Bryony Gordon Music is not to blame for violent crime
’ve been hunkering down this week at home, waiting for World War Three to arrive. Sorry, did I write World War Three? What I meant to say was a washing machine. Yes, I’ve been hunkering down this week, waiting for a washing machine to arrive. And while there might be a big difference between the Apocalypse and a 9kg capacity drum with inbuilt Wi-fi and 16 different wash cycles, I’d just like to point out that when you sit at home all day with nothing more than 24-hour news channels and social media for company, it’s very easy to start to confuse the two.
You see a woman in need of clean laundry. I see a possibility of nerve agents, nuclear war, and knife crime on every corner.
While I was hunkering one night, some men on mopeds rammed the door of the office across the road in an attempted break-in. I find that such incidents don’t help to dispel outlandish beliefs that the city you live in is a murderous hellhole overrun by gangs.
My husband, who is the ying to my yang, tells me not to be so ridiculous. This is life in a sprawling metropolis, he says.
“But it’s so much worse than when I was a child growing up in London!” I wail. “It was never like this when I was young. Social media is making everything worse. The world is going to hell in a handcart! Have you heard of this ‘drill music’?”
“You mean the form of hip-hop that is being blamed for the rise in violent crime in London?” he sighs.
“Yes! They were talking about it on the Today programme! Gang members taunt each other in songs that they then post online causing real life violence.”
“You sound 108 years old.” The next day, we are watching a documentary on Netflix called The Defiant Ones. It is a brilliant miniseries about the roles of two very different men in transforming contemporary music culture, and the unlikely friendship behind it: Jimmy Iovine, a legendary super producer who has worked with Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Patti Smith, and Dr Dre, the founder of the rap group NWA. (Together, Iovine and Dre created Beats Electronics, which they sold to Apple in 2014 for £1.8 billion.)
It took me right back to my teens in the Nineties, when the poster I proudly displayed over my bed was “PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS”. My friends and I used to spend hours round each other’s houses listening to Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur, the American rapper who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. A few months later the Notorious BIG, another of our favourites, was
Moral panic is useless when it comes to solving problems
also shot dead. Was there moral panic at the time that the world’s teenagers were listening to such violent music? Almost certainly.
In the late Eighties, did the FBI investigate Dre and NWA for their song ‘F--- Tha Police’? They sure did.
Did people get stabbed? Yes, a friend of mine was, now I think about it – a knife plunged into his arm outside a tube station in west London, missing a major artery by a millimetre. He was 15. Suddenly, my spectacles are not so rose-tinted.
The fact that violent crime and controversial song lyrics have existed since the year dot, does not make what is happening in London right now any more acceptable or any less heartbreaking – and yes, it is heartbreaking when any child feels that the best option open to him or her is a life of gang crime.
What it does do, is highlight how useless moral panic is when it comes to solving problems. A genre of music may provide politicians and commentators with a convenient and easily identifiable scapegoat, but it doesn’t get to the bottom of why some kids feel so compelled to make it.
Instead of blaming drill music, shouldn’t we be listening to it?
The thought of my five-yearold daughter growing up with social media terrifies me, and when I switch on the news sometimes I just want to move us all to a nuclear bunker. But hasn’t it always been this way? Was everyone relaxed in the Seventies when the dangers of Cold War hung over us, or the Eighties and Nineties when the IRA were busy trying to blow up the government?
The world is a frightening place. It is also a wondrous one – but only if we pluck up the courage to get out of the house and embrace it.