Drill music is one of the world’s most popular genres, with Black British aesthetics and language taking centre-stage. But it’s also the epicentre of a new form of institutional racism, writes Adèle Oliver, with musicians’ artistic expression used in court rooms as evidence of “bad character”. It calls on us to ask: are human rights really universal? Or are they reserved for those deemed “human” enough?

In the face of almost a decade of relentless media-fuelled moral panic, excessive prosecution and censorship, drill simply will not quit. The once-fringe rap subgenre has become one of the most popular genres in the world, with Black British aesthetics and language taking centre stage. Yet, in the wake of this runaway success, Black men and boys participating in what is arguably their generation’s biggest cultural moment find themselves caught in the snares of a human rights catastrophe.

From funding the Israeli regime to the Post Office scandal to the passing of the Rwanda Bill, recent months have seen NGOs, academics and activists decrying the UK’s human rights violations as a “stain on this country’s moral reputation”. Even in this moment of collective moral reckoning, the criminalisation of drill music – or more accurately, the Black boys and men who live through it – has evaded this indictment of human rights violations despite the mounting evidence of breaches of basic human rights. I argue that what this reveals is no “stain”, no thoughtless slip up on an otherwise pristine fabric of morality, but rather a carefully embroidered brand on a colonial cloak, tailored to fit a new iteration of institutional racism that only affords human rights to those deemed “human” enough.

Art Not Evidence

The argument long touted by politicians and the police is that drill incentivises, glorifies, and increases knife crime and gang violence across the country. Tory MP Nickie Aiken was the latest to join the chorus, claiming that there is a “direct link” between knife crime and drill music in the House of Commons earlier this year. Though this fallacy has been debunked in empirical and qualitative studies for drill specifically and extreme music styles more generally, there is still a tidal wave of indictment against the cultural phenomenon which has produced some of the most successful, and most unfairly criminalised, artists in the UK today. These include Digga D (featured in the banner image above), who has been blighted by criminal behaviour orders that require his lyrics to be vetted by police before release, prohibit him from playing certain songs, and limit who he can associate with, and AM & Skengdo, who became the first people to receive a prison sentence for performing a song in British legal history.

Many artists, journalists, lawyers, youth workers and music lovers have been pushing against the noise, affirming that drill is art – not evidence. Though violence and irreverence are key features of drill music, as they are in many venerated artworks and forms, drill itself is not a senseless expression of the artists’ violent intent. It includes deeply lyrical storytelling, with rhythmic and melodic dexterity creating space for complex narratives and ethnographies of both the quotidian and the traumatic.

Whose crime is it anyway?

Despite the narrative of a post-colonial Britain which is no longer blighted by the missteps of the past, deeply ingrained colonial ideas around Blackness, Black expression and its inherent criminality persist.  A 2018 study called “Imagining Violent Criminals”, which tasked participants with assessing the character of imagined songwriters, spoke to this fact. The exact same lyrics were given to all participants in the study, the only difference being in how these were presented: how the genre was classified (country, metal or rap) and the race of the writer (Black or white). Country and metal lyrics performed by an imagined white figure of decent character are figurative, explorative, artistic; identical rap lyrics, when performed by an imagined Black figure of bad character, are threatening, caustic, tangibly harmful – an institutional and internalised assertion, shaped by the colonial myth of Black criminality and denial of the violence of the colonial project of whiteness.

This is the underlying logic at the foundation of our court rooms, which allows this artistic expression (including notebook scribbles and unfinished drafts) to be admissible as evidence that proves bad character of Black boys beyond reasonable doubt.

New research from the University of Manchester reveals the alarming extent to which regular use of rap culture as evidence in serious crime cases unfairly targets Black people and serves as a procedurally racist device. 66% of the defendants in cases where drill or rap is used as evidence are Black people (compared to 4% of the overall English and Welsh population); 12% are Black/mixed. A gang narrative is used to convict multiple defendants under problematic Joint Enterprise laws in 80% of cases.

Why is this a human rights issue?

In a recent event Art Not Evidence event, hosted by LSE Law School and Garden Court Chambers, lawyers argued that the criminalisation of drill is both racist and unlawful. Barrister Owen Greenhall opposed moral and prosecutorial arguments about drill provoking and inciting violence, invoking the infamous words of Lord Justice Sedley: “free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative […] freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having”. Sedley here is referencing Article 10 of the Human Rights Act (1998), which opens with the statement “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression”. The article clearly covers music and lyrics but time and time again, in courtrooms across the country, we’re reminded that artistic expression and free speech have a price for Black drill artists and enthusiasts.

In an age of rising intolerance and epidemics of Andrew Tates that are having genuinely detrimental effects on the young boys that the police and MPs claim to be so desperate to protect from life-changing harm, it is drill that is seen as the biggest threat. A Freedom of Information request filed by the Meta-funded Oversight Board revealed that every one of the 992 requests that the Metropolitan Police made to social media companies and streaming services to review or remove music content between June 2021 and May 2022 involved drill music – and that those requests resulted in 879 removals. Why does our cash-strapped criminal “justice” system choose to spend time and money on misappropriating the concept of hate speech and denying the driller’s human right to free speech?

Genuine, sustainable change requires digging deep into the root, the very foundations of a society built on sullied ground. If we claim to care about our young people and human rights in the UK, we need to confront the criminalisation of drill, rather than scapegoating it.

Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill, published by 404 Ink, is available now.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credits: Illustration © Tomekah George. Image showing Digga D live at the Royal Albert Hall, London, by Christina Massei via Alamy. Image of youths in Shepherd’s Bush by Sandor Szmutko via Shutterstock.