Is Drill Rap a Dead End?

The largest in the world Drill rapper can spend the rest of his life in bars – and no one should want his crown. This week rapper from Chicago Lil Durk was arrested in an alleged murder plot to kill Savannah, Georgia, rapper Quando Rondo in LA in August 2022. Quando’s cousin Lul Pab was killed instead, fueling Quando’s anguished cries at the crime scene. Then Durk posted that “no” whimper to the intro of an unreleased song, to the awe of the same voyeurs and Reddit rats who now call Durk a fool for engaging with the very meat they were giddily looking at.

Durk’s arrest highlights the battle between his friend and OTF affiliate King Von (murdered in 2020), and their rivals Youngboy Never Broke Again (incarcerated) and Quando Rondo (pending sentencing next week in a federal drug case). Most disheartening is that it is unclear why the conflict started in the first place; all these guys were cool at one point. Chicago rapper Lil Reese, a close friend of Durk, told No Jumper that NBA Youngboy’s crew occasionally hung out with him in Chicago. In 2019, Durk made an X-post noting, “Young boy, so hard.” King Von and Rondo (who is signed to NBA Youngboy’s Never Broke Again records) had been friends.

But apparently something happened behind the scenes to sour their feelings for each other. During an Instagram Live session in March 2019, King Von dissed NBA Youngboy’s music, proclaiming, “You got a hat in your raps,” but then walked back saying he was joking and that music is on the way was – in February 2020, Von made an X post urging Youngboy to drop a song they made together. In August 2020, Von posted a photo holding hands with someone who fans said was likely Jania Meshell, Youngboy’s mother’s child (she says they were just doing a song together). The next day, Youngboy posted a photo to Instagram with the caption, “I’m out, make my son fuck your daughter since you trollin,” a shot that many people believe was aimed at Von. During the same period, Quando Rondo and Lil Reese began exchanging photos on social media.

Just days before Von’s death, a YoungBoy song featuring Von’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, rapper Asian Doll, was leaked. In November 2020, King Von downplayed the breakup in an interview with DJ Akademiks, noting, “It’s not that serious” and saying that the internet is blowing the breakup out of proportion. It was his last interview; Later that night, he encountered Quando at an Atlanta club, fought with him, and was then fatally shot by Quando’s friend, Lul Timm. With Von’s death, things went beyond resolution. Durk had known Von for years, signed him after he came home from covering a murder case in 2017, and together they helped transform Durk’s OTF (Only The Family) label into a formidable rap movement.

Over the next few years, Durk and the duo Youngboy and Quando began exchanging photos relentlessly on social media and in diss songs. Fans have gotten a taste of it, raiding Durk’s Instagram comments section to tell him to “slide for Von.” For these fans, who tend to view the street violence associated with rap as a reality show, Von’s death wasn’t a sign that things had gone too far, it was just another plot point. The lines were drawn by the artists, but sharpened by fans pouring through Twitter (now X) posts, Instagram Lives and songs looking for so-called subliminals about the next guy.

Whatever happened between them before Von’s death seems like the kind of one-upmanship that rappers grow out of and think about as youthful selfishness. Iconic rapper 50 Cent had a conflict with Fat Joe that bordered on violence, but they managed to squash it, and the two seem to be pretty good friends now. In February 2023, he said Rolling stone That maturation made him realize that he hated following Joe like that. He also said he recognized what happened between Durk and YoungBoy: “The things they come from make them do that. Their entire experience is in the music.”

50 has many parallels with both men. His upbringing in Southside Queens was a draw for many of his fans. Gangster rapper Ice T called 50 ‘the last gangster rapper’ against Soren Baker that he ‘believed’ Get rich or die trying artist. “I think being a real gangsta rapper has to scare you a little bit. I don’t think there aren’t new people doing it,” said Ice T. But in 2024, there’s no long-term reason to make fear an artist’s main draw. The fans who lurk on Reddit pages and watch Trap Lore Ross’ videos want to see artists figuratively walking a tightrope between art and reality. They want to feel like Durk’s bars are about calling out hits on opps about someone specific. And if a performer inevitably slips and falls while walking a tightrope, it’s solely his fault. They’re “stupid” because they waste their chances, even though much of drill rap’s appeal comes from the authenticity fans seek. It’s a no-profit paradox.

Drill rap is a dead end that artists no longer have to walk. This is not a statement about the artistic merit of these scenes; the scene has given us geniuses like Durk, Chief Keef, G Herbo, Sheff G, Pop Smoke, and artists like Cash Cobain and Ice Spice have cultivated the fun created by Cobain spur sexy drill. But the drill scenes as a whole have become too corrupted by the weight of criminalization. There are too many fans ogling rappers as racist, hyper-masculine caricatures, disregarding anti-blackness by demanding artists live their raps at the cost of their lives or freedom. There are too many “media personalities” who have no respect for hip-hop as an art form, and make millions by callously giving these fans their dose of black nihilism. And now more than ever, there are too many prosecutors who can’t wait to snare artists in their next gang indictment. Drill rap has become a plague on hip-hop, not because of the artists, but because of people who don’t consider it art. It’s the people who try to excite the artists, at their own expense.

A lot of street violence comes from people protecting their reputations, and unfortunately, drill music is so inextricably linked to gang violence that the dynamic has seeped into its fandom. The music has been reduced to a soundtrack of nationwide gang violence that is decimating a generation of black and brown youth. And instead of this circumstance causing alarm, it has become entertainment that artists feel obligated to star in. On “Wonderful Wayne and Jackie Boy,” Durk rapped, “I ain’t on the net that fed years,” but still occasionally played with fire to let people know who he was. That’s why Durk’s lyrics after Von’s death have left a trail of damning hints at retaliation that could find their way into the courtroom. That’s why, after Pab’s death, he set Quando’s cries to a song rude to DJ Akademiks he stopped seeing “slide for Von” comments on his Instagram “for some strange reason.” His perception does not depend only on good music. He fuels his fans’ desire to believe him. But at this point, after two young men are dead, allegedly behind bullshit, it’s worth asking how much more Black Lives hip-hop “credibility” is worth.

These fans didn’t force Durk to do what he would have done; he is a grown man with autonomy. But its five-year run is a glimpse into a rap subculture choking on its own bloodlust. In September 2022, Quando told it Rolling stone that ‘I think about changing all the time, but he’ can’t change because people don’t want a nigga to change. It’s like the respect and my rep who will leave if a nigga changes. The rap fans who support Quando are part of that nation. They like him not just because he makes good music, but because they think he’s a gangster who makes good music.

Elsewhere in the interview, Quando noted, “Niggas live violent lives. That doesn’t change anything. Everybody could say, ‘You could change…’ It’s over with big brother, nigga too far away. He apparently saw no way out. In 2020, Durk rapped: “They ask me where I’ll be in ten years, shit, I said, ‘The FBI.’” Both men seem to have resigned themselves to a terrible fate mapped out by a country that abandoned them left. Fans looked at the OTF-Youngboy beef as a sporting rivalry, but in the end, only the system won. Even if they were to physically escape their home environment, they would not be able to do so mentally. And the voyeuristic fans who saw them facing martyrdom didn’t want that.