Ballad of the Bullet

Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy

Forrest Stuart

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691200088
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

How poor urban youth in Chicago use social media to profit from portrayals of gang violence, and the questions this raises about poverty, opportunities, and public voyeurism Amid increasing hardship and limited employment options, poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, they're capitalizing on the public's fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys, a group of thirty or so young men on Chicago's South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of "drill music" (slang for "shooting music"). Drillers disseminate this competitive genre of hyperviolent, hyperlocal, DIY-style gangsta rap digitally, hoping to amass millions of clicks, views, and followers—and a ticket out of poverty. But in this perverse system of benefits, where online popularity can convert into offline rewards, the risks can be too great.Drawing on extensive fieldwork and countless interviews compiled from daily, close interactions with the Corner Boys, as well as time spent with their families, friends, music producers, and followers, Forrest Stuart looks at the lives and motivations of these young men. Stuart examines why drillers choose to embrace rather than distance themselves from negative stereotypes, using the web to assert their supposed superior criminality over rival gangs. While these virtual displays of ghetto authenticity—the saturation of social media with images of guns, drugs, and urban warfare—can lead to online notoriety and actual resources, including cash, housing, guns, sex, and, for a select few, upward mobility, drillers frequently end up behind bars, seriously injured, or dead.Raising questions about online celebrity, public voyeurism, and the commodification of the ghetto, Ballad of the Bullet offers a singular look at what happens when the digital economy and urban poverty collide.

1

From the Drug Economy to the Attention Economy

Like many teens growing up in urban poor neighborhoods, Xavier spent his high school years dreaming of playing Division 1 college basketball and entering the NBA draft. Blessed with an early growth spurt and a natural talent on the court, he spent evenings at a nearby park, practicing his free throws. If he worked hard enough, he always told himself, basketball would be his way out of Taylor Park. He planned to use his first professional paycheck to move his mother and younger brother out of the neighborhood once and for all. The three of them liked to fantasize together about the lavish details of their future house in the Chicago suburbs.

But as Xavier’s senior year wound to a close, the college scholarship offers never arrived. He was heartbroken, but eventually graduated. With his lifelong dream shattered, Xavier was desperate to find another way to make good (and fast) money. Like some of his classmates and neighbors, Xavier decided to try his hand at drug dealing. He immediately sought help from the neighborhood’s “big homies”—men in their thirties and forties who, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, dominated the local drug economy as members of Taylor Park’s Black Counts gang. Much to Xavier’s continued disappointment, however, the big homies wanted nothing to do with him. They refused to bring him into their business.

“Shit’s fucked up, bro,” Xavier complained as we sat across from each other at one of our favorite greasy spoon diners on the South Side. “Shit’s all fucked up.”

Xavier kept his eyes down as he spoke. His shoulder-length dreadlocks hid his quietly watering eyes. He was depressed. Very depressed. Again. Over the past year, as I had become close to the soft-spoken twenty-year-old, I had seen him repeatedly sink into periods of dejection, slipping from the highest of highs to the deepest of lows in a matter of hours. When Xavier was feeling especially down, he had a habit of disappearing for a day or two, holing up in his room, self-medicating with a mixture of PCP (Angel Dust) and weed. I worried about him. I did my best to intervene when I noticed his mood starting to sink.

That day, hoping to distract Xavier from his usual coping mechanisms, I treated him to lunch. It had been a difficult week, leaving Xavier broke, hungry, and frustrated. His cell phone had been shut off. His mom was hounding him to start contributing to the household financially.

“You know the most messed-up part?” he asked me after a few minutes of tense silence. He stuttered a bit as he spoke—a side effect of his most recent PCP binge. “It ain’t used to be like this. Back in the day, if I was out here fucked up [broke], the big homies woulda hooked me up. They woulda gave me a corner and a pack [of drugs to sell]. And if I did good, they woulda let me run the whole block, push more weight. It really ain’t like that no more, though. They see me out here tryna’ make some kind of paper [money]. They see me. But they don’t do shit.” Xavier chewed on a mouthful of fries. “They ain’t rockin’ with none of us no more. We on our own, bro. We on our own.”

With its mix of nostalgia and dejection, Xavier’s rant captures a new dilemma facing those coming of age in urban poverty, and helps to explain the recent turn to the online attention economy. Of course, it’s never been easy for undereducated and unskilled youth to make ends meet, much less to achieve the upward mobility necessary to climb out of poverty. Throughout the late twentieth century, these youngsters turned in staggering numbers to the drug game, joining the ranks of gangs that monopolized the underground economy.¹ When crack cocaine became widely available in the 1980s, street gangs “corporatized,” redirecting their energy and organizational structure toward drug distribution.² As one of the most attractive and reliable options available, young men could count on enlisting as “foot soldiers,” peddling small quantities of crack on a consignment basis on one of the street corners controlled by their local gang. Evocatively described by the historian Mike Davis as a “crypto-Keynesian youth employment program,” these drug-selling gangs became a community institution, providing young black men with useful skills, access to consumer goods, and self-worth otherwise denied by their racial and class background.³

Times, however, have changed.

Beginning in the 1990s, the crack economy and corporatized gangs simultaneously eroded. Crack’s grip on the urban landscape loosened as U.S. drug markets diversified with other substances such as heroin, prescription opiates, PCP, and designer synthetic drugs like MDMA (Ecstasy), ketamine, and GHB.⁴ Gangs’ previous hierarchical, franchise structure—a model developed for the specificities of crack dealing—suddenly grew unprofitable. At the same time, federal and local law enforcement agencies used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to arrest high-ranking gang leaders and unravel their hierarchies.⁵ Neighborhood youth like Xavier and the Corner Boys have found themselves locked out of the underground job market once available to their fathers. Although their eventual turn to the online attention economy is new, they’re following a long-standing pattern in the history of America’s urban poor communities. Facing one period of economic dislocation after another, young men have always found creative, if controversial, ways to pursue their dreams. Disappointed by local adults who appear “out of touch” with the reality faced by the younger generation, they find new role models to follow. This process unfolded most famously in the mid- and late twentieth century, amid the wreckage of deindustrialization, when the drug corner replaced the shop floor.

THE GOOD OL’ DAYS

Rick and I stood chatting on his back stoop at nine o’clock on a dew-soaked morning. A cigarette hung loosely between his lips. He shuffled about in his house slippers and calf-length white socks. The younger of his two daughters busied herself terrorizing their small terrier, who squirmed as she held it over the lip of their above-ground pool. Rick’s other daughter emerged from the house, grinning ear to ear, carefully hugging a large plastic bowl filled to the brim with breakfast cereal. On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Rick’s frayed cornrow braids, round belly, and startling domesticity belied the fact that just fifteen years earlier, he and his Black Counts associates had held a tight grip on daily life in Taylor Park. Throughout the crack epidemic, Rick had steadily worked his way up in the organization, eventually saving up enough money to move out of Taylor Park and into this three-bedroom, two-story, single-family house in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. Every morning, Rick waves his wife off to work, drops his daughters off at school, and heads back to his old stomping grounds. There, he meets up with his childhood friends Lewis and Lil Mark—two similarly balding, bellied, veteran Black Counts. Working as independent, or “freelance,” dealers outside of their old corporate gang structure, they stay on the move, pacing the neighborhood streets selling weed and baby bottles filled with “lean”—a prescription cough suppressant containing a euphoric mix of codeine and promethazine.

Rick describes his twenty-plus-year career in “pharmaceutical sales” as beginning somewhat unexpectedly, perhaps even reluctantly.

“Growing up, I was gonna work in the mill, like my pop.” Rick was referring to the collection of rolling steel mills that billowed over Chicago’s South Side for more than a century. Collectively, the Wisconsin Steel mill, U.S. Steel mill, Republic Steel mill, and a collection of smaller mills made up the region’s largest employer, furnishing the steel for the nation’s railroads and downtown skylines. These towering industrial plants provided black Chicagoans, like Rick’s father, with decent-paying, unionized jobs. By 1970, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) counted 130,000 members in the Chicago region, most of whom were black or Mexican.⁶ But these numbers, like the mills, wouldn’t last. Beginning in the 1980s, the mills were hard pressed to compete with foreign firms. They started laying off workers. Before the end of the 1990s, U.S. Steel’s South Works, the last mill standing, closed its doors for good. The crumbling carcass of the old ore wall still stands today, casting a long shadow over the city’s largest vacant lot. The effects were immediately felt, even miles away, in neighborhoods like Taylor Park.

“By the time I was about sixteen,” Rick told me, “they had all just stopped. That was the beginning of the end right there. Everything went downhill. Pop was out of work. Hell, everyone was out of work. Once those mills closed, everything else closed too. All the mom and pops. And all the people who could get the hell out, they got the hell out.”

The closing of the South Side’s mills was a microcosm of the larger trends of economic restructuring that ravaged black communities across Chicago, the rustbelt, and America more generally. In 1950, the employment rate in the South Side’s “black belt” mirrored the city average.⁷ But then a number of political and economic factors—including the relaxation of trade restrictions, stagflation, and other jolts to the world market—encouraged the flight of U.S. manufacturing to cheap-labor locations in the developing world.⁸ More than ten million jobs were lost nationally due to closures or decreased production demand between 1979 and 1985 alone.⁹ By 1980, Chicago’s manufacturing base had been cut in half.¹⁰ Because black residents were overrepresented in the manufacturing sector, they were disproportionately dislocated. By 1980, the number of working residents in the black belt had fallen by a staggering 77 percent, leaving nearly three out of four persons older than sixteen jobless.¹¹ The departure of big plants triggered a domino effect, leading to the subsequent demise of small stores, banks, and other businesses that relied on the wages paid by large employers.¹² With few employment options in cash-strapped neighborhoods, the black belt hemorrhaged close to half its population over the second half of the twentieth century.¹³

Amid deindustrialization, the U.S. economy simultaneously “reindustrialized” through the steady expansion of the service sector and jobs related to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries.¹⁴ During the 1980s, for the first time in U.S. history, the service sector surpassed manufacturing as the largest single division of the domestic economy. Between 1972 and 1988, 40 percent of all new jobs were in the service sector.¹⁵ New jobs increasingly reflected a bipolar distribution. On one end of the spectrum were high-paying, high-skill positions that demanded high levels of education. By the late 1980s, the volume of jobs requiring some college training rose by 44 percent; jobs mandating a four-year university degree grew by 56 percent.¹⁶ Lacking sufficient education and white-collar skills, many black residents found themselves channeled to the other end of the spectrum. These are low-paying, low-skill, and “dead-end” jobs—dishwashers, cashiers, bus boys—that offer little opportunity for meaningful advancement.

Large-scale economic shifts dramatically transformed interpersonal relations and neighborhood culture. Writing in the early 1990s, the sociologist Elijah Anderson documented that long-standing ties had begun to fray between neighborhood youth and “old heads”—middle-aged men of stable means and employment who socialized youngsters into their responsibilities regarding work, family, and the law.¹⁷ As meaningful employment grew scarcer, and as young people recognized their limited and subordinate place in the emerging service economy, the old head lost his prestige and authority. “The youth,” Anderson observed, “mock and patronize the old heads … for not understanding the ‘way the world really works.’ ”¹⁸ They turned instead to the flashy and seductive trail blazed by what Anderson called the “new old heads”—men in their twenties and thirties squarely employed in burgeoning drug-selling gangs. “On the local street corners,” Anderson wrote, the new old head “attempts to impress people through displays of material success like expensive clothes and fancy cars. Eagerly awaiting his message are the unemployed black men, demoralized by what they see as a hopeless financial situation and inclined to emulate his style and values.”¹⁹

As if reading directly from Anderson’s account, Rick reminisced with a longing grin. “We saw our uncles and our cousins out there gettin’ that paper. They had the girls and the expensive cars, and all. We hadn’t never really ever seen nobody from our hood ballin’ out before, so we wanted to be just like them.” Rick followed in the footsteps of his older siblings and formally joined the Black Counts gang at age sixteen. “They were runnin’ everything back then,” he continued, “so they took us under their wing. They hooked us up with a hustle.” That “hustle” was a job selling crack cocaine alongside a half dozen of his friends as part of a corner crew along one of Taylor Park’s busier thoroughfares. Although the pay wasn’t especially high—foot soldiers’ wages reportedly hovered between six and eleven dollars in untaxed cash per hour—it was certainly better than the minimum wage Rick and his buddies could expect from the menial service jobs available in the formal sector.²⁰ Street dealing also offered better employee support and “benefits.” This included bonuses during special holidays, and bail money and lawyer fees in emergencies.²¹ The few who were lucky enough to avoid arrest and death were rewarded with...