Brooklyn Drill

[DannyL]

I'll give you a first impression now - how hard I find to understand it. I've been listening to MC music of every sort since I was 11. And I find this stuff super-cryptic on first listen. It reminds me of listening to fucking Supreme Clientele for the first time. So dense and hidden. Like a lyrical allegory for the masking up.

 

[luka]

Yeah it's crazy that. So dense and encoded.

 

[sadmanbarty]

when i played drill to my mum she did the classic middle class mum move of going "its shakespearean".

to be fair she'd probably say that about anything, but it is true. in school when they do sheakspear you spend most of the lesson just deciphering all the metaphors and all that.

"shakes from the spear like william"

 

[sadmanbarty]

"Mash house with Miz, Misch, Mash (Mash, mash)
Pengting brown like sauce, she covered in Mac (Mac, mac)
Ten toes with Blancs, two shanks like I ain't tryna lack (That's steppin')
Peng one man rent for the winter, I ain't tryna bash (No way, no way)"

come again?

 

[DannyL]

IIRC, the origins of rhyming slang were apparently to be able to talk and not be understood by police and informants.

 

[sadmanbarty]

i remember first getting into uk drill (and probably at the point where i hadn't managed to separate the chaff from the wheat) where it was so simile-dense. everything was "like" something else.

not in a sophisticated way.

 

[DannyL]

Hard to see it now through a fog of faux-mockeny Guy Ritchisms and Dick van Dyke, but maybe rhyming slang carried that same sense of cryptic threat bitd.

 

[sadmanbarty]

IIRC, the origins of rhyming slang were apparently to be able to talk and not be understood by police and informants.

i've compared it to cryptolects before. polari's the same.

they also do this thing of replacing the names of victims or descriptions of violens with "shh". "when shh get shh".

 

[luka]

Barry's always going on about polari. He first used it to describe the way me and Craner talk to one another

 

[sadmanbarty]

Barry's always going on about polari. He first used it to describe the way me and Craner talk to one another

you remember that!

i remember being proud of that. sophisticated. the after eights of banter.

 

[DannyL]

It should be "Eights" not "Eighths". You've blown it now.

 

[luka]

you remember that!

i remember being proud of that. sophisticated. the after eights of banter.

It's in your greatest hits that one

 

[DannyL]

i've compared it to cryptolects before. polari's the same.

they also do this thing of replacing the names of victims or descriptions of violens with "shh". "when shh get shh".

That's part of the paradox isn't it. How to be public when discussing illegality? Reputational advantage in conflict with self-incrimination. It's crazy interesting. There's something there also about stategies for negotiating the open spaces of the internet. When everything is open, how to keep something closed?

 

[sadmanbarty]

bobby shmurda incriminating himself creeped everyone out.

 

[luka]

There's all these amateur crime reporters that work the drill beat now. You must have all come across these scarcity ones

 

[luka]

When true crime stories meets the entertainment industry

 

[luka]

The whole thing around 'realness' is interesting. We do have a hunger for 'the real' as much as we might enjoy the simulation. But not the real as mundane. There's no appetite for that.

 

[DannyL]

Bizarre isn't it. It's proper William Gibson.

 

[luka]

That awful man with the beard who sings those tuneless dirges about anxiety and going for a jog to help with his depression. That's disgusting. That sort of real is rubbish.

 

[DannyL]

I thought Barty's point above about social realism was spot on above.

We should drop Ken Loach a line, get him involved. Guaranteed to turn up at all the trials offering to be a character witness while his house gets burgled.