What’s up, Fam…
As a media analyst and a critical thinker, I am constantly foraging through my thoughts, seeking my most honest perspectives. Often these perspectives are controversial, or offense to a standard belief about how our world and lives actually operate. This particular characterstic, this idiosyncratic window, is what on many occassions has driven me to indulge a particular artist’s work. Whether that work be Chris Ofili’s take on western views of women, morality, and decency or Too Short’s version.
This idiosyncratic window of mine was wide open when I came across this video of Ghanaian teens adopting a mimetic style of Chicago drill rappers.
While this movement in Ghana is dubbed, “Asakaa”, I would rather it just be referred to as drill or Ghanaian drill. In this way, it still honors those that originated those eerily hypnotic syncopations while qualifying its present articulation. In that same way that New York drill does not have to cast off its artistic inspirations while embracing its regional adjustments.
I shared this clip on Twitter, and a friend of Our Asylum has this to say:
Mimicry can be defined in a myriad of ways. I want to allow J. here to his own interpretations. My take on mimicry is more about survival repitition. My four year old son mimicks my vocal enunciations because he thinks talking with bass implies dominance, meaning, it will be more persuasive when he wants to get his way. There is a power dynamic involved in these types of imitations. Vigilance against cultural misappropriation and intellectual property theft is quite understandable as a necessity. Especially in a space where one group has broad base of members seeking to belittle and dehumanize members of that group whose cultural works are being mimicked.
Class considerations should also be weighed. Drill music, and rap in general, developed from specific historical and material conditions. A glimpse of a few of these conditions can be gleaned from a passage from William Julius Wilson’s classic,”The Declining Significance of Race”:
The mounting financial problems of urban schools seem to go hand in hand with their rapidly changing racial composition. In Chicago, the white enrollment in the public schools had dropped from 46.3 percent in 1966 to 24.9 percent in 1976. Other cities have experienced similar changes. In Philadelphia, the black student enrollment has increased to more than 60 percent of the total school population, with most white pupils attending parochial schools. In New York, the black and Puerto Rican public school population increased from 32 percent in 1957 to 63 percent in 1973. The change in the public school population reflects both a change in race and a change in social class as fewer white and middle-class black parents are sending their children to urban public shools. The result has been an exceedingly rapid rise in the proportion of “high cost” disadvantaged students and a corresponding drop in overall educational performance. If the annual reading scores of urban public schools are any indication, children who have the greatest need for education are receiving the poorest training. For example, in the Chicago public schools in 1966-67, only 32 percent of the sixth graders could read at a fourth-grade level.
This is foundation that much of both hiphop as a genre and drill as a subgenre grows out of. Include with this growth of voice, what G-Herbo works against through his own mental health organizations. It is quite understandable why J. wishes to be vigilant in protecting misrepresentations of these cultural outgrowths. In that same vein that romanticizing, say, lapdancing, has its dangers, but it must be regaled as an artform. However, there must be some sort of regulation in place to reduce goofy misapplications like when those that do not quite get that lesson like Nicki Minaj lapdancing an underage whyte boy.
Drill music can easily be misunderstood outside of a shared socio-economic perspective. I am happy that O’Kenneth, City Boy, Reggie, and Jay Bahd are able to offer their families and communities newfound financial opportunities from their musical success. I am also unable to disassociate their use of red flags and what appears to be finger twisting from my own readings of urban culture exclusive to these United States. It is one thing to find survival value through adopting art, quite another to perform behaviors that signify membership in organizations that you do not, or could not, belong to. I still would not use that term,”minstrelsy”, but I would be lying if I did not sense that too much was being taken from young Black USA without permission or comprehension of value.
Stay safe,
J. OWL Farand
That's comical. They do have gangs in Ghana. When I was there newspapers always mentioned gang fights with butcher knives and machetes. Hard to get a hat there unless I military or police. But youngin' is funky...