Last week, NBC aired an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit titled “Nightmares in Drill City,” a drill-rap-based episode that’s as sensational as the title suggests.
The episode synopsis states, “[Assistant District Attorney] Carisi asks the SVU for help with a murder investigation when one of the witnesses shows signs of abuse.” But that neat summation downplays the hyperbole of what actually takes place. The episode follows the fallout of a murder that took place after one rapper (David “G” Graham) robbed another rapper (Milly2K) for drugs they saw in their music video. If that’s not enough propaganda, the guilty rapper turns out to also be a sex trafficker abusing a harem of women, including Victoria Warshofsky, a 17-year-old white girl who becomes the star of the episode.
The 31-year-running franchise is known for pulling from pop culture headlines. There have been episodes based on Chris Brown and Rihanna’s fight, the Jay-Z-Solange elevator incident, and Michael Jackson’s child abuse allegations, among others. Last year, show producer Dick Wolf stated that the show has “always adapted to current events in a nonpolitical way and our viewers can expect us to keep doing so.” But there was nothing apolitical about this racist, tone-deaf depiction of rap.
That quote from Wolf is from a Forbes article questioning how the show would operate during a nationwide defund the police movement. The Emmy-winning franchise, which has spawned numerous offshoots, is one of TV’s chief examples of copaganda, or romanticized dramatizations of law and order that serve to shape public opinion in favor of law enforcement. A 2020 study by Color of Change and USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center found that television like Law & Order “glorifies, justifies and normalizes the systematic violence and injustice meted out by police, making heroes out of police and prosecutors.” This episode is a quintessential example of copaganda and anti-rap propaganda.
All the broad strokes of politician-stoked fears and stereotypes around rap are checked off: a rapper gets killed because they had drugs in their video (and gets their chain snatched). The offender then brags about doing it in a music video (while aiming the murder weapon at the stolen chain in his hand). The murderer also happens to be a pimp who’s enslaving an underage white girl. And for good measure, the writers got the terms “drillers” and “clout chasing” in the script. It’s as if Law & Order producers employed Breitbart writers to have at it for an episode.
During a scene from the show that went viral, the SVU cops are watching a music video where G’s rapping about the murder. Detective Odafin Tutoula, played by rap legend Ice-T, notes that G’s performing drill rap, which he credited to Chief Keef and framed as “competition on whose crew is the hardest.” Another cop notes, “I’ve seen this crap in street crime; they’ve been shooting each other up all over the city.” Ice-T replies, “These kids are clout chasing,” and adds, “The dummies want to be famous so bad they’re doing our job for us.” But someone could have also said that about Ice-T’s music if they had an agenda to push.
The clip was clowned on social media for its after-school-special-level corniness, but Ice-T’s presence made it more than just a cringe-worthy, hilarious depiction of rap from outsiders. One of our own was complicit in it. Ice-T is a rap icon who created one of the first so-called gangsta rap records with “6 N The Morning.” He explains the impetus for the record on Netflix’s Hip-Hop Evolution docuseries, where he recalls being in the streets, then realizing, “I can’t just live the game; I gotta document the game.” He joked that he rhymed about the streets because “even gangs have their own entertainment division,” which was said in jest, but references the reality that gangs have creative people in and around them expressing the reality of their surroundings. Many people perceive artists rapping about violent misdeeds as “self-snitching,” and in some cases it very well may be, but when society engineers survival-mode conditions in which people are perceived as “savages,” it’s no surprise when some embrace that identity.
Many rappers come from poverty-stricken environments where they may have nothing but their reputations. Gang Starr’s “Just to Get a Rep” chronicles the life of a stick-up kid who enjoys that “mad brothers know his name, so he thinks he got a little fame from the stick-up game.” Biggie rapped about “kickin’ niggas down the steps just for rep.”
On Hip-Hop Evolution, Ice-T spoke to “living backwards” in the streets, expressing the “really strange” dynamic where “you’re livin’ in a world with all these villains, thieves, and scoundrels, and you take pride in that.” It may seem like a strange source of esteem to people with no proximity to these neighborhoods, but it’s a reality of what happens in communities blighted by politicians’ “really strange” by-design decisions to deprive people of the resources they need to thrive.