The Problem With NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ War on Drill Rap

NYC Mayor Eric Adams is trying to get drill rap videos banned from social media, as part of the ongoing war on drill rap. Here's the problem with his stance.

Eric Adams New York City Mayor war on drill rap
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Image via Getty/Alexi J. Rosenfeld

Eric Adams New York City Mayor war on drill rap

Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams fired his first salvo in the ongoing war on drill music in the city. The former NYPD officer told a group of reporters that his son, a Roc Nation employee, showed him some drill videos and “it was alarming.” He was so distraught that he announced plans to ask social media platforms to ban the videos, speaking to their supposed “civic and corporate responsibility” to censor art. 

“We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music [with the] displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites,” Adams said. Unsurprisingly, he omitted any reference to alleviating the social factors that cause the violence depicted in the drill scene. 

In the proverbial elected official handbook, “condemn art to stoke moral panic” comes before “use local art to appraise social conditions.” Maybe the latter isn’t even a suggestion. Adams is one of many local politicians scapegoating their local rap scene as the cause of their municipalities’ violence, in order to justify being “tough on crime.” But the difference between him and most politicians is that he’s able to use the might of one of the largest police forces in the world to enforce his agenda. 

New York City’s drill scene is already reeling from the consequences of the lifestyle referenced in the music. Its biggest star, Pop Smoke, died due to gun violence. So many of its brightest lights, such as Sheff G and Kay Flock, are currently incarcerated. Hot 97’s DJ Drewski, one of the scene’s biggest advocates, reacted to the gun violence by resolving not to play violent diss records that reflect an ongoing gang war, which has claimed the lives of dozens of drill rappers in the past several years. 

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Adams’ comments come after the death of Chii Wvtts, aka Jayquan McKenley, an 18-year-old Bronx rapper who was killed in Brooklyn. During his speech, Adams said, “I didn’t know Jayquan, but his death hit me hard because the more I found out about Jayquan’s story, the more I saw how many times he had been failed by a system that is supposed to help boys like him.” He was tearful during his speech, indicating genuine sorrow for the loss of another young life. The moment harkened to Barack Obama noting that Trayvon Martin could have been his son. Many Black and Brown politicians must feel the weight of the deaths of so many young people who could have potentially followed in their footsteps of civic leadership if they had been given a real chance. Adams likely has some legitimate desire to stop the violence as a means of creating better communities, but where he errs is in his approach to stopping violence. 

During his speech, Adams grossly exploited Wvtt’s death to stump against drill rap and music videos for “causing the loss of lives of young people like them.” He also said he was “alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It’s one of the rivers we have to dam.”

Adams has indicated several times that he wants to be tough on crime. Skeptics have speculated that recently having thousands of NYPD officers walking down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue wasn’t just about honoring slain officer Jason Rivera; it was a show of force. In a previous speech, he asked lawmakers to institute “targeted amendments” to the state’s Raise The Age legislation by allowing 16-year-olds to once again be prosecuted as adults in criminal cases (the age is currently 18). He also wants tougher bail laws, recently condemning people who he says “are using the bail system to perpetuate violence in communities like yours and mine.”


Adams has merely found a convenient scapegoat to justify his desire to institute more corrosive policies in New York City.


Last week, Adams announced the impending creation of an anti-gun unit, which he says is “going to do precision policing to go after those firearms and 500-600 trigger pullers.” Notably, he didn’t acknowledge the offenders as human beings who made mistakes, but described them as mere “trigger pullers,” which dehumanizes them. His anti-gun unit plans were announced days after President Joe Biden came to New York to discuss the city’s violence. 

The new mayor wants to get tougher on crime, and put more people in jail for longer periods of time, but that approach has been proven not to stop crime. And drill music isn’t what’s causing crime, it’s a response to it. Somehow, a half-decade into drill music’s presence in the city, the former Brooklyn borough president is just now finding out about the scene. How could it have been the source of the city’s violence if he didn’t even know it existed, and gun violence preceded it? Adams has merely found a convenient scapegoat to justify his desire to institute more corrosive policies in New York City.

Prominent figures in major cities all over the country have been trumping “crime surge” narratives as a response to rising violent crime over the pandemic. An LAPD detective compared LA to “The Purge.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has referenced an “explosion of violent crime” nationwide. It’s true that violence has risen in many cities, but the stats are a consequence of increased poverty, as the pandemic has taken many people’s jobs and the country has been too stingy to offer proper aid. As The Guardian noted last summer, people are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the ’90s, reporting an 80 percent decrease in the New York homicide rate in 2020 vs. 1990. The piece was published in July 2021, but the truth is still the same: things are much safer than they were decades ago. 

It’s undeniable that violence is a symptom of poverty. But when sensationalists blame rap music and compare communities to movie dramatizations, they want citizens to believe there’s a festering evil that needs to be locked away. It’s true: politicians and other officials need to banish the cop in their mind.

Rappers are championed, but also targeted, as the voices of their cities’ plunder. From LA to Chicago to New York, their shows are canceled or heavily surveilled. There are hip-hop police units in several major cities profiling them. The FBI has used lyrics as evidence in RICO cases, and in cases for the recently instituted Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, which is a “war on guns.” The legal system continues to criminalize rap music, and this can only happen with the stigmatizing that Adams, and others, are guilty of. When people present the idea that music, and music videos, are to be taken literally, they’re seeking to justify whatever happens to artists.

Adams’ characterization of drill, a Black art scene, as the cause of violence, is his chance to offset cries to defund the police and further theorize the cops’ necessity. But while conservatives and centrists may feel placated by his decisions, they will only cause more violence. Feeding the prisons will only further destroy lives, families, and communities. The only thing that will help solve the violence is non-punitive measures that provide people alternative pathways to heal their trauma and care for themselves.  

As I noted two years ago, all rap is political, even if it’s not intended to be. Drill artists may not be aspiring to one-up Chuck D or Dead Prez on songs depicting the city’s violence. But nevertheless, their lyrics and videos are a chronicle of late-stage capitalism, where legitimate opportunities are harder to come by, at the same time gangsta rap is tasked to be the “bigger and better” version of itself. When video game systems constantly level up, consumers are rewarded. But when poverty increases, the resulting conditions are disheartening, as is the desperate expression of the artists putting a mirror to them. Banning music, or videos, won’t stop social conditions that need to be mended with care, not censorship or cuffs. 

Adams cried for McKenley, but his punitive desires reflect a cold lack of empathy for all the other kids in New York City who could meet his fate. Instead of watching the videos his son sent him and considering what led these artists to be so comfortable rhyming about taking each other’s lives, he’s manipulating their misguidedness to ensnare them into the legal slavery of incarceration. That’s more evil than any threat on a drill record. 

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