Violence, Rhymes, and Double Binds

There has been recent philosophical interest in the way drill rap music is criminalised by the police and judicial system. Whilst philosophers have pushed back against drill’s criminalisation by reaffirming it as an artform, there has been little investigation into whether drill music’s content glamorises immorality, and if so whether we ought to condemn these representations. For example, should we be concerned with how drill rappers exploit stereotypes about black criminality for financial gain?

 

Whilst we might criticise drill for its immoral content, there are competing positive evaluative responses available. One response might laud drill music, not for concretising revolts, but rather as attending to the void created by depleting effects of racism. Another positive response might laud drill music as championing a particular kind of black empowerment through appropriating and exploiting constructions of black criminality. That is, critiques of drill as affirming stereotypes about black criminality might ignore the aesthetic richness of drill music, where the signification involved points to a deeper register of text that describes the feeling of being locked into stereotypes about criminality, or makes fun of the holder of the stereotype. Indeed, exploiting stereotypes while simultaneously expressing power is a distinctive aesthetic feature of the black literary tradition. In these ways, drill music espouses both aesthetic and moral virtues that can easily be overlooked in critiquing the lyrical content for its alleged glamorisation of violence. 

 

This paper introduces a framework for understanding the above competing responses to drill rap by using Sukaina Hirji’s (2021) analysis of oppressive double binds. I argue that drillers are caught in oppressive double binds, and this framework helps us to see the dialectical stalemates that emerge in evaluating drillers’ violent content by offering new insights into the complexities involved when drillers glorify violence.