Drill music, a form of hip hop known for its gritty lyrics, has been criticised by police for encouraging gang violence, but a new analysis shows that songs with positive lyrics are more popular on YouTube.
Bennett Kleinberg and Paul McFarlane of University College London analysed 550 YouTube videos by 105 London-based drill music artists, using machine learning to investigate how the tone of a song’s lyrics changes.
Every word in each song was captured and given a sentiment score based on its context. For example, “gun” received a rating of -1, while “thrive” received a +1 score, the minimum and maximum scores possible.
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Rather than glorifying violence – a claim drill music’s detractors make against the genre – the researchers discovered that drill music fans watched and engaged more often with music videos whose lyrics had a positive tone.
“We find that songs in the positive cluster attract almost twice as much audience engagement on YouTube in the form of comments and views than songs in the negative sentiment cluster,” says Kleinberg, who also points out that it is possible a song can have a positive overall sentiment but still contain violent language.
Craig Pinkney of University College Birmingham in the UK, who has researched the connection between gangs, youth violence and drill music, believes that while the content of the songs can be violent, the ability to make it as a musician and leave gang life behind is a benefit. “Unfortunately what happens is we only listen to the music in terms of its content and see the violence that [it] perpetuates and that’s all we talk about,” he says.
Glorification of violence is also far from limited to drill music, says Pinkney. “I like watching gangster films, I like to watch Narcos and Breaking Bad.”
That is an argument drill artists make too. “Everything comes down to people’s choices and conscience,” says London musician Dimzy. “Me and you both ain’t gonna watch El Chapo and then start creating a cartel in the UK. There’s been drugs and violence before drill.”
London Metropolitan Police detective superintendent Mike West, whose commissioner Cressida Dick last year linked drill music to an uptick in gang violence, told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ that the research was an “interesting contribution to ongoing efforts to understand threats being generated online”.
The researchers are now working with the Metropolitan Police to better understand drill music. “This is a starting point towards follow-up studies where we examine whether drill music does facilitate conflict,” says McFarlane.
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