On August 22, 2024, YouTuber Brandon Buckingham, whose gimmick is traveling to dangerous neighborhoods and posing alongside their residents holding guns, posted a video, “The Most Hated Rapper in Philadelphia: Life as Mr. Disrespectful,” about a young man named Abdul Vicks, more popularly known as YBC Dul. In it, Dul and his friends show off their weapons and the abandoned house where they used to sell drugs. At one point, he takes Buckingham for a ride near the block of his “opps,” or enemies, in a “striker,” or stolen car; they hear gunshots. Ominously, Dul boasts of being “feet on land,” or out in the street. “I never got robbed,” he says, “I never got touched, I never got shot at in the city yet.”
The next day, Reddit user BigMoneySw posted “RIP DUL” on r/PhillyWiki, the subreddit for Philadelphia street culture. Users reacted in disbelief, but as is common with murders in the city, social media had the story well before the news. Reports would soon confirm that Dul and his manager, Baby 35st, had been stopped behind a bus on Olney Avenue when a white SUV pulled up beside them and fired several times into their vehicle, striking Dul in the chest and hand. After stopping at his nearby home, Baby 35st drove Dul to the local Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The killing wasn’t a surprise. Dul’s gang, the Young Bag Chasers, had been warring with a slew of rivals. Tied to dozens of shootings, YBC had taken so many losses that their foes had begun taunting them as the Young Bullet Catchers. In Philadelphia’s drill rap scene––where songs ridicule the dead, describe slayings in explicit detail, and dare opps to try and seek revenge––Dul’s affronts were one of a kind: he threatened to slap the grieving mother of one of YBC’s victims, crowed about YBC shooting an opp’s six-year-old sister, and filmed himself digging up the grave of a murdered fifteen-year-old, laughing maniacally about how the teenager still didn’t have a tombstone. After Zyir Stafford, a.k.a. Booga, was shot and killed while leaving his job at McDonald’s, Dul dropped the video “McButtons and McNuggets,” which shows him placing an order at the fast-food restaurant before dragging a body from a car, tossing it in a pit in the ground, and slowly sprinkling out a box of french fries, as if pouring out libations for the dead.
To understand Dul and today’s Philly drill, you have to understand the Chicago drill of the early 2010s, and to understand Chicago drill requires a revision of received wisdom about gangs and their motivations. In the popular imagination, gangs are organized, hierarchical criminal enterprises, a source of profit and protection, guarded by secrecy and nearly impossible to escape. This notion is a blend of half-fictions gleaned from rap music and crime movies and fails to register the long-standing decline of the corporate gangs of the crack era, which used murder and extortion to establish monopolies on drug distribution. In reality, even organized crime is disorganized; gangs tend to be overlapping, permeable, small, and short-lived. As crack use has declined, drug markets have moved toward an independent-operator model, often facilitated by the anonymity of the internet; street dealing, for all but the most successful, has become a dangerous and unprofitable enterprise. This is not to say modern gangs don’t do it, but it rarely provides sufficient motivation for group cohesion.
The typical gang is a group of boys aged fourteen to twenty-three who met through school or have family ties and identify with a tightly circumscribed area, sometimes as small as a single block or corner, anchored by a takeout Chinese restaurant or a corner shop of the kind Philadelphians call a papi store. Many still live at home, with single parents or grandparents; most smoke weed and drink lean, and, at least in Philly, they pop percs. They have guns, often shared, that they like to hold up in photos, along with real or fake money, fanned out or in thick stacks. They have a penchant for three-letter monikers––CTS for Courtois TrapStars in Saint Louis, FBG for Fly Boy Gang in Chicago––and these often precede members’ nicknames: CTS Luh Wick, FBG Duck. They tend to have disciplinary problems and have often cycled through correctional facilities, Department of Health and Human Services programs, or alternative schools for disruptive youth. They want what seemingly everyone wants: to get rich and famous on social media.
In 2012, Chicago rapper Chief Keef did just that with “I Don’t Like,” a viral track that brought drill music to a nationwide audience and landed him a multimillion-dollar record deal. A drill is a targeted murder; the term had been current in Chicago for a couple of years at that point, popularized in 2010 by Pac Man’s “It’s a Drill,” which hit the airwaves a few months before Pac Man’s own fatal shooting. As much as a sound, Keef’s innovation was an aesthetic: where Drake, Rick Ross, or Lil Wayne had pushed a fantasy of opulence piled upon opulence, with private planes, pimp cups brimming with Ace of Spades, and bronzed beauties in bikinis, Chief Keef showed his fans grim alleyways, housing projects, and abandoned homes. The bass was heavy, the melodies grim in minor keys; no one was dripped up in Louis Vuitton or Rick Owens. Instead, a crowd glared menacingly into the camera, throwing gang signs, smoking blunts, brandishing pistols and AR-15s.
This was a new response to a paradox at the heart of gangster rap, where success is based on a constantly challenged, constantly threatened authenticity inseparable from forms of criminality that must be represented but can never be explicitly acknowledged. (Many of these videos include disclaimers that the guns are merely props. The clips of real bullets and any number of arrests at drill video shoots say otherwise.) For the first gangster rappers, allusion sufficed: Schoolly D’s, Ice-T’s, and Eazy-E’s tall tales set in the hood or on the corner sparked a moral panic in the eighties; by the mid-nineties, as rap’s market share grew, real rappers distinguished themselves from fake through increasingly explicit references to drugs, gang life, and killings. Lines like UGK’s “Cut a fifty up into a nice fat boulder / Cut it to a nice fat pile of hover tens” were incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t know a cocaine dealer; Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, released at the tail end of the most violent period in New York’s history, gave listeners a tour of the city’s criminal geography, from Central Booking to Queensbridge Houses to Rikers. Denise Herd of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health attempted to measure the increase in violent content in a corpus of the 340 most popular rap songs from 1979 to 1997 and claimed an increase from 27 to 60 percent. In her reliance on Billboard data, however, Herd missed the enormous body of violent nineties underground music on labels such as Rap-A-Lot, Suave House, No Limit, and Hypnotize Minds.
Perhaps the decline of violent crime, which would reach a forty-year trough in 2014, incentivized bolder expressions of violence; perhaps it was the discovery that Rick Ross, who took his name from a cocaine kingpin, had previously worked as a corrections officer; perhaps it was simple market pressure, which, as Georg Simmel notes in his writings on fashion, requires that one somehow distinguish oneself by doing the same thing as others but differently. At any rate, Chief Keef threaded the needle, helped along, ironically, by Joseph “Lil JoJo” Coleman, a brash young rapper from a gang called Brick Squad 069 who relentlessly disparaged him and rappers Lil Reese and Lil Durk on social media. In “I Got Dat Sack,” Lil JoJo addressed the three directly, bragging, “Fuck this rap / I ain’t gone talk / I’m a leave it in the street.”
JoJo would soon post a video on Twitter of himself chasing Lil Reese through traffic, followed on September 1, 2012, by a picture of himself in Keef’s gang’s territory. Finally, on September 4, after driving by a group of rivals and taunting them, he would tweet to Lil Reese, “I am out here on my 2 feet wya bitch” and, soon afterward, “Im on #069 Im out here,” referencing Sixty-Ninth Street on Chicago’s South Side. At 7:30 that evening, JoJo was riding on the handlebars of a friend’s bicycle down Seventieth Street when three vehicles approached and one opened fire. JoJo ran but was struck in his right side and fell dead.
The next day, Chief Keef tweeted, “hahahahahhahahahahahahahaahhAAHAHAHAHA” and “Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo Wanted To Be Jus Like Us #LMAO.” He would later deny knowing JoJo and allege that his account had been hacked, but JoJo’s mother and brother blamed Keef, and on Facebook, Keef’s cousin Tadoe Bey would attribute the murder to three Keef associates before deleting the post and likewise claiming his account had been hacked. One of the men he mentioned was shot to death in apparent retaliation two weeks later; one died from cardiovascular disease and epilepsy aggravated, according to speculation, by a lean and Xanax addiction; the last is serving a prison sentence for the drive-by shooting of a fourteen-year-old boy on the 6100 block of South Vernon Avenue, six days after which he posted a photo of himself holding a Nerf gun with the caption “DEM BULLETS FLY NO NERF BOY GO POP A G ON VERNON STREET.”
This is, in nuce, the tragedy and barbarism, the absurdity and wastefulness, of drill culture. It made Chief Keef rich, it probably made his labels and the platforms that host his music even richer, and it spawned hundreds of bandwagon hoppers, foes, peers, and wannabes, not just in Chicago but across the globe, from San Juan to Jacksonville to Brixton to Rotterdam.
There are now academic studies of drill; YouTubers like Trap Lore Ross make a living picking apart drill lyrics to keep fans cued in to who’s killed whom; there is drill fanfic on Wattpad, including “basically a gay book of different drill rappers or maybe just any rapper being gay” and a novel about YBC Dul so inane I couldn’t finish it. There is even an academic book: Ballad of the Bullet, a drab deployment of criminologically questionable boilerplate about “structural causes” welded to a passable memoir of the author’s time among an aspiring drill crew. The only substantive thing I learned from it is that there are well-to-do white kids out there willing to fly drill rappers to their homes and pay them to shoot a video together for the privilege of claiming opps on some block in a city they may never even visit.
Street Literacy
It’s impossible to say when drill arrived in Philly because it’s impossible to clearly separate drill from street rappers like AR-Ab who paved the way for it, but for convenience’s sake, we’ll say 2019, when SimxSantana dropped the video for “FLEXIN N’ FLASHIN’.” The spare, droning beat, the pounding bass, the lack of a chorus, the unrelenting litany of violence, the filtered lighting, the association with a crew (D4M) whose members would kill and be killed: everything that would be trademark in Philly drill for the next six years is there, apart from the surgical masks and shiesties that gave a sanitary cover to anonymity seeking when Covid hit the following year.
The base assumption of sociological research is that the future will by and large resemble the past, and in pre-pandemic Philadelphia, this assumption was a poor one.
On March 16, 2020, Pennsylvania schools closed. On March 17, ostensibly to protect the health of her officers, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw issued a directive instructing them not to detain suspects for narcotic offenses, theft from persons, retail theft, theft from auto, burglary, vandalism, car theft, fraud, and prostitution. On March 23, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf issued a stay-at-home order, and Philadelphia’s streets emptied out. The predictable consequences to public order almost immediately ensued.
Alongside the progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, Outlaw had taken it for granted that decriminalization would redress historical injustices while reducing crime. Studies existed that bolstered the wisdom of this approach; studies existed that would have contradicted it. This is the risk of “evidence-based” approaches to social problems: in the research they are based on, random samples are rarely so, confounded factors are excluded, results are frequently irreplicable, and motivated reasoning is omnipresent.
But even when this is not so, the base assumption of sociological research is that the future will by and large resemble the past, and in prepandemic Philadelphia, this assumption was a poor one. Krasner’s purging of the prosecutor’s office and push for more lenient sentences or outright dismissal of charges for illegal gun possession and a host of other offenses took for granted that the city’s crime had reached a steady state. And of course, at the time, nobody was talking about drill.
Shootings began to rise the same month the lockdowns hit and by the end of the year had nearly doubled to forty-six per week, with 499 murders, one body shy of the record set thirty years before. Two rarely mentioned points seem relevant to the unprecedented rise in violence during the pandemic. First, young people had lots more time to film rap videos and snipe at one another online. Second, emergency assistance money put a lot more guns on the street. Sales rose 49 percent in Pennsylvania between 2019 and the end of 2020 and remained well above the historical average for the next four years––how many buyers were intermediaries is unknown, but Pennsylvania is notorious for straw purchasing scandals, with an analysis by Brady, formerly the National Council to Control Handguns, finding that 1.2 percent of the state’s licensed dealers accounted for 57 percent of firearms that ended up in the hands of criminals. Newspaper readers could be forgiven for assuming that gun buying was driven by Second Amendment–obsessed rednecks and frightened residents in poor neighborhoods looking for protection, but it’s difficult to watch the evolution of drill videos over the past five years and not notice how one pistol or two becomes five or ten, plus AR-15s, AK-47s, Dracos, hundred-round drums and extended clips, auto sears, and laser sights in red, blue, and green.
Drill has given new life to a long-standing and asinine debate about whether rap music is a cause of violence or merely reflects the violence in society. Imagine asking such a question about the vase, the cellphone, or the ballistic missile, and you’ll see the folly of supposing that cultural artifacts can ever be born into an ether of pure contemplation. I cannot prove that drill music incites violence in the same way that no one can prove anything, because causation is inductively observed and cannot be deductively verified; but if drill music celebrated real instances of child abuse or ethnic cleansing instead of the socially fraught issue of violence in poor communities, there would surely be less opposition to the notion that these people mean what they are saying. The British scholar Jonathan Ilan has proposed that “street illiteracy” informs the linkage of drill music to violence, countering with his own “street literate” methodology of watching hundreds of drill videos to arrive at the vague and predictable conclusion that they are an empowering “hybrid of fictional artistic expression, loose autobiography and calculated social-media-style performance.” One wonders what his peculiar form of street literacy would make of the striking but not unrepresentative sequence of events that follows.
On the afternoon of December 23, 2022, Philadelphia police responding to a report of a person with a gun found Ramir Parrish in the parking lot of the laundromat in Germantown where he worked. Parrish, or PNB Chucky, was an aspiring rapper affiliated with a gang that had been feuding with the Westside Mafia, or WSM, since 2016. Video showed two shooters firing on Parrish. When he fell, the larger of the men approached, stood over him, and “overcooked” him, firing several times into his head.
On March 23 of the following year, the account Pugga6500 (in reference to the 6500 block of Berdan Street, WSM territory) posted a video on YouTube, since removed, called “Let Them Tell It,” which opens with a hand stamping a blunt out on the head of a Chucky doll (a perennial feature of drill rap is the boast of “smoking on” dead opps, a sublimation of the cannibalistic rituals associated with aggression toward out-groups since the dawn of time). Pugga then appears on a sidewalk holding a pistol to the Chucky doll’s head. In this frame, the doll is wearing a ski mask; though there’s no mention of it in Pugga’s eventual arraignment, I suspect this detail, coupled with the last words of the song (“I was tryna kill that nigga way before he got a deal / When they hit his face his ski mask got connected to the ground”), was incriminating. According to Chucky’s family, he had recently signed a recording contract.
On April 6, Pugga posted another video, “OK OK.” Early on, he raps a line that anyone might have rapped: “Nigga talkin’ all that hot shit, now his fuckin’ face missin’.” Its possible significance in connection with Parrish’s fatal wounds becomes clear in the later verse, “It’s that laundry duty / It’s that super-easy wash and fold / Once we get that lo.” On June 17 of this year, I listened to Pugga apologize in court, and tell Chucky’s family, “I didn’t mean to put you through no hurt.” He had pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and possessing an instrument of crime, and was sentenced to eighteen to forty years.
Philly drill has been well-documented, for those willing to look around, for the past four years. On YouTube, there’s Box 29 News, Phillyscoreboard, and the standout American Confidential, which blends deep background on gang members and their feuds with a historian’s sensibility. PhillyWiki has the vices of every rumor mill, but when a shooting happens, it’s the first place those interested turn to find out who did it and why. On Instagram, apart from the accounts of rappers and gang members themselves, the anonymous Tommy Hood Figure is a chronicler of street wars in Philly present and past. Then there’s Philly Death Row and the sinister Philly ESPN, which uses basketball terminology to tally shootings in a supposed league, referring to the dead as retired players and to bullets as dropped points and tracking which crews are up on which:
I can’t say whether these pages directly encourage drillers; I can say they use the lingo, and I’ve watched them argue about their “scores” on Instagram Live. If a page gets the story wrong, someone always jumps in to correct it (despite the scorn the culture heaps on self-snitching, for many, the temptation of glory outweighs the threat of incarceration, and a lot of them just don’t seem to realize the cops are watching). Aiden Waters, one of several Fastbreak members arrested for a string of murders, including that of YBC Dul, referred in a phone call to shootings as “scrimmages” and called a resulting death a “slam dunk.”
American Confidential has paid subscribers on YouTube and on Patreon; Tommy Hood Figure has a paid Close Friends group for more sensitive stories; less reputable pages exploit the carnage to drive followers to their weed business or lure them into CashApp and credit card scams. Some seem to be in it for the perverse pleasure of egging young people into killing one another. But what about those who follow them? What about myself? I have proposed to write a book about crime in Philadelphia, and I justify this as research, but after you’ve seen fifty murders caught on Ring and corner store security cameras, what do you learn from seeing the fifty-first? What general principles am I meant to derive from the endlessly expanding file on my computer, in which names, dates, and street corners bleed together into one unfathomable tragic mass?
Shoot, Troll, Get Shot
An investigator I know told me recently how he’d interviewed a boy who had shot and killed one of his opps on a bus. (I’m not worried about blowing his cover, because every year there are several shootings on Philly public transit.) This man, who has a past of his own, tried the sympathetic approach to get the boy to open up––I’ve been there, I know what you’re going through, and so on and so forth. This only elicited apathy. And so he spoke of how difficult it was to actually shoot a person, how few people can bring themselves to commit murder, how many balk at the last second, and asked, “What was it that made you able to pull that trigger when so many others can’t?”
The pounding bass, the lack of a chorus, the unrelenting litany of violence: everything that would be trademark in Philly drill for the next six years is there.
This question roused the boy. He thought a long time, looked the investigator in the eyes, and responded, “I don’t know.” There is more truth in this I don’t know than there is in any number of theories about the causes of violent crime. Criminology has made at least theoretical advancements with group-based modeling, which attempts to disaggregate and gauge the impact of various risk factors on the chances that given persons will turn to crime; Adrian Raine’s Anatomy of Violence details how finer-grained insights into congenital, developmental, and environmental factors linked to criminality have begun to enrich the gross generalizations of root-cause hypotheses. These are an improvement on the notion that x amount of poverty + y of trauma and z of structural inequality almost inevitably give rise to crime, and on the essentially Calvinist view of those who would reduce wrongdoing to bad choices made by self-possessed agents with a vicious or misguided character; but anyone overly confident in their understanding of the whys of delinquency, or in their belief that such whys are ascertainable or even exist, will find chastening a recent paper by Matthew J. Salganik in collaboration with 160 research teams. “Measuring the Predictability of Life Outcomes with a Scientific Mass Collaboration” used exhaustive data sets, machine learning, and expert appraisals to investigate the extent to which life trajectories were subject to forecasting. Despite thousands of data points, researchers were found to be largely incapable of predicting individual outcomes; instead, their prognoses clustered in such a way as to suggest that expertise in the social sciences represents, above all, competency in modeling the beliefs of fellow experts.
This complicates the search for push factors, but what about the pull––what is it about killing an opp and celebrating it in a video that makes it so alluring that people will risk death or incarceration to do it? What compelled Ameen Hurst, a.k.a. Lil’ Scatted, a prison escapee facing four murder charges, to rent a studio in Manhattan and record a song about his crimes? What was so funny when he messaged a friend of one of his victims, laughing and ordering him, “Pick ya mans up,” before scornfully repeating the boy’s last words, “I’m hit! I’m hit in my neck!”?
The answer cannot be––however much the heart and conscience compel it––that this isn’t really happiness, that there is something else going on here; to affirm such is to fall into the same error as Descartes, who thought that because animals didn’t possess a soul, their howls of pain when being vivisected were a mere mechanical effect. Psychological approaches, which retain the methodological glow of Freud even as they draw more patently on Rousseauean ideas about society and bad parenting perverting the innately pure human essence, crumble in light of the extreme rarity of murder even in the worst lives and the most wretchedly deprived communities. René Girard comes closer to the truth with his theory of mimetic rivalry: prerationally, preconsciously, we perceive an advantage in others’ doing things, and we try to top them to steal this advantage for ourselves. Especially among young men, who have an outsize compulsion for what Erving Goffman calls the “ephemeral ennoblement” of risky activities that prove their mettle, mimetic contests are likely to take a violent form.
There is nothing all that new about this. Drill has distinctive parallels in history, in medieval Iceland’s blood feuds and in the fashion for dueling that reigned for centuries in Europe. Even Jojo’s posting up in his opps’ hood hearkens back to the duel’s predecessor, the pas d’armes, in which knights would announce their intention to hold a designated terrain and linger there, waiting for someone to come challenge them. Wherever personal honor is favored over the status conferred by society, honor-based violence will remain a source of prestige; and if you have the unsettling sense that the contemporary world offers too few opportunities for dignity, especially for young black men and boys in America’s poorest big city, you may note the relevance of Kevin McAleer’s assertion, as easily applied to drillers as to his subjects in Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-siècle Germany: “Destitute of noble values by which to live, duelists embraced a set of aristocratic guidelines by which to die.”
Only a small proportion of violent offenders are primarily and immediately motivated by the suffering of others. A self-selection for such individuals does occur in settings of generalized violence––in drill, these are disproportionately likely to become shooters. But enjoyment of violence can be cultivated and is a somewhat elastic quality: not everyone can become a sadist, but almost everyone can learn to relish another’s pain. In a study of genocide, Ervin Staub tells the story of a Vietnam gunner who initially refused an order to murder but capitulated when threatened with court-martial. “The veteran reported that in a fairly short time firing at civilians became like an experience at a target-shooting gallery, and he began to enjoy it.” Endless documents on atrocities committed in war or under the aegis of authoritarian regimes confirm the reality of this habituation process.
Nor is an opp innocent in the eyes of a driller. The endlessly repeated cycle of drill rap––shoot an opp, troll his gang, get shot in turn––speaks to an uncomfortable but ironclad fact of criminology: many crime victims, especially murder victims, share biographical traits with those who prey on them. A study of shootings in Philadelphia in 2020 found the following:
Offender and victim demographics resemble each other: for the arrested shooters, 94% were male, 95% were people of color (74% Black Male), and the peak age was in late adolescence and young adulthood (18-30 years old). Similarly, for victims, 86.5% were male, 88.5% were people of color (61.5% Black Male), and the peak age was in young adulthood to mid-thirties (21-35 years old). . . . Previous shooting victimizations are fairly common among both victims and offenders. . . . Previous involvement in crimes is also common among both offenders and victims. 50% of the arrestees had a Violent Felony charge in their criminal history, as did 33% of the shooting victims. 38% of the arrestees had a “Violation of Uniform Firearms Act” (VUFA) charge, as did 29% of the shooting victims. 37% of the arrestees had a “Narcotics Possession with Intent to Distribute” (PWID) charge, as did 30% of the shooting victims.
We should note that things are worse than the numbers show, as the clearance rate in 2022 for fatal and nonfatal shootings in Philly was 36.7 percent and 18.9 percent, respectively.
Drill contributed to a spike in violence above all because it made conflicts sticky. There was a permanent, public record of these beefs, and a chorus of strangers in the comments section became a virtual peer group demanding retaliation. Pandemic conditions introduced novel contingencies. But there remained an upper limit on the number of people willing to commit murder, and logic dictates that if a large number of those murdered were themselves potential murderers, their death would cause the homicide rate to decline on its own (one Redditor called this, poetically, a “self-cleaning oven”). QED: after a mean 496 homicides per year from 2020–23, that number was almost halved in 2024, and 2025 is on track to see murders hit historic lows. What this means for ordinary policing is difficult to say, but at the least, assertions that policy is responsible for a sudden drop in crime should be viewed with skepticism.
Bodies and Clout
To return to YBC Dul: his killing was momentous enough that numerous friends texted me about it, and I texted numerous friends in turn. It sounds silly to compare his death to John Lennon’s or Kurt Cobain’s, but there was something of that there, too, just as there was something of the mingled solemnity, scorn, relief, and reluctant admiration when a notorious bank robber is finally shot down. In a genre saturated with callous irreverence, Dul had distinguished himself as the most relentless. It is hard for me to conceive of something more succinctly inhumane than him rapping about K.J. Johnson, a sixteen-year-old basketball player killed by two YBC members: “K3 can’t make no more jump shots.” I read Dul wasn’t offed over drill beef but because a weed customer put a bounty on his head. I’ll never know, but if it’s true, it would be like Houdini dying of a burst appendix after hundreds of death-defying stunts.
Some seem to be in it for the perverse pleasure of egging young people into killing one another. But what about those who follow them? What about myself?
Online, many asked if this was the end of Philly drill. It just seemed too insane to go on: dozens of people had been locked up, some for the rest of their lives. My notes record 130 deaths affiliated with the scene, but there must be many that I’ve missed: just yesterday, I learned a crew I’d barely even heard of was up on their opps by nine bodies. On September 6, 2024, the first arrest came for Dul’s murder: then-sixteen-year-old Aiden Waters, who is now tied to six shootings, four fatal. Waters is aligned with Fastbreak, which Larry Krasner described with the awkward but not misplaced term “shooting group.” Critics have long accused Krasner of denying the gang problem through such euphemisms; be that as it may, Fastbreak’s raison d’être is bodies and clout. They have rappers, but the music seems calculated to reinforce the rep and not vice versa.
As the Fastbreak plot continued to play out—with more arrests, the dropping and refiling of charges, and the indictment of Aiden Waters’s mother, who was seen on her home security footage handing a Fastbreak member the rifle allegedly used to kill Dul—Noah Scurry, a star student and basketball standout, was shot to death outside his family home. What seemed a senseless tragedy took a turn within days, as two drill videos posted to YouTube, “Swing My Door” and “Switches and Dracs,” began to circulate. In both, a rapper in a sinister Joker mask flashes pistols with extended magazines, boasts about bodies, and disses opps from Fastbreak and other gangs. It’s taken for granted now that Noah Scurry was the Joker; on Shannon Sharpe’s podcast, local media personality Gillie da King claimed that Philadelphia detectives had told him Scurry was responsible for the murder of his son, YNG Cheese. Internet sleuths soon found TikToks of Scurry walking the streets with guns; in another, he boasts, “I’m a athlete with a whole body count.” He is said to have had between three and six killings to his credit. Inevitably, another rapper in a Joker mask has since appeared.
Who knows how many heads the hydra has? As I was bringing this piece to a close, there was a shooting in Fairmount Park, a short walk from where I live, with nine injured and two dead. One of the crews that lost someone, Harleyville in the city’s northeast, has allegedly been putting belt to ass, in the local patois, ever since. Their main rapper, SMG Nas, has a track out dissing Joker called “TMZ.” As of this writing, it has twenty-four thousand views.