Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical and Cultural Perspectives
- Part II Approaches to Rap
- Part III Applications of Rap
- Part IV Contexts for Rap
- 13 Honoring the Honorable
- 14 ‘It Will Never Go Away’
- 15 The Art of Capping
- 16 Drill as Cultural Form
- 17 English Rap in India and the Fault Lines of Sociolinguistic Politics
- 18 Television and the Janus Face of Chinese Hip-Hop
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
16 - Drill as Cultural Form
Video-Music, Chromatism, War and the Alternative
from Part IV - Contexts for Rap
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2025
Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap
- Cambridge Companions to Music
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical and Cultural Perspectives
- Part II Approaches to Rap
- Part III Applications of Rap
- Part IV Contexts for Rap
- 13 Honoring the Honorable
- 14 ‘It Will Never Go Away’
- 15 The Art of Capping
- 16 Drill as Cultural Form
- 17 English Rap in India and the Fault Lines of Sociolinguistic Politics
- 18 Television and the Janus Face of Chinese Hip-Hop
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Drill YouTube music videos are contradictory – nihilistic and collective, empty and humanizing, negatively assessing marginalization and societal nihilism, performing those scripts as a placebo for pain and humiliation, and also shaping popular culture in that image. This chapter explores drill YouTube music videos as cultural form, for what they tell us about the historical transformation of black diasporic sound culture, contemporary popular culture and its alternative cultural politics. Through an analysis of drill music videos, it identifies a shift away from sound culture towards video-music, and therein a shift to the networked and platformed moving image, and to narrative. This requires a reevaluation of the role of sound in alternative cultural politics and in black diasporic popular culture, and asks that drill video-music be evaluated on its contingent cultural terms, not on the terms of other cultural and musical moments.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Global Rap , pp. 236 - 248Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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