MUSIC FUELLING MURDER
An anguished mother this week scrubbed her dead son’s blood off the pavement – another victim of London’s gang wars which are being stoked by menacingly violent rap videos. So why IS a bishop’s 60-year-old son championing them?
It’ s impossible to separate the crime from‘ the art’
Hunched over the ground on which her 17-year-old son was shot dead on Saturday, Pretana Morgan cut a harrowing figure as she kneeled barefoot to scrub his blood from the pavement.
her son Rhyhiem Ainsworth Barton was the first victim in a spate of shootings in London over the Bank holiday weekend.
‘We’re not being protected because of the police,’ Pretana said. ‘The police are the ones putting us in danger. I want my son’s body so I can go home [to Jamaica], they can take back their British passport. I don’t want nothing from them.’
her despair is palpable. Yet yesterday it emerged that Rhyhiem was a rapper in London’s ‘drill’ music scene — a genre of music which celebrates gang life and promotes violence and is enthusiastically promoted by former BBc dJ Tim Westwood.
Rhyhiem was said to have been on a police database of rappers which Scotland Yard believed was promoting violence and goading rivals in online videos.
The teenager, the 62nd victim to be killed in the capital this year, was said to be a member of the masked Moscow17 crew from Kennington who were involved in a violent feud with rivals from nearby Peckham.
his family believe he was shot in the chest at 6pm on Saturday close to his crew’s base in Kennington by sworn rivals, Zone2 crew in nearby Peckham. Last month, the rapper who performed under the name GB, recorded a song in which he challenged Zone 2 and claimed: ‘We are at war with the f***ing cops’.
he appeared in a mask alongside Westwood last year in a rap video viewed on YouTube more than 170,000 times.
Westwood called Moscow17 ‘legendary’ before they rapped about ‘splashing’ rivals — slang for stabbing someone repeatedly until they pour with blood — and Rhyhiem bragged the gang is ‘known for capping’ its enemies, street language for shooting someone.
But behind the bravado of drill lyrics there are lives in tatters.
‘Let my son be the last and be an example to everyone.’ said Rhyhiem’s mother, who insisted her son was not in a gang and had been ‘trying to make a difference’ by learning to work with children. ‘Just let it stop.’
She is not alone in her sentiments. ‘Who’s it gonna take next?’ pleaded a handsome teenage boy, barely able to contain the emotion in his voice. ‘It’s like we’re losing everyone that was close to us.’
Leoandro Osemeke, 16, a promising rapper known to his friends as Showkey, was mourning the murder of his close friend Myron Yarde, aka Mdot, in April 2016.
Yet four months later, in August, Showkey had joined his contemporary in the cemetery. Both were stabbed to death over inconsequential rivalries — ‘beefs’ — with South London gang members.
These were petty arguments which in years gone by would have been settled with words and, perhaps, fists.
But today’s youth has to contend with a deadly catalyst: drill music. An offshoot of uK rap, it is characterised by violence, threats and a glorification of criminality.
While ‘ gangsta rap’ is nothing new, the current generation of drill artists have raised the bar. no longer is it enough to rap about breaking the law. To be a star on the drill scene you have to walk it like you talk it.
So when headie One, a leading drill artist who performs on the BBc, was assaulted at Bedfordshire university in January, the consequences were played out on YouTube. First the ambush itself was published on the video sharing website (120,000 views and counting), followed by a three-minute song recorded by headie One in which he rants: ‘Got beef in the streets so I invest in shells,’ and, ‘send shots tryna hit man’s head.’
Which means, in rough translation: ‘I’ve bought some bullets and I’ll get revenge by shooting my enemies in the head.’
Since this tune was posted online a 19-year- old rapper from a rival gang, Kelvin Odunyi, has been gunned down in the street by two masked men on a moped.
While there is no suggestion headie One was personally involved, another YouTube video, viewed 75,000 times, has linked Odunyi’s death to the Bedfordshire university ambush.
This is how drill music works: gangs (mostly made up of teenagers) feud with each other, show off their weapons (mostly knives and swords) and boast about dealing drugs and committing crime.
Thedifference between this and previous musical and gang crazes — dating all the way back to the mods and rockers of the Sixties — is that some of the musicians really do want to kill each other.
evidence can be found in the sheer number of crimes prompted by the petty feuding of teenagers who invade rivals’ favourite chicken takeaway shops and film themselves urinating on street signs, simply to get a reaction. That reaction is invariably both violent and disproportionate.
Since young Showkey and Mdot were murdered in Peckham more than 150 others have been stabbed and slashed to death on London’s streets. In that time — less than two years — there have been over 7,000 non-fatal stabbings in the capital, the vast majority over similar turf wars, drugs and gangrelated crime.
Last month the Met commissioner, cressida dick, deployed 300 extra police officers after six separate knife attacks in a week. Five of the victims were teenagers. One was just 13 years old. drill music has its roots in chicago but in recent years London has become home to the genre, with a new generation of performers racking up millions of hits on YouTube. They are making money out of it but, as a member of the Brixton crew 67 puts it, this is ‘chicken change’ in comparison to what they can gain through their activities elsewhere.
And while music itself cannot be blamed for the upsurge in violence in the capital, in the case of drill it is all but impossible to separate the crime from the art.
The feuds they rap about are all too real. On their favourite social media platforms ( as well as YouTube, others with names like Link up TV, Press Play, and GRM daily), in the comments below the music videos, impressionable fans keep a score sheet of stabbings.
The more eloquent among the rappers acknowledge this reality. Skengdo, a drill artist from the cowley estate in Brixton, admits: ‘What we’re saying is what a lot of the younger ones are out there on the street doing. They get influenced by it. Music is powerful.
‘drill is common now — you hear drill everywhere. So little kids are hearing that and thinking: “That’s what I want to do.” They think that’s correct.’
Standing next to him as he utters these words is his comrade A.M., wearing a balaclava. This, again, is typical drill. Many of the rappers cover their faces with scarves, hoods and masks, ostensibly because they are on the run from the law.
In the case of another well known Brixton driller, called Scribz, the masks enabled him to work around an ASBO banning him from releasing audio or visual artistic material for two years. Issued because of the extreme violent content of his lyrics, he simply ignored it by putting on a mask and claiming to be another rapper, Ld67, who was filling in for Scribz.
It was as effective as it was shameless. his drill collective, known as 67 after the area code of their Brixton estate, rapidly became one of the best known in the business.
Scribz continued to thumb his nose at the authorities, posing on social media with a pit bull and spewing out threats on YouTube tracks, until he was stopped by police while carrying a knife and sent to jail. his bandmate SJ67 was incarcerated for being in possession of a handgun.
Like so many of their contemporaries, the rappers of 67 profess to be artists who simply comment on the life they know. Raised in tough areas, to them drugs, guns and stabbings are daily issues, and by making music about it they claim they are turning a negative into a positive.
A former gang member turned social media entrepreneur, Simeon Moore, says: ‘ They are getting a million views on YouTube, they could turn that into a business easy and make money and come away from the streets. So how can we invest in them to develop?’
Another figure taking a keen interest in drill is radio dJ Tim Westwood. despite being the privately educated 60-year-old son of a former Anglican Bishop of Peterborough, he has reinvented himself as the British godfather of rap music.
his credibility was clinched in 1999, when he was supposedly injured in a drive-by shooting in South London. In interviews he boasts of knowing who shot him, adding: ‘I didn’t snitch then I ain’t gonna snitch now.’ Somehow this totally preposterous persona impresses the young drillers, however, and after being released from prison in February Scribz made his first public appearance on Westwood’s online TV show.
Westwood, one eye on his young fans, gushed in his cod Jamaican patois about the Brixton group’s criminal fanbase: ‘67 be running the prisons — some of those young offenders, they ride for 67 hard.’
BuTthis blatant cosying up to gangsters serves a purpose as old as the music industry itself. drill music is the flavour of the month, transformed in a couple of years from an underground movement to the brink of mainstream success.
The controversy only serves to fan the flames, and the millions of youngsters streaming this glorification of knife and gun crime into their homes now come from far and wide, not just the insular confines of a few London council estates.
The Peckham rapper Giggs (real name nathaniel Thompson, aged 34) was the first to make the breakthrough. his lengthy criminal record, including a spell in prison for possession of a firearm, was no bar to becoming a global name, whose most recent album entered the charts at number two.
Another elder statesman of drill, Wiley (Richard cowie, 39, a selfconfessed criminal stabbed 20 times), was invited to Buckingham Palace earlier this year to collect an MBe from Prince William for services to music.
even dizzee Rascal, a mainstream rapper who boasts of his friendship with Prince harry, likes to tell how he was stabbed six times. With role models like these, why wouldn’t fans want to carry a knife?
The current crop of drill artists, however, take it to a new level. While artists in the past have used music to elevate themselves from the street, for many drillers the cut and thrust of gang life is their reason for living — and dying.
corleone, another of the elder statesmen of uK rap who has made a fortune and set up his own label, is honest about the situation. ‘ A lot of guys feel like they’ve got to
do bad stuff to [be successful]. It seems to get airplay. But it’s not like it’s just music. The majority of them are trying to kill each other.’
The list of violent incidents linked to drill music is endless. A precis of some of the more notorious incidents can be found on YouTube, where there are dozens of films cataloguing the ‘beefs’ among drillers. Here’s a few of these incidents:
C Biz, a huge drill star, was charged with murder but cleared. Teddy was stabbed and airlifted to hospital. YB was stabbed in the head, Young Dizz shot and stabbed multiple times.
Teewizz was stabbed in the stomach with a zombie machete. He died at the scene.
TizzyT was ‘poked’ (stabbed) 20 times. YB was ‘cheffed (stabbed) in his head’ in revenge for an attack on a rival gang member. Taze has been shot three times. AB ‘got shot in his head [ in] broad day[light]’.
This is just a snapshot of a scene which keeps young fans glued to social media, following feuds between gangs on Snapchat in the same way as their parents watched TV soaps.
In the case of 16-year-old Leoandro Osemeke (Showkey), his death came about because of a petty feud with another rapper who was just 15 at the time. The killer, whose name cannot be revealed because of his age, was cleared of murder on the grounds of self defence.
For some drill collectives their criminality is the biggest bar to success because they end up in jail. A West London group, 1011, saw five of its members locked up last year in an operation involving officers from Operation Trident, the Met’s anti-gang unit.
Armed officers sealed off Portobello Road in Notting Hill, arresting the gang on suspicion of conspiracy to cause GBH and seizing a number of weapons.
The arrests should have surprised nobody, particularly after one of the group’s members had posted CCTV footage on YouTube showing a 16-year- old from rival gang 12World being stabbed and claiming ‘credit’. As for 12World, their rapper Anticz was jailed for 14 years for brutally stabbing two strangers in Hyde Park with a hunting knife. He had gone out wearing a camouflage mask intending to rob people, then stabbed one victim so viciously that part of his bowel lining was left protruding from his side.
SOHAVe his bandmates been chastened? Not a bit of it. In one of 12World’s most recent tunes, ‘ This Beef Can’t Settle’, they take shots at judges for imposing such a long prison sentence before one member, S1, raps about stabbing a rival and twisting the knife so it tears up his victim’s lungs.
Pastor Ryan King, from Grace Baptist Church in Wood Green, is in no doubt as to what is driving his parishioners to kill each other with depressing regularity.
‘I do think that these sorts of videos, and the irresponsible use of social media more widely through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat etc, are fuelling the escalation of violence in North London,’ he says. ‘It is like petrol on a fire.’
Headie One, the rapper linked on social media to the recent spate of stabbings in London, remains defiant. Interviewed on Radio 5 Live, what did he have to say about his violent lyrics, in which he speaks of shooting his rivals in the head?
‘It’s all about interpretation,’ he said. ‘ It’s art, it’s got different angles.’
The question of how many ‘angles’ one can apply to violent murder is moot. What does it mean to Headie One?
‘That’s for me to keep to myself,’ he said.
And there you have it: the disingenuous equivalent of a person answering ‘ no comment’ in the police interview room.
We can only draw our own conclusions. After all, the millions of impressionable youngsters who worship Headie One and his ilk most certainly will.