortage of social housing – that are not being addressed by current policy (Thapar 2019). Rather than create these issues, the music reflects them. The impact of neoliberal policies disproportionately affects minority ethnic groups, whilst simultaneously expecting these groups to take responsibility for social exclusion and structural inequality experienced. Although drill lyrics rarely explicitly mention race, I argue the music and its treatment by mainstream media, police, and politics provides a window into the experience of racialized poverty in London. In Kent Nizzy, a track about Kennington by Harlem Spartans (2017), MizOrMac raps, “CID trying to lock my city/But fuck Trident we all violent/Man, back your city/Kennington, where it’s fucking sticky,”. By referring to CID, the Criminal Investigation Department, and Operation Trident, a controversial initiative tackling gang violence within Black communities, the rapper paints a picture of the increasing confinement, surveillance, and over-policing of Black youths in the city amidst a context of youth violence. Rather than glamourizing or inciting gang crime, the music offers an angry testimony to the experience of young black males in London. Krept and Konan rap, “Police stopped me, asked to search my whip/Said if you ain’t got no grounds, you ain’t searching shit,” (Krept & Konan 2015). The neoliberal shift of responsibility away from the state to the individual involves a process whereby the effects of social injustice are policed by incriminating, and thus attributing responsibility to, those who suffer from it – black youths are characterised as dangerous rather than vulnerable (Fatsis 2019).  

Hyperlocality, Territorialism, and Claustrophobia in Drill Music

“Kennington/
I was fifteen me and GTrap, hands on a Remmington/
Scrap fights at Waterloo like Wellington/
Tryna rip holes and touch man's skeleton (Touch skeleton)/
Opp boys can't see us, man's wettin' 'em (Wettin' 'em)/
Kennington/
I made my first bag in Kennington.”
Kennington Where It Started – Harlem Spartans (2017)

To put these policies into conversation with music being released by drill crews, I use the example of south London group Harlem Spartan’s Kennington Where It Started. The track is about pride in their area; specifically Kennington Park Estate – and, like most other drill tracks, the pride is violent and defensive, directly addressing their ‘opps’ (opposition), “a richly poetic but nonetheless grim enumeration of drug dealing, knives, and guns,” (Hancox 2019a: 34). When you put Kennington Park Estate into context with changes in London around it, the fiercely defensive and microscopically local focus of the music can also be contextualised. Nearby Elephant and Castle has been the target of “social cleansings as allied to regeneration,” (Watt and Minton 2016: 212). At the heart of the regeneration effort was the demolition of two huge estates, the Heygate and Aylesbury Estates, which made way for the creation of luxury apartments whilst providing the bare minimum in terms of social housing provision, with previous occupants being largely unaccounted for (ibid). On the other side of Kennington is the area of Vauxhall, also undergoing massive regeneration efforts, emblematic of which is the St George Wharf Tower with flats costing up to £51 million (Hancox 2019a). I argue that the music reflects the position of those marginal and working class communities that have been displaced or confined by neoliberal privatisation and regeneration, a community that is “effectively under siege – not from tanks and air raids, but from poverty and youth violence, inequality, institutional and societal racism,” (ibid: 34). Indeed, not only do the dark shots of inner-city council estates and violent lyrics contribute to the mood of gritty urban life under such policies, but the musicality of the backing tracks emulates the experience of these young people by using samples of police sirens, screeching car tires, and harsh beats reminiscent of gun shots. In an increasingly claustrophobic built environment, one of the outcomes is an intense and violently defended hyperlocalism, down to the level of individual council estates, reflected in the territorialism of drill’s lyrics.

For a generation whose cultural memory is scarred by the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the institutional racism revealed by the Macpherson report on the handling of the case, coupled with the everyday over-policing of Black youths and the public derision by politicians and police of drill, the neighbourhood or ‘manor’ becomes an area of key importance, not only for identity but for survival. Les Back describes the sense of belonging and loyalty to an area as ‘neighbourhood nationalism’ (Back 1996); no longer strictly tied to ethnic identities, instead neighbourhood nationalism reflects the commitment to and time spent living in an area. In understanding racial identity and belonging in this sense, Back contests the “situational model prevalent within anthropology and the sociology of race relations,” (ibid: 4) by recognising local and trans-local formations. This locational perspective can also account for the importance of postcodes or estates in Black youth violence; transcendent of race, the neighbourhood identifies insiders and outsiders (Gidley 2009). As the neighbourhood is increasingly cut down by housing policy, and access to public space minimised by privatisation, surveillance, and lack of mobility, territorialism intensifies (Hancox 2019a). Furthermore, Hancox suggests that the identification with the neighbourhood, postcode, or council estate has to do with the precarity of diasporic identities – when owning ‘English’, ‘Ghanaian’, ‘British’, or ‘Jamaican’ has been denied to you or feels unreachable, the neighbourhood becomes a central material and symbolic location for identity and belonging (ibid). Amidst shifting configurations of the relationship between citizen and state, marginal and diasporic communities whose material conditions are directly affected – and yet unacknowledged – by structural inequality might shift their citizenship toward a hyperlocal identification with the neighbourhood, rather than with the nation state.  

The Vernacular Politics of Drill

“Can feel the knife sharp in my gut/
My body collapsed, it's hard to get up/
‘Wagwan fam, remember me from the can?/
Shoulda stuck to rapping’ they said it as they ran/
But little did they know that was all part of the plan/
Holding my stomach, blood on my hands/
Paramedics trying, I know I'm slowly dying/
They're tryna keep me breathing, my mum's here crying/
I can see the pain, she prayed for me still/
I can feel my heart coming to a standstill/
Feds asked who's responsible, I just kept it real/
I said ‘Whoever banned drill’”
Ban Drill, Krept & Konan (2019)

Krept & Konan’s short film and track Ban Drill was created in response to the increasing criminalisation and censorship of drill music. The track features the protagonist Jaden or Jay: “I’m fifteen, I’m from a poor block ‘round the way/My mum tries her best to put food on my plate […] sometimes I gotta go to school with no lunch money/But I get it, she ain’t got it, I still love mummy,” (Krept & Konan 2019). He begins selling drugs with people from his estate and gets arrested. Once out of jail, he begins to make drill rap and gains popularity. The music video shows two alternate scenarios. In the first, the police censor Jay’s videos and he, “can’t do a show, it’s getting stopped by Trident,” (ibid). He resorts to going back to selling drugs on the block and is ultimately stabbed by a rival gang and left to die. In the second scenario, his music becomes successful, he can provide for his family without selling drugs, and he performs at sold out shows. The final shot is Jay on stage with Krept & Konan, cheered on by a crowd of their peers.

Krept & Konan’s track is an emotive and political message to the police and other authorities, suggesting that the criminalisation of drill locks communities into patterns of gang crime and perpetuates the violent effects of structural inequality, rather than solving these issues. In the comments of the YouTube video, one user writes, “Watching this I realise why so many people do drill music, it's another way to try and escape,” (YouTube comment, 2019). In a Guardian opinion piece, Konan claims, “Creativity was my way out of the violence that surrounded me. It’s deprivation, not music, that devastates communities,” (Konan 2019). In the piece, he describes how after the murder of his stepdad, forming Krept & Konan prevented him from getting involved in “jail, gangs, and getting arrested,” (ibid). I suggest that although Krept & Konan provide a counternarrative to mainstream and institutional characterisations of drill, the notion that drill musicians use music as a legitimate means to gain socioeconomic success taps into the neoliberal values of self-empowerment and self-betterment. Unable to unlock access to other routes to neoliberal status due to their position within the broader social context, drill music provides a path to legitimate empowerment. It is revealing that it is this argument, resting on neoliberal values at its core, that is used to critique the government’s handling of drill and youth crime.  

Ultimately, this brings me to my final point, which is that as well as reflecting the experience of citizenship in London, drill has a political power and provides a domain and platform where young Black working class people can negotiate and contest their citizenship. Whilst admittedly Krept & Konan’s track consciously addresses a particular political issue, I argue that all drill music has a political power – the power of boosting social visibility, giving a voice to the voiceless (Hancox 2019a), and depicting the effects of structural violence experienced by marginal communities. Fatsis aptly describes drill as, “a culturally and socio-politically conscious youth subculture that voices valid, yet neglected, concerns about the experience of social life in London’s ill-mannered manors,” (Fatsis 2019: 1303). As demonstrated by the lyrics, video, and musicality to Harlem Spartan’s music, the music speaks to the experience of young black men in relation to London’s built environment as well as its institutional forces. Connecting this to the broader context of neoliberal housing policy, I suggest that the trajectory away from postwar social housing provision towards the current housing crisis (Watt and Minton 2016) has progressively deprived working class communities not only of material provision such as social housing, but also of political channels that might represent them (Koch 2016). This alienation from politics is further grounded by a sense of betrayal at New Labour’s ideological turn towards the expansion of the middle class at the expense of the working-class (ibid). Even so, in her ethnography of an English council estate, Koch notes that despite the pervading sense of disenchantment with formal or electoral politics, inhabitants mediated the political system by “vernacularizing politics in their own ways,” (ibid: 285). Fundamentally, drill rap can be described as the vernacular politics of young black youth growing up in inner city council estates, reflective of their experiences of citizenship amidst a context of neoliberal privatisation. In this way, drill rap music carries an important political message and is a vital platform for the expression and negotiation of the experience of citizenship within London.

Whereas Koch relates her concept to local politicians utilizing kinship networks within council estates to gain traction, I argue that the youth represented by drill rap experience little to no representation in either formal or local politics, further exacerbated by cuts to local youth services and the criminalization of drill. Instead, the music itself becomes a form of vernacular politics, of having their voices heard; of “transmuting the anxiety, pain, and joy of inner city life into music” (Hancox 2019a: 19). The grassroots production of the music, using free software and everyday technology such as phones (ibid), the defensive kinship networks of drill crews and their opps, plus the gritty urban musicality of the tracks are all emblematic and expressive of the sociopolitical positionality of the Black youth making drill. I argue that voices like Krept & Konan’s take the place of local politicians and provide a platform where issues experienced by young people living in inner-city council estates become amplified and heard and put directly into conversation with political and institutional narratives such as Cressida Dick’s. When the cumulative effect of ongoing policy change is a territorial turn towards identification with the hyperlocal, inhabitants of council estates turn not to representatives from local politics, but to the voices coming directly out of that built environment. Therefore I argue that drill is a vernacular politics of vital relevance and importance for communities marginalised by neoliberal policy; as argued by Konan in his opinion piece: “Expression – even if it is confronting, scary, and violent – is important, particularly for a deprived and otherwise voiceless community.” (Konan 2019).

Conclusion

In this essay, I have used drill rap to provide a rich ethnographic insight into my central question of how citizenship is experienced and negotiated through the built environment. The working-class inhabitants of council estates have been increasingly marginalized, excluded, and confined by the progression of neoliberal housing policy that sought to expand the middle class and ‘regenerate’ inner city London. Ultimately, these policies resulted in what has been described as ‘social cleansing’ through a shortage of social housing and an increasingly privatised and surveilled public space, disproportionately affecting ethnic minority identities. I argue that the violent territorialism and hyperlocalism featured in drill music reflects an increasingly claustrophobic experience of the built environment as a result of housing policy. Situating drill within the current political climate also sheds a light on how alongside shifting housing policy, notions of power and responsibility have transformed amidst neoliberalisation, where the effects of structural inequality are obscured as the cause of structural inequality. The stark and brutal lyrics depicting gang violence, over-policing, and growing up in London, samples of sirens and screeching tires, and music videos featuring gritty urban backdrops all offer a testimony to rather than a glamorisation of the experience of young black men in London. Therefore, I argue that drill not only provides an important platform to share the experience of citizenship for Black youth in inner city London, but also to negotiate and contest mainstream depictions that criminalise these groups. Ultimately, drill music is a vernacular politics for voices that are misrepresented or unheard in formal politics.

References

Alexander, Catherine, Maja Hojer Bruun, and Insa Koch. 2018. ‘Political Economy Comes Home: On the Moral Economies of Housing’. Critique of Anthropology 38(2):121–39.

Back, Les. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture. UCL Press.

BBC London Radio. 2010. ‘The Robert Elms Show’.

Dizzee Rascal. 2017. Slow Your Roll. Island Records.

Fatsis, Lambros. 2019. ‘Policing the Beats: The Criminalisation of UK Drill and Grime Music by the London Metropolitan Police’. The Sociological Review 67(6):1300–1316.

Gidley, Ben. 2009. ‘Youth Culture and Ethnicity: Emerging Youth Interculture in South London’. in Youth Culture: Scenes, Subcultures, and Tribes, edited by P. Hodkinson and W. Deicke. Routledge.

Hancox, Dan. 2019a. Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. London: W. Collins.

Hancox, Dan. 2019b. ‘Skengdo and AM: The Drill Rappers Sentenced for Playing Their Song’. The Guardian. Retrieved (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/31/skengdo-and-am-the-drill-rappers-sentenced-for-playing-their-song).

Harlem Spartans. 2017. Kennington Where It Started.

Hodkinson, Stuart, and Glyn Robbins. 2012. ‘The Return of Class War Conservatism? Housing under the UK Coalition Government’. Critical Social Policy 33(1):57–77.

Hyatt, Susan. 1997. ‘Poverty in a “Post-Welfare” Landscape.’ Pp. 166–98 in Anthropology of Policy: Perspectives on Governance and Power. London: Routledge.

Koch, Insa. 2016. ‘Bread-and-Butter Politics: Democratic Disenchantment and Everyday Politics on an English Council Estate: Democratic Disenchantment and Everyday Politics’. American Ethnologist 43(2):282–94.

Konan. 2019. ‘Music Saved My Life. Banning Drill Takes Hope Away from Black British Kids like Me’. The Guardian. Retrieved (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/13/music-banning-drill-black-british-kids-violence).

Krept & Konan. 2015. F.W.T.S.

Krept & Konan. 2019. Ban Drill. UMG.

Rose, Nikolas, Thomas Osborne, and Andrew Barry. 1994. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University Press.

Thapar, Ciaran. 2019. ‘Don’t Censor Drill Music, Listen to What It’s Trying to Tell Us’. The Guardian.

The Telegraph. 2018. ‘Police to Treat Gangs like Terror Suspects with Tough New Laws.’ May 30.

Watt, Paul, and Anna Minton. 2016. ‘London’s Housing Crisis and Its Activisms: Introduction’. City 20(2):204–21.

 YouTube Comment. (2019). Re: Ban Drill Short Film [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuwcr-M37D