Brooklyn Drill

[sadmanbarty]

Might as well give it its own thread.

I was pretty ambivalent about it, but there are a couple of bits on Meet The Woo 2 that move it beyond an awkward aping of UK drill. Faint shimmers from the stargate that you wouldn’t get in the UK. Flirtations with Uriel. Seraphic glimmers.





There’s also muscularity in post-2018 drill production that sounds too polished for the UK but which works in the States. Bruce Springsteen’s biceps in sleeveless denim music.

Where it transcends being solely- misguidedly- derivative is when it opts for post-Migos cantonised flows. That is an ingredient in the UK (Miz being the most glaring example), but its not foregrounded to anywhere near the extent it is in some of this Brooklyn stuff; there’s still a pull towards contiguity in the UK.





Crowley rather astutely criticised Pop Smoke for essentially being an Abra Cadabra impressionist. While there’s a lot of truth in that, it does explain why he sits more comfortably with these beats. A lot of the US rappers are cutting through when the music works far more as something immersive. The UK rappers all sound like kids at school mumbling reluctantly to a grumpy teacher, whereas these American lot have that showbiz shine. They’re beaming spotlights in a music that’s supposed to be murky.

 

[sadmanbarty]

In a way this music is a serious indictment of the UK's inability to tie what it was doing with drill to what was going on in the States at the same time. Its a bit embarrassing that some bloke from New York's had to do it belatedly (especially given how UK music- and UK drill itself- has an illustrious history of honing in on and working off of the most innovative strands of US rap).







There were a couple of hints things could go in a somewhat similar direction (though admittedly by way of Africa), but nothing came of it. The music just went stale.

 

[sadmanbarty]

Oh, turns out D'One did a whole EP last year with Young Slime-esqu green and purple snakes and everything.

 

[sadmanbarty]

Oh, turns out D'One did a whole EP last year with Young Slime-esqu green and purple snakes and everything.

But there's no drill on it...

Its all trap.

 

[luka]

First one you posted is amazing

 

[DannyL]

Yeah that Pop Smoke one is amazing. Why does this shit sound so much better (to my ears) with US voices? I know they have a deep MC culture but I can't really hear shades of that classic NY rap in this, in the way that you can with so much other stuff.

 

[sadmanbarty]

There’s always been a magical undercurrent in UK drill. Those gliding bass lines are writhing, sinuous and diabolically serpentine. The funeral march pianos and cathedral reverbs have their religious connotations. The lyrical preoccupation with numbers is like alchemy or 5%er stuff. You get those hexing sorceress vocals in things like ‘waps’.

But it’s always been overshadowed by the social realist elements of the music. The mantra-like nature of UK drill often ends up sounding more apathetic than trance-inducing. There’s something washed out and grayscale about the music that detracts from its imaginative potential. It sounds like Lambeth on an overcast day.

What’s great about these Woo 2 bits is that the magic is front and centre. The cavernous reverb, the dragon scale autotune, the “murmurs from a Martian crypt” (to coin a phrase)... it’s all so enchanting.

 

[sadmanbarty]

The intimacy’s gone on those woo 2 ones. Compare it to something like wicked and waaasss. It’s all broad strokes, these gargantuan reverberating zeniths. It’s Old Testament floods of sound.



The drums are also less fidgety and jungly. Faint ‘kill shit’ snares, those lop-sided main accents, but all the flurries are gone.

 

[sadmanbarty]

I can’t listen to tg Milligan without thinking of that footage of him in prison, arms held behind his back and that giant 9 foot bloke who was built like the thing just repeatedly punching him in the face. It’s one of those things you really regret watching. Just irredeemably bleak.

His vocals sound like that. They sound bruised and traumatised. They sound like swollen eye sockets and split lips.

 

[versh]

This one's good.

 

[DannyL]

I probably don't know enough about UK drill to really comment but what I hear is a kinda lack of the performative in the UK vocals. It can sound like it doesn't have the desire to excite and entertain in a way that the US stuff does, and I think that's just 40 years of MC culture soaking in via osmosis. There's an energy from the aggression but it seems kinda one-dimensional, less rounded than the US stuff. Muffled, literally. Whereas I hear and see a kind of ... flamboyance, confidence in those US tracks. There's a certainty that you'll want slamdance around to this.

 

[DannyL]

Like the woooooo and "she like the way that I ... RRRRRRR" on that last Pop Smoke (bass on that is a fucking monster btw) - I can't imagine a UK driller having the confidence to flex like that. Maybe I'm very wrong, idk.

 

[luka]

Sheff G was the first one of them I came across. I played this a lot but mostly for the Taze verse which I love. Some good dancing in the video too.

 

[luka]

Like the woooooo and "she like the way that I ... RRRRRRR" on that last Pop Smoke (bass on that is a fucking monster btw) - I can't imagine a UK driller having the confidence to flex like that. Maybe I'm very wrong, idk.

You can see this in the physicality as well if you watch the video I've just posted for instance.

This is something I've always found interesting. American style dance and choreography is global but the same moves look very different once transplanted to India or England or Korea.

 

[luka]

There's an inhibition to Taze's movements that marks him out as English.

 

[luka]

But how anything tastes depends on what you've just had in your mouth beforehand. Like orange juice after brushing your teeth. And a while back when Barty was making me listen to UK drill on the one hand and Migos on the other, the U.K. greyscale could make the Atlanta stuff seem too Hollywood, too James Cameron, too professional wrestling. Woo like Rik Flair. Sort of gross and ridiculous.

 

[sadmanbarty]

what's nice about woo 2 is that it's combined 2017 barty into one package; drill beats with migos vocals.

i've beeen waiting for this music to happen for 3 years.

 

[luka]

He even did a lightwork freestyle with a mask on (it's not very good)



But I think everyones always had a secret fantasy about traffic around the 'Black Atlantic' going in every direction and this is the first time that's become a reality.

 

[luka]

I was thinking as I lay in bed this morning not wanting to get out cos there's a hurricane trying to cave my windows in that Barty should do one of those mvuent listens to such and such for uk drill but force everyone to get involved not just overworked mvuent.

 

[sadmanbarty]

In normal circumstances, the internet dilutes cultural artefacts by exposing them to outside influences, but drill has inverted this phenomenon; the internet has allowed a very narrow, insular culture centered around South London’s Tulse Hill area to project itself out into the world. There are now strands of drill that owe far more the UK that Chicago in localities as disparate as Albania, Spain and New York. Far from being merely gangs and violence, drill has shown itself to be the sound of technology, of globalisation, of terrorism and of despair. Its resonance and scope are far more wide-ranging than its geographic and social confines would suggest. As C1 says, “the world’s much bigger than the Tulse Hill slums...”.