quite a fascination with gangs and guns. does that whole schtick get a little old at some point?
i parody my own taste in music as being 'gangs and stabbing', but that's not actually the case either in the sense of only listening to gangster music (i love rnb, jazz, reggae, garage, pop, etc.) or even finding gangsterism the appealing part of the music.
in the case of drill for example its the rhythms, rather than the lyrical themes, that appeal to me. as it happens there are intriguing elements to the lyrics; the density and sophistication of allusions and metaphors, the asexuality, the slapstick nature of some violent lyrics, the phonetic buoyancy, the numerical nature of many lyrics, the cryptolectic nature of a lot of it, the interplay of various dialects, etc.
as far as being a cliched goes, to my ears a guitar rock band writing a song about Wittgenstein or zero lower bound interest rates are likely to be infinitely more derivative than artists who are working within a genre that didn't even exist a year before they made the track.
in terms of this thread, the notions that a puritanical middle eastern islamist militant group is borrowing cultural cachet from extravagant, hedonistic US rap and that teenagers in south east london are in turn mimicking these jihadists are noteworthy cultural phenomenon.