Schedule

Tareeq Jalloh (Philosopher; University of Manchester/Sheffield): Does Drill Rap Music Cause Violence? 

Abstract: The critique that rap causes violence (causal claim) goes back as far as the 1980s, but today drill rappers (drillers) are having their freedoms restricted based on instances of the causal claim. In this talk, I argue against censoring drill on the assumption that it causes violence for three reasons. First, even according to the most charitable rendition of the causal claim, there is insufficient evidence to support it. Second, even if the causal claim is true in some limited sense, there is no reason to support censorship-oriented approaches to violence reduction over community-building approaches. Third, critics should be worried about the racist public meaning of advancing the causal claim and the censorship-oriented approaches to drill.

Joy White (Applied Social Sciences; University of Bedfordshire):  Saying something? Rap, grime and UK drill as a mode of social commentary. 

Lambros Fatsis (Criminology, Sociology; City University of London): Policing ‘Race’ Through ‘Crime’: Drill Music, Racism & Criminal Injustice

Abstract: UK drill music has excited the penal and public imagination since it broke into the mainstream around 2018. Denounced as a “demonic”, “nihilistic”, “knife crime rap” that provides the “soundtrack to London’s murders” and “spreads a message of hatred and violent revenge”, drill is perceived and pursued as anything other than the form of artistic expression that it is. Thinking against such ill-informed, misleading and hysterical reactions to this ostensibly malign rap subgenre, this talk challenges legal penal narratives that link drill to violent ‘crime’. Drawing on the long history of policing Black/Afrodiasporic music(s) from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, I argue that what is policed when drill is policed is not ‘criminality’ but blackness; as a form of cultural pathology that ought to be eliminated as a dissonant and disorderly presence in the white body politic.

Adèle Oliver (Artist, Writer, Linguist; Art not Evidence & University of Glasgow): Gun Fingers and Gang Signs: Drill and the colonial myth of collective Black criminality

Abstract: Across the country, drill is being used as prosecution evidence for serious charges, including ‘gang’ murders prosecuted under Joint Enterprise laws. In these cases, it is not only lyrics that are presented as evidence of criminal intent but also collective bodily expression. One example is the ‘Manchester 10’ case, prosecutors said that the continuous use of a ‘two fingers up gesture’ (gun fingers) by groups of Black boys in a drill music video was nothing other than clear evidence of gang affiliation. Gun fingers, on white hands, are figurative, explorative, almost involuntary responses to nasty grooves in warehouse raves; gun fingers, in Black hands are embodied threats, tangibly harmful replicas of the real-life impulse to harm. This is an institutional and internalised assumption, shaped by the ‘myth of collective Black criminality’ and the denial of the ongoing violence of colonialism. In this talk, I use gun fingers and drill as a case study to explore the criminalisation, consumption and commodification of Black collective expression.  

Open Discussion

This session is supposed to open up space for us to share thoughts following up from the talks of the day, discuss topics that came up and stuck with us, but also - importantaly - to make connections and possible plans for the future. This session, like the rest of the workshop, is open to all! 

Break

Panel Discussion - At Cathays community center, café space (36-38 Cathay's terrace)

Discussants: Tareeq Jalloh, Lambros Fatsis, Adèle Oliver

Moderator: Ethan Nowak (Stanford University) 

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 (Glasgow), 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.