Pulling drill rap videos from TikTok won’t stop the violence plaguing cities | Jenice Armstrong

The late C. Delores Tucker, a civil rights and social activist, used to call gangsta rap “pornographic filth” and say, “You can’t listen to all that language and filth without it affecting you.”

Even though she had a point, her speeches elicited a lot of eye-rolling from rappers and their fans.

I’ll admit it: I may have rolled my eyes some, too. Hey, I was young. I had a different mindset back then. I regret that I didn’t have a better appreciation for what she was trying to accomplish, even as she made headlines nationwide by leading Black ministers to protest outside of Tower Records and campaigning vigorously against derogatory terms directed at women. In return for her efforts, she got ridiculed by the late Tupac Shakur and others.

In hindsight, Tucker really tried to school us.

I was reminded of her crusading last week after New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced plans to crack down on drill rap. In drill rap, young artists brandish weapons, spout foul language, and brag about committing homicides, sometimes dressed in bulletproof vests. The lyrics are raw and extremely aggressive — and the videos are all over YouTube and TikTok.

Drill rap started in Chicago about a decade ago with the likes of Chief Keef and other rappers and has become pervasive not just in the United States but internationally.

“Drill music is all about promoting death,” said Bilal Qayyum, an anti-violence activist and the founder of the Philly-based Father’s Day Rally Committee.

I hadn’t even heard of drill rap before last week. Neither had Adams.

But after the recent deaths of two aspiring rappers, the newly inaugurated mayor watched videos suggested by his son and decided that he needed to do something. On Friday, at a news conference, he announced that he would reach out to social media sites that host drill rap and ask executives to be better corporate citizens.

“We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music — displaying of guns, violence. We are allowing it to stay on these sites ...” Adams pointed out. “We are alarmed by the use of social media to overproliferate this violence in our communities.”

I never met Tucker, who died in 2005. But something tells me she would be pleased.

It’s refreshing to see someone in Adams’ position bring up the subject, much less take action. I would love to see Mayor Jim Kenney and some other city leaders take more bold steps in the name of improving the culture and protecting impressionable young minds. That’s really what Adams is trying to do — save lives during a time when gun violence is soaring in cities nationwide. Last year was Philadelphia’s most violent ever — with 562 homicides, many resulting from social media beefs. I encourage Kenney to join Adams in pressuring sites such as YouTube to better police the content it hosts.

“This is a bold yet much-needed move,” said Chad Dion Lassiter, executive director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. “The glorification of violence, sex, and degradation hasn’t always had enough voices to speak back to it. What we are witnessing now is sinister and deeply troubling.”

He added, “Glorifying the killing of another human being in music and aesthetics is more than alarming.”

Even though I agree that we need to do a better job monitoring drill rap videos, taking them down likely won’t make much of a difference to our soaring crime rates. Darin Toliver, a cofounder of the Black Men at Penn School of Social Work, cautioned that it’s important to recognize that despite all of the violent imagery, drill music is a form of self-expression.

“Rap music is historically a mechanism which allows freedom of expression by young Blacks,” he said. “The questions raised shouldn’t be, ‘What are you doing?’ but rather, ‘Why are you doing this?’ The only way it will change is when we allow those individuals to tell us directly. We cannot speculate or use the ‘I’m the adult and you will listen’ approach. Many have personally witnessed horrific trauma on a consistent basis. Who do they turn to? Where do they turn to?”

For many otherwise talented youngsters, the answer is music. Drill rap today. Maybe something even more aggressive tomorrow. Sadly, it reflects their reality and state of mind, which is why even expanded oversight from YouTube and other social media platforms wouldn’t be a fix. What would, however, are economic ladders and opportunities to help these aspiring creatives see their way out of poverty, and recognize that guns and violence don’t have to be part of the equation.

Anything short of that is a bandage on a bullet hole.