Violent music vs violence and music: Drill rap and violent crime in London

The current policy of removing drill music videos from social media platforms such as YouTube remains controversial because it risks conflating the co-occurrence of drill rap and violence with a causal chain of the two. Empirically, we revisit the question of whether there is evidence to support the conjecture that drill music and gang violence are linked. We provide new empirical insights suggesting that: i) drill music lyrics have not become more negative over time if anything they have become more positive; ii) individual drill artists have similar sentiment trajectories to other artists in the drill genre, and iii) there is no meaningful relationship between drill music and real-life violence when compared to three kinds of police-recorded violent crime data in London. We suggest ideas for new work that can help build a much-needed evidence base around the problem.

Examining UK drill music through sentiment trajectory analysis

This paper presents how techniques from natural language processing can be used to examine the sentiment trajectories of gang-related drill music in the United Kingdom (UK). This work is important because key public figures are loosely making controversial linkages between drill music and recent escalations in youth violence in London. Thus, this paper examines the dynamic use of sentiment in gang-related drill music lyrics. The findings suggest two distinct sentiment use patterns and statistical analyses revealed that lyrics with a markedly positive tone attract more views and engagement on YouTube than negative ones. Our work provides the first empirical insights into the language use of London drill music, and it can, therefore, be used in future studies and by policymakers to help understand the alleged drill-gang nexus.