Folks need to Chill about Drill

Join our one day workshop (online and in-person), and our panel discussion in Cardiff (in-person) 

OPEN TO ALL

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION 

Drill rap has, in recent years, become one of the fastest growing areas within the music sector in the UK. Despite the cultural and economic potential of the burgeoning ecosystem of artists, promoters, technicians, and other staff that has developed in the genre, government policy in the UK appears to have been aimed more at disrupting drill than supporting it. Police forces have banned drill performances, prevented artists from uploading videos or distributing music on the internet, and used lyrics as evidence against singers in court.

Many of the striking features of the institutional responses to drill in the UK have parallels in the United States. While the legal landscape in the US is different, rap lyrics have been treated as testimony in hundreds of cases and have contributed to long custodial sentences. As in the UK, official responses to rap music seem on many occasions to fail to treat performers and producers as artists.

This event will focus on these issues of freedom and social justice surrounding drill music and its treatment in both the US and the UK with perspectives from sociology, criminology, philosophy and artists.

PANEL DESCRIPTION 

Join us at Cathy community centre between 18:00 and 19:30 on Friday the 6th of December for a panel discussion to round off our event ‘Folks need to chill about drill: discussions on rap, freedom, and social justice’. 

Ethan Nowak (Stanford), a philosopher whose work focuses on creative uses of language, will host Lambros Fatsis (City University of London), a criminologist specialising in the criminalisation of Black and Afro-Diasporic music, Tareeq Jalloh (Manchester), a world-leading expert on philosophical approaches to drill rap, and Adèle Oliver, author of Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture, and Criminalisation of UK Drill. 

Together, we will explore the emergence of the current moral panic over drill and ask how it compares historically to other forms of anti-Black racism that targeted music. We will consider how drill rap serves as a form of individual self-expression, a locus for community-building, and indeed, a potential form of anti-colonial resistance. 

 This event is organised by Tareeq Jalloh, Ethan Nowak and Cardiff University

Register on Eventbrite [LINK]