sadmanbarty
Well-known member
These are some jumping off points. Also, naturally, Yeats's theory of masks.
“No face…”
Choosing an archetypal UK drill track- one that does little to differentiate itself- is difficult insofar as tracks in that vein are so plentiful. But that’s the point. Drill is changing-same music (or, to borrow drill’s vernacular, chinging-same music). It occupies a distinct, almost uniform, sound world of muffled, funeral-march pianos, swampy bass, freckled drums and seraphic reverb. When played for any lengthy amount of time it becomes meditative and immersive. Repetition becomes mantra like. What can sound like apathy can also sound like surrender. For all the lyrical content surrounding physical death, its sonics impart a kind of ego death that chimes with drill’s aesthetic of anonymity. The collective gang identity trumps that of the individual. Faces are masked. Clothes are uniform. Voices are made devoid of any defining traits; mumbled with little variety of timbre or intonation.
Individual character is so stripped away that in rather dystopian fashion many artists adopt names that resemble codes more than they do nicknames as though they’ve tacitly internalized the disposability of their own lives in gang warfare. Monikers such as C2 and M24 are indistinguishable from gang tags like M20 and 150 when presented side-by-side in YouTube titles. The group O’Lanna take this to its logical extreme with each of its rapper’s simply adopting a number to add to the ‘surname’ O’Lanna; their track ‘Wheel It There’ is accredited to rappers 3 O’Lanna, 6 O’Lanna, 7 O’Lanna and 8 O’Lanna. These codified forms of identity have rather inconspicuous and bureaucratic origins. Groups 67 and 86 derive their names from Tulse Hill’s 020 867 telephone code. Moscow 17 and 12World likewise garnered their group names from their respective SE17 and W12 postcodes while Zone 2 arrived at theirs via Transport For London’s five pricing zones. Drill’s numerical preoccupation speaks to the genre’s reductive view of human life. Deaths, prison sentences and gang aggrandizement are often abstracted into mathematical sums as in Loski’s ‘Hazards’ where he mocks the death of four members of rival gang 150 by rapping “they say 150, but it’s 146 instead”. Ironically enough the code “IC3”, used by British law enforcement to denote black suspects, is routinely appropriated by drill artists. They assimilate and weaponise this depersonalizing taxonomy against their opponents. NPK’s ‘Talk is Cheap’ features the lyrics “black blade on an IC3, run down four other IC3’s” while Poky raps “stuck in the hood just trying to survive, pop four IC3’s in a ride” is his song ‘D Kamp’. B Side even go so far as to title a song ‘IC3’.
“Still cutting shapes in the rave…”
This blurring of boundaries between the individual- and collective- self simultaneously echoes the collectivism of the rave dream and is its moral antithesis. The divergent use of piano in rave and drill is telling. Though central to each genre, in rave the pianos were crisp, staccato bursts of utopian sunshine whereas in drill they’re viscous, nihilistic, murky and grey.
drill