Roadmanbarty's Top 20 Drills

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Go on then go on then draw for the choons. 20 goon choons. The illest drill.

An impassioned defence of a much maligned genre. Why does it matter? Why is it life enhancing? Why should we bother?

An explanation of what makes it top 20 worthy. Quotables.

The great lost RA/Fact/Wire article.

(Motivated by listening to a couple of YouTubers top 10s and thinking they weren't all that really, and certainly made drill look shit compared to grime e.g.)
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
co-sign. I can imagine what some of them might be, but others will be lost gems unaccessible to the casual observer
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Barty right now

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Leo

Well-known member
I dunno, get the feeling barty, luka and third are cheating on us, run off to some other 20-year old message board. Barty's just trying to cover for them with his entertainment date thread, to throw us off their trail. secession in our midst, a breakaway republic being formed under our very noses. some call them traitors, I won't go that far, at this point.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
They're on some tropical internet island, kicking back with cocktails, chuckling.

I don't think the word traitor is appropriate, Leo, at the moment.
 

Leo

Well-known member
possibly a mutinous three-way new year's resolution pact, a need for a higher intellectual bar. rumors of something about how we're incapable of holding up our end, stagnant placeholder conversation.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
1) Harlem Spartans- Call Me A Spartan


Medusa-head sitars spit and lurch over a jittering bossa nova of hissing high hats, claustrophobic clicks, guttural bass growls and barking brass stabs. Intricate, multisyllabic wordplay zips and zigzags past in every direction, vividly recounting tales of “Spartans” and “shinobi men” equipped with blades, swords and spears inflicting “wounds” in epic tales of “vengeance”. It seems then that it’s not only the brass that stabs in this setting. In fact it’s hard to find much in the song that doesn’t at least tangentially conjure images of bladed weaponry. The percussion clinks, the sitars are tinny and metallic - gliding from note to note like swords swooshing through the air. Even the editing is quick cut; chopping, slicing and swiping to the extent that the screen is occasionally engulfed in a scarlet red filter as though the camera lens has been splattered with blood. We’re presented with a group of shadowy figures, their faces disguised and obscured behind balaclavas and hoods. They’re amassed outside a nondescript convenience store, but that does little to allay their ominous aura. In this context, even the most incidental of background details is sinister. The infantile, heart-shaped Wall’s ice-cream logo that repeatedly appears suddenly feels palpably gory. The word “FOOD” that hangs over the rapper’s heads insinuates that the violence they embody is predatorial and primal. The skeletal park gate they congregate around, with its brittle metal arch, morbidly evokes the “arbeit macht frei” sign above the gates of Auschwitz. A legal disclaimer at the beginning of the video isn’t enough to assuage this sense of malevolence. With its grammatical mishaps and inconsistent capitalization it comes across as disingenuous and subversive. It professes that what is being portrayed is “fictional”. It is not. This is real life. This is London. This is UK drill.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
2) SMG- Karma


Raw, palpable agency.

Imposing your will on the world.

Blood.

Sweat.

Hot-blooded heathens.

Riots and pandemonium. Prison breaks.

The implosion of the social contract.

Explosions. Knocked out teeth flying through the air like shrapnel. Skulls crunching under heels. Tires burning.

Looting music. Lunatic music.

The Mehdi Army.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
3) Zone 2- Wait


Toxins in the bloodstream. Spreading. Swarming through veins and organs.

Suffocating you from inside.

Lung spasms. Cardiac arrest. Seizures.

The shuddering, ivory whites of the eye as they roll to the back of the head.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
4) Moscow17- Scoreboard


Rippling moonlight reflected in water. Night walks through empty dockland. Intimate moments alone. Cityscapes rendered tender by obsidian horizons. Those fleeting hours when metropolises become concrete Edens. The world becomes a dream when London sleeps.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
5) C1- Do It Again


Submerged. The tide muscular and magisterial. Passive but potent. Swaying, not violently but nonetheless inescapable. Poseidon’s grip like a boa constrictor. Still, yet menacingly lethal.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
6) Loski- Famlee


Stadium-scope EDM drillstep.

A druggy festival girl with blue hair, neon mascara and a skin-tight dress clinging to pasty cellulite. The world becomes a blur; music becomes reverb and all she can see is the cloying arcade lights of elliptic fairground rides.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
7) Poky- D Kamp


Wicca and witchcraft. Little characters made of willow dangling from trees. The disembodied breaths you hear in lonely forests. The silhouettes that manifest in the corner of your eye. Tree branches that become hands tapping on the window in the minds of frightened children.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
LoL your writeups (which are great) are so abstract. I kind of expected some bars. Are you more into the beats than the bars?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm going to rigorously, commensensically, tediously analyse every selection as if it was a botanical sample.
 

version

Well-known member
my initial interest was the drums. they immediately made me think of jungle

then it was the mediative, womb-like quality, which the low pass filters play their part in.

then luke did that post about the morse code style of mcing and i fell in love with it all over again.
.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Interesting. Maybe Barry can cover the beats and Luka the lyrics.

I noticed listening to some of that Brooklyn drill that they calls guns "poles" and that opens up a seam of symbolic shanking that the Brits with their "spears" don't enjoy (but they shake the spear like William so it's 1-0 to the UK).

All the ppl commenting under the videos seem to be obsessed with the rappers themselves.
 
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