![]() Like other drill beatmakers from the U.K., he takes elements of the Chicago drill sound and puts a twist on the style by adding woozy, gliding bass. One of those artists is a young producer from London named AXL Beats. Ten years later, we’re seeing the emergence of a new generation of rappers and producers who grew up obsessed with Chief Keef and the whole Chicago drill scene. The Chicago drill movement proved to be massively influential throughout the 2010s, and its effects still ripple through the music industry today. “At that point in hip-hop, in the top 40, no other producer in America was hitting the snare that many times.” “I would literally take every cadence that I was learning from my marching band coach,” remembers DJ L, who leaned on his background as a marching band percussionist and paired it with influences from the house music he was hearing at Chicago juke parties. And they were loaded with hi-hats, snares, and bells. The beats were dark and punishing, with moderate tempos that usually hovered around 70 beats per minute. The best way to talk about your opposition or get bragging rights is to do it in a song.”Īs the Chicago drill scene grew, though, it developed its own sound. “You have all these neighborhoods that have different gangs, and this is the soundtrack to the violence that's going on in the city. “The music came from gang culture,” says Chicago drill producer Chase Davis. With a name that comes from a term of violence -“drill” is commonly used in Chicago as slang for “kill”- the subgenre initially formed around a mentality rather than a specific sound. We had the most shocking, most provocative shit in the world.” It was no different than N.W.A in the late ’80s. “Drill music came from the culture of violence in Chicago,” says DJ L, a Chicago producer who helped shape the drill sound, along with Young Chop and other beatmakers. In the early 2010s, rappers like Pac Man, Chief Keef, Lil Reese, King Louie, Fredo Santana, Lil Durk, Lil Bibby and G Herbo exploded on the national stage with raw, brutally honest songs that opened a window to the realities of street life in their neighborhoods. Before it took over Brooklyn, drill was a product of Chicago. ![]() But it’s a sound that didn’t originate in the five boroughs. Drill music is the new sound of New York. Pop Smoke’s declaration in the back of that Sprinter wasn’t an exaggeration. And if you didn’t have that combination, it wouldn’t feel as big.” in the club, I go into all those artists in a row. “If I didn’t have other records to play in that tempo, I don't know if it would be the same. “I think 22Gz, Fivio Foreign, Sheff G, and those guys helped make someone like Pop Smoke even bigger,” argues Flex, who has been keeping these artists in heavy rotation during his DJ sets. “This ain’t happen since the times of Dipset and G-Unit,” says journalist Jamel Robinson, Brooklyn rap’s on-the-ground documentarian as host of the Melz TV YouTube channel. “It's been a long time since I've seen a whole part of town have their own thing.” The DJ and radio personality acknowledges that A-listers like Cardi B and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie have come from the city in recent years, but none of them emerged with a whole scene at their backs. “I've gotta be honest, this was the first time in about 20 years that there’s been, like, a whole movement,” says Funkmaster Flex, who has been on the front lines of NYC rap since the early ’90s. In 2019, that momentum hit a tipping point when Pop Smoke’s drill anthem “Welcome to the Party” and Fivio Foreign’s “Big Drip” took over the city, earning them each multimillion-dollar record deals. Since 2016, the streets of Brooklyn had been rumbling with the sounds of 22Gz, Sheff G, and other artists who took the unapologetic mindset of drill music and reinterpreted it in their own New York image. This time, though, New York’s hottest rapper wasn’t standing alone. All that “King of New York” talk was beginning to feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the past six months alone, he had collaborated with Travis Scott, Nicki Minaj, and Quavo, and earned his first Billboard Hot 100 hits. His music was everywhere, blasting through speakers in every corner of Brooklyn, and now the rest of America was starting to take notice. Riding through Manhattan in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, the 20-year-old rapper was just hours away from releasing his second mixtape, Meet the Woo 2, and he had a lot to be happy about. “This drill shit is the sound of New York,” Pop Smoke declared on a cool evening in early February.
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