Against UK Drill: Minstrelsy, War Music, Immanence, Moral Responsibility, and Aesthetic Quality

UK Drill music is a subgenre of hip hop that has gained a foothold in the British cultural landscape over the last decade and a half. It is music about violent, murderous criminality, and the behaviour gleefully spoken of in the music disregards the value of human life. My position on the inherent value of human life comes from the position in Genesis 1:26 (each person is made in God’s image, according to his likeness). In this project, I argue that drill fits a gap, vacated by traditional blackface minstrelsy in the British cultural appetite for racist depictions of black people – drill is a new form of minstrelsy that does not require the blackening of the face or reddening of the lips for the performer to debase black people. This project explores this new category of minstrelsy and why drill squarely fits within it. I use this project to examine the specific racialisation of drill, drawing on the philosophy of Tamar Szabó Gendler – imaginative resistance, Susan Sontag – her writing on war photography in <i>Regarding the Pain of Others<i/>, as well as other scholars and my own original thought. I use Fanonian theory to explore the connection between drill and his conception of the immanence of black consciousness. This essay makes moral claims about drill, using the material of the essay and numerous examples from drill music and the cultural milieu surrounding it and the context it exists within to argue that it is inherently morally bankrupt and aesthetically poor.