The musical genre of rap has recently taken the throne as the most popular genre in the United States (Serjeant 2018). However, rap is also well-known as the most controversial genre in the American public sphere because of its often vulgar and gory lyricism. By rapping about friends and family who are incarcerated or have been murdered, many rappers are accused by outsiders of promoting violence and glorifying gang life. But can the philosophical concept of grief help us better understand why rappers include such lyrics in their songs?
I argue that Robert Solomon’s concept of grief allows us to have a clearer understanding of how these lyrics are actually an unconventional, unrecognized form of public grieving. In his book True to Our Feelings, Solomon contends that grief is not merely a self-enclosed activity; rather, grief is in fact an engagement with the world, similar to other emotions such as anger and fear (Solomon 2007: 77). I briefly elucidate Solomon’s view of grief as a social engagement with an example of President Trump’s situational public display of emotion, or lack thereof. I then argue that Solomon’s perspective of grief can especially speak to the lyricism of a specific subgenre of rap music that has been highly contentious for several years: Chicago drill rap. Further, his philosophical interpretation of grief can help us discern the reason why drill rappers specifically use the names of deceased friends so frequently in their lyrics.
When the musical genre of hip-hop/rap emerged in the late 1970s out of the Bronx, New York, much of the United States did not know how to react (Alridge and Stewart 2005: 190). The genre was not only groundbreaking in mixing bass and treble sounds in a new way; hip-hop/rap also changed the way music was able to convey the lived experiences of the artists. Earlier genres like jazz and the blues certainly allowed black Americans to sprinkle hints of their toilsome lived experiences into their music. However, hip-hop/rap provided a platform in which the music directly engaged the injustices that black Americans faced (and continue to face) on a daily basis.
One of the newer subgenres of rap is called Chicago drill rap. As its namesake indicates, this subgenre originates from the impoverished southside neighborhoods of the city of Chicago. The subgenre accrued national popularity (or more accurately, notoriety) with the rise of a sixteen-year-old drill rapper named Keith Cozart, more commonly known by his rap alias, Chief Keef. Chicago drill rap’s novelty was that its rappers, including Chief Keef, were all native Chicagoans who experienced the hardships of severe marginalization because of the race and class disparity that splits the north and south sides of Chicago. As a result, Chief Keef and his peers could make a distinct claim of authenticity to living a life “of the streets,” meaning that they were raised by the gangs that pervade southside Chicago. This claim of authenticity about living in “the struggle” is central to the subgenre’s identity as a whole, and it’s apparent in the music’s nihilistic lyricism. For instance, prominent drill rapper King Louie released a song entitled “Live and Die in Chicago” in which he raps at one point: “They say you can make it anywhere, if you make it in Chicago. / So, don’t take offense when I speak about murders and bitches, etcetera. / I’m just speakin’ Chicago…” Evidently, King Louie, like all drill rappers, identifies himself with the ideals of being a gritty gang-member from the toughest neighborhoods of the Windy City.
On its face, this sort of lyricism seems to glorify misogyny and homicide. I will concede that in some ways, it certainly does. But I argue that there’s greater complexity to drill rappers’ motives than mere self-aggrandizement and claims to authentic hardship. Their lyrics are also meant to fulfill a much more meaningful motive: to grieve the losses of their friends.
Most, if not all, Chicago drill rappers experience significant loss in their lives, as is typical of any gang member in southside Chicago. The southside is riddled with turf wars, drug sales, and widespread destitution. Accordingly, the chances of being injured, killed, or incarcerated are extremely high for black American residents. When gang members are killed, American gangs have historically grieved their fellow members’ deaths with memorials such as graffitied walls and renamed street corners. However, with the advent of social media and its ability to help disseminate new kinds of music, drill rappers appear to have turned to using their songs’ lyrics as a means of grieving and memorializing the deaths of fellow gang members.
For example, drill rappers affiliated with the 600 subset of the Black Disciples gang in Chicago (e.g. Lil Durk, Rondonumbanine, 600 Breezy, Edai, etc.) will often repeat phrases such as “R.I.P. L’A” and “Steve Drive” throughout their songs as if it’s a mantra. With the first phrase, the 600-affiliated drill rappers refer to deceased fellow drill rapper and 600 gang member, Leonard Anderson, who went by the street/rap alias of “L’A Capone.” The second phrase, “Steve Drive,” refers to a deceased fellow gang member known as Lil Steve. “Steve Drive” is now the nickname of the 600 gang’s street corner in southside Chicago. These sorts of phrases are used casually throughout the songs, regardless of the song’s topic. To outsiders, this casual use of a deceased friend’s name is downright unusual and indiscernible, and it certainly doesn’t register as a form of grief.
Solomon’s breakdown of grief can help us better comprehend the reason behind these lyrics.
Grief is an inescapable emotion that all of us experience at some point in our lives, and from Solomon’s lens, grief is an essential component of the good life, despite how painful it can be. Yet Solomon delves even further beyond these points and makes three claims about grief that are particularly applicable for this analysis. First, he argues that grief is most meaningful when the experience is shared with other humans. Grief is commonly framed as an emotion that isolates the griever from the rest of his/her surroundings. However, Solomon notes that cultures outside of America encourage the social ritual of grief, and although American culture doesn’t necessarily encourage grief, there’s outrage when someone doesn’t display signs of grief after a significant loss. An illuminating example to consider is how the American population responded to President Trump’s lack of emotion displayed when Heather Heyer was killed during the infamous 2017 Charlottesville protest. Ignoring the politics of the situation, almost everyone found it disturbing that President Trump showed zero external signs of grief after an American citizen was murdered while exercising her First Amendment right to protest. It’s this sort of “Why aren’t you upset at this?!” moment that pushes Solomon to believe that his assertion of grief being a social action holds true.
Second, Solomon also asserts that love is the necessary precondition that must exist before one can experience grief. So, if one grieves the death of a person, then the griever must’ve had a loving connection with the deceased. When the loved one dies, the process of grief is therefore a method for “keeping the love alive” with the dead person who is now absent from the griever’s world (Solomon 2007: 74). Solomon draws this idea from the fact that, for all of us, the grief process entails the impossible desire to bring the deceased back to life. From this desire to keep the love alive, Solomon presents an adjacent third claim: grief is an engagement with the world that stems from a desire to honor and remember the deceased. Since we can’t bring our loved ones back to life, we work to maintain the existence of their names and memories through acts of commemoration. It’s a second life of sorts. To affirm his theory, Solomon points to the innumerable amount of buildings, roads, and other physical sites that we name for people after they die. For this reason, Solomon concludes that grief can be viewed as a positive emotion, since it helps build communities and foster a sense of importance for recognizing the impacts of people’s lives.
In reexamining the lyrics of Chicago drill rap songs, Solomon’s concept of grief is quite revealing. Outsiders who hear the lyrics that reference a rapper’s friend being murdered will question why a person would ever publicize such a difficult loss. For many listeners, it feels wholly inappropriate. Solomon, on the contrary, helps us understand that these lyrics serve as a comfortable form of public grief for the artists. When the aforementioned living drill rappers cite the brutal murders of comrades such as L’A Capone and Lil Steve, their intention is to pay homage to people who were like brothers to them. In addition, the rappers attempt to create art that will keep the love and memory of their friends alive both personally as well as in the public sphere. Since rap is their chosen medium for artistically expressing themselves, the rappers fulfill Solomon’s concept of grieving via social ritual and social action through their music. More specifically, the drill rappers ritualize the perpetual utterance of the phrases that dually grieve and commemorate the loss of their friends. Solomon would likely argue that these utterances are strategic for creating social solidarity in addition to generating comfort from the idea that the deceased will not be forgotten.
One might object, however, that my application of Solomon’s concept of grief to drill rap doesn’t totally fit. This is because Solomon lists outcomes of grief that appear to align with the outcomes of Chicago drill rap. In the section where Solomon dissects grief, he concludes the section with a description of the positive outcomes that grief can produce. He offers that grief can yield the following three positive outcomes: cause for reflection, social solidarity, and urgency of life. Although I would argue that drill rappers probably do experience these outcomes, one might object that drill rappers have frequently sought revenge for the killing of their friends whom they cite in their songs. By using grief as a motivation to murder opposing gang members, the objector could argue that grief is no longer playing a central role to the good life as Solomon had intended.
This is undoubtedly a challenging objection. My reply is that drill rappers do in fact experience the reflection, social solidarity, and urgency of life that Solomon describes, but these experiences take an unfamiliar form. I argue that when we are analyzing if a theory of grief fits a real-world situation, then we must only evaluate the emotion of grief itself, not the aftermath that occurs away from the social action of grief.
In using Solomon’s theory of grief to explain Chicago drill rap, my goal is to make a genre of music and its artists more understandable, since drill rap is commonly seen as absurd by the general American population.
Chicago drill rap songs:
Works Cited
Alridge, Derrick, and James Stewart 2005. “Introduction: Hip Hop in History: Past, Present, and Future.” The Journal of African American History 90(3): 190–195.
Serjeant, Jill 2018. “Hip Hop and R&B Surpass Rock as Biggest U.S. Music Genre.” Reuters, January 4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-music-2017-idUSKBN1ET258.
Solomon, Robert C. 2007. True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. Pbk. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shared by: Kyle Adams
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