Deeping It

Chapter 1: Drill as Crime

'Crime is a distinctly European concept that was institutionalized into the criminal justice system through the penal code, created in the 1700s by founding theorists of criminology's classical school of thought. In practice, crime is a concept that limits what can be defined as harmful and violent [.] Europe's crime-concept depends upon institutionalized constructions of dangerousness for colonized people and nations, and lack thereof, for colonizing people and nations.'

Viviane Saleh-Hanna, Colonialism, Crime and Social Control32

Neither of my parents are huge TV- or film-heads but out of the two of them, you're most likely to find my dad with the remote in his hand. Like many people of his generation who came of age when Kung fu movies, crime flicks and Blaxploitation were at their peak, my dad loved (and still loves) stories about crime and conflict, real or imagined. So naturally, the sound emanating from the TV growing up was often the creepy scores of CBS true crime documentaries about killer couples, murderous teenagers, jilted lovers, and the like. Then there were the UK-based docuseries featuring coppers wrangling dangerous drivers with no insurance, shoplifters, and the drunk and disorderly. Not to mention Crimewatch, the most intense national game of 'Where's Wally', with just a grainy CCTV image and nightmarish facial composites to go off, as well as the countless fictional shows, films, and books, about detectives, lawlessness, and criminality. It's not just my dad who loves to get his Columbo on though - crime-obsessed viewers are increasing, with action and true crime consistently amongst the highest grossing and most popular genres across Europe and the Americas.33 No other topic has the same kind of narrative longevity: three films is probably as far as you can take a rom-com franchise but we've been accosted with ten Fast and Furious films, countless iterations of James Bond, John Wick and Jason Bourne and there never seems to be enough #truecrime for a mystery-insatiable audience. Popular media tells us that crime, whether monstrous or mundane, is a fact of everyday life, a spectacle on a spectrum from hilarious to downright terrifying.

Long before we're able to binge the latest true crime sensation on Netflix though, what we grow up consuming encourages us to align with crime-fighting and to shun anything associated with criminality. Some of the most popular TV shows for kids, past and present, are deeply carceral, centred on the 'otherness' of criminals who stand in direct opposition and threat to the characters who we love, root for and (should) identify with. From Paw Patrol to Scooby Doo, Rastamouse to Noddy, Spider-Man to The Famous Five, the eponymous crime fighters and their gang are on hand to show us what 'good' looks like. The bad guys are hauled away to some place out of sight and out of mind, or they are continuously chastened by the good guys who return triumphant episode after episode, book after book, film after film, vindicated by the victory of justice being served. The overall message from it all is simple: crime exists. Crime is bad. Criminals are worse (except when they are white, beautiful, and/or fictionalised).

These ideas are anchored through sociocultural norms, or what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus - the social embodied in the individual, which 'implies a "sense of one's place" but also a "sense of the other's place"'.34 There is a sociocultural disposition to delimit criminality, who it is associated with and perpetuated by, because this process allows us to orient ourselves away from the deviant criminal, placing ourselves in the category of the law-abiding, the credible, the good. You only know where you stand when you establish where another person cannot. This cements the epistemic justification that crime, which is only committed by criminals, is the antithesis of the law, order, and justice triad that keeps us safe. True crime docs and kids shows filled with copaganda don't originate this idea; they are only reflections and instruments of our social reality. This reality has been crafted over centuries of imperialism, chattel slavery, conquest and authoritarian dynamics where Blackness is associated with deviance and treated with suspicion. When I mention Blackness here, I'm thinking about scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva's description of Blackness as 'a mode of existence that spreads beyond the juridical borders of any given state and the ethical borders of every nation'.35 All over the world, Black people necessarily fall outside of ethical life; in other words, they are situated outside 'the broader moral community'36 and are the targets of state-sanctioned violence. This violence can be fast, public, and spectacular, such as the instances of police brutality that sparked Black Lives Matter protests worldwide; but it can also be slow, obscured and prosaic like the disproportionate effects of climate change on racialised minorities.37

Just like the concept of crime itself, this institutional state-sanctioned violence, in whatever form it takes, cannot be disentangled from its colonial roots and offshoots. This is a difficult point to prove in the face of our national proclivity for placing colonialism and its realities firmly in a time long-since passed - it's a hill I'm willing to die on though. Globally, but in Britain especially, we use a grammar of legacy to speak about colonialism as a space and time-bound phenomenon that only existed throughout the lifespan of the British Empire. Defining colonialism in this way gives the comforting illusion of progress. However, when we start to think about imperialism and colonialism as 'structure[s] and not event[s]',38 we can deep how colonial technologies have not been scrapped, but just updated for twenty-first century use. We can acknowledge and name the institutional violence enacted on individual or collective deviance from gendered, racialised and colonial norms. With this in mind, we can see that the criminalisation of UK drill is not an exception to the rule of law; it is the rule. UK drill, as the most undeniably antagonistic and irreverent Black music style to break into the British and global mainstream, is deviancy par excellence, a threat to the usual business of whiteness to be snuffed out by the long arm of the law.

Tracing crime through its etymological roots, the academic field of criminology, and theories about affect, music and respectability, this chapter deconstructs the drill-as-crime trope that has been used to target the genre and its artists, highlighting the role that racism and colonialism plays in it all. This will allow us to deep how criminality is produced and placed onto drill rather than the other way round. To criminalise drill, you must simplify it completely - strip it of any aesthetic, expressive or artistic properties, any context or value. Keep stripping it down and you are only left with the brittle bare bones of the concept of crime itself, which break easily after a little prodding and poking. Stay with me - we're about to go deep.

Defining Crime

I'm a historical linguist at heart, so my go-to way of analysing any kind of concept or idea is to look at its etymology. The word 'crime' has been a part of the English language since the mid-thirteenth century. It comes from the Old French crimne, a derivative of the Latin root cerno, which is a verb meaning 'I separate, distinguish by the senses, mostly by the eyes, i.e., I perceive, see, discern; I decide upon; I decree; I perceive comprehend, understand'.39 That definition sounds eerily like the verb that frames this book, which, if you didn't know is a Multicultural London English anthimeria - an adjective-as-verb conversion that turned deep into a thing you do as well as what something is. Though the verb 'to deep' doesn't have the same genealogy as 'crime', the fact that crime was originally defined as personal judgement and has now been expanded to encompass the institution of judgement shows how quickly the subjective and personal can become objective and epistemic. This moment of linguistic serendipity shows how concepts link in ways that we don't always expect.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, 'crime' had two main, co-existing definitions. The first is crime in the way that it is used today: an offence punishable by law. The second is crime as sinfulness and spiritual transgression: a Christian assessment of deviance. In Wycliffe's Bible, the first full translation of the Bible into English published in 1382, the Middle English version of the word appears several times, usually with the latter connotation.40 As time went on and the judiciary developed, 'crime' as something that is against the law of the land, became an English language staple. By the mid-eighteenth century, key Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham and Cesare de Beccaria became interested in the study of this concept that had become so embedded in the consciousness of society. They were specifically interested in the social philosophy of criminal law, creating the classical school of thought on crime.41 It was Italian phrenologist Cesare Lombroso,...