The Soundtrack to London’s Murders

Image may contain Human Person Fireman Clothing Footwear Apparel and Shoe
Everyone knows that there are many causes behind London’s contagion of stabbings, but that doesn’t stop people from blaming an angry, slang-ridden form of hip-hop called drill.Photograph by Gustavo Valiente / i-Images via ZUMA Press

There were more homicides in London during February and March than there were in New York City. The count was thirty-seven to thirty-five. The way that the British media presented this information made it sound as if the two cities had been experiencing rival outbreaks of urban warfare. In fact, the opposite is true. In the past generation, the number of killings in the British capital has hovered between a hundred and two hundred a year, while New York has witnessed a scarcely believable decline, from 2,262 homicides in 1990 to two hundred and ninety-two last year, a fall of eighty-seven per cent. Still, the news resonated in London, because it touched on something that you see when you live here, but which is hard to explain, and which authorities are struggling to stop. Too many young men—boys, really—are attacking one another with knives. Of the forty-seven people killed in London in the first three months of the year, thirty-one were stabbed to death. Nine were teen-agers. In the space of twenty-four hours, a few days after Easter, there was a rush of stabbings across the capital. Seven teen-agers were taken to hospital; one later died.

Two of the boys were found bleeding in the park around the corner from my house, in Bow, East London. They were fifteen. Pictures taken afterward by passersby showed a pair of jeans and a bloodstained white T-shirt lying on the sidewalk, along with blue latex gloves and gauze patches scattered by paramedics. Part of what is unsettling about London’s knife attacks is their ephemerality. Because the victims and perpetrators are often minors, they are not named in news reports. (Only the dead are named.) And, because they are often poor people of color, their stories rarely surface. There are exceptions: last year, the Guardian set out to track every young person killed with a knife in Britain. But, for the most part, the police tape goes up, the road is cleared, and the police tape comes down again. A few hours after the attack, it’s as if nothing happened. I was away when the boys were stabbed in my local park. When I got home the following night with my family, there was no sign. The next morning, we went to the swings as usual.

Everyone knows that there are many causes behind something as complicated as a contagion of knife crime, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to find just one. In January, Sadiq Khan, the city’s mayor, a member of the Labour Party, blamed the national government, which since 2010 has cut six hundred million pounds from the Metropolitan Police budget. Amber Rudd, the country’s Home Secretary, a Conservative, disagreed. (When someone leaked a civil-service report ascribing part of Britain’s rise in violence to falling police budgets, Rudd claimed not to have read it.) The disappearance of dozens of youth centers in the course of eight years of social-service cuts is at once too obvious an explanation and too hard to fix. Therefore, because there is nothing better than a new fad among the youth to blame for a new dissolution in their behavior, attention in recent weeks has come to focus on drill, a pared-down, slang-ridden form of London hip-hop, which kids like to listen to on their phones, and which often includes references to “fishing” and “dipping” and “shanking” and “swimming.” To the uninitiated, that’s stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, and being stabbed.

Arguments that try to blame art for fomenting violence don’t generally age well. In 1992, Vice-President Dan Quayle asked Interscope Records to withdraw “2Pacalypse Now,” by Tupac Shakur, from sale, saying, “It has no place in our society.” Society, it turns out, can accommodate both angry music and safer streets. New York’s crumbling homicide rate, even though there’s coarseness everywhere, is proof of that. In 2003, the year that murders in England and Wales hit an all-time high, Britain’s best-selling single was “Where Is the Love?,” by the Black-Eyed Peas. Nonetheless, part of the point of drill, which is made for, and almost exclusively by, black men under the age of twenty, is to collapse the distinction between their rapped lives and their lived lives.

Drill arrived in London in the summer of 2012. Until then, it had been regarded as a hyper-violent hip-hop variant that was particular to Chicago, forged in response to the city’s terrible crime rate. (Chicago had twice as many homicides during 2017 as New York and London put together.) “Drill land” in London refers to the housing projects of Brixton and Peckham, south of the River Thames, and of Tottenham, to the north—pockets of isolation in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. The music circulates first on YouTube, with videos of kids in balaclavas slowly riding their bikes in front of corner shops, making deft little slashing gestures, threatening their “opps” from a rival block. The most popular videos get more than ten million views, and tens of thousands of comments. Last year, a rapper known as M-Trap (real name: Junior Simpson) took part in the fatal stabbing of a fifteen-year-old in South London after writing verses about just such an attack. “You suggested [the lyrics] were just for show, but I do not believe that,” the judge in the case said. (Simpson was sentenced to life in prison.) Last week, the Home Office released a new anti-violence strategy that singles out drill videos for stirring conflict among young people hooked on social media. “The most viewed comments and videos are the ones most likely to result in retaliatory violence,” the report said. “These teenage boys have created their own version of Lord of the Flies,” the Spectator, a conservative magazine, concluded this week. “Our inability to give them what they need to thrive within law-abiding society has consigned a generation to nihilism and bloodshed.”

On Monday evening, I stopped by the basement studio of Emil Proffit, one of London’s leading drill producers. The room was small, with a full ashtray and a desk covered in empty plastic bottles. Proffit, who has a small goatee, wore a tracksuit and reclined in a large black office chair. “I think you have to be a bit silly not to realize that some things are touching the line a little bit, and some people overstep that line,” he said. “I am not a fan of that.” Proffit is thirty-four. Some of the rappers that come to him are as young as fourteen. He gives them a pep talk before they record. “When you talk about du du du du du in the song, this might have a repercussion, so you’ve got to be careful,” he told me. “Perception is everything.” Proffit used to teach music production at a youth center in East London, until the funding for his course was cut, in 2011. By day, he handles complaints for one of London’s local councils. He discovered drill by chance, in 2016, when two young rappers named BT and Rendo came to his studio and recorded a song, “PM to the AM,” that raced to a million views on YouTube. “I was like, Get the fuck!” He said. “How have I missed a whole genre of music in London? It was because of my age.”

Like other youth workers I spoke to and the few music writers who have studied the drill scene, Proffit rejects attempts to draw a straight line between the music and London’s knife-crime problem. “My favorite kind of movies are horror movies, but I am not a serial killer, you know,” he said. He tries to control the risks, though. The reason that his studio is in Chiswick, a leafy neighborhood in West London, is to keep his rappers away from competing gangs and rival drill artists. “I know how serious it could get,” he said. “We chose here because no one knows where it is.”

When I asked Proffit to name a seminal drill song, he suggested one that he produced: “Macaroni,” by Skengdo and AM, his biggest stars. “Macaroni” stuck in my head for the next few days. Its lyrics slide between the concerns of childhood and something else entirely. (“Macaroni” is slang for a MAC-10, a type of machine gun.) As with many drill songs, most of the lyrics went over my head. But, for a few lines near the end, the slang all but clears (“Stoney” means “Stone Island,” a make of jacket), and in AM’s low voice you can hear the draining toll of London’s youth violence:

Active but inside I’m very lonely
Father, forgive me, ’cause I ain’t holy
Losing my loved ones, they’re dying slowly
Touch them, I'll bang-bang, get through your Stoney
Block’s hot, the beef’s on
It’s getting smoky