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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is the takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry.

Mayor Eric Adams: I had no idea what drill rapping was, but I called my son, and he sent me some videos. It is alarming. We are going to pull together the social media companies and sit down with them, and state that you have a civic and corporate responsibility. We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence, we’re allowing it to stay on these sites, because look at the victims.

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Melissa: That was New York Mayor Eric Adams, who apparently got a lesson in pop culture earlier this month after two young New York hip hop artists were killed. Now, Adams is just learning about drill rap, but it's been around for more than 10 years and was first made popular by Chicago-based rappers like King Louie and Chief Keef in the early 2010s.

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Melissa: Now, artists and fans in the drill scene have criticized Mayor Adams for focusing his rage on a musical genre rather than the broader systemic issues that lead to gun violence. Adams met with members of New York City's rap scene earlier this week, including Brooklyn rapper Maino.

Maino: There’s been a lot of talk about drill rap, drill music, New York City, connecting violence with the culture, and I just wanted [unintelligible 00:01:52] conversation with the Mayor.

Melissa: It’s certainly not the first time public officials have singled out rap as a cultural boogeyman. This type of criticism was nearly its own sub-genre back in the early 1990s, as this NBC news clip from 1993 reminds us.

News anchor: As hardcore rap became big business, radio began to cater to an audience growing into the mainstream. Special versions were recorded for broadcast but retained many of the sexually explicit and violent lyrics that led to public calls for change.

Melissa: Joining me now in what still feels like 1993 is Michael Jeffries, dean of academic affairs and professor of American Studies at Wellesley College, and also author of Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop. Thanks so much for joining us again on The Takeaway, Michael.

Michael Jeffries: Thanks for having me.

Melissa: All right. Let's just start with the basics. How would you describe drill rap to someone who thinks they've never heard it?

Michael: Well, I think some of the content in drill rap has been around for a very long time. If you go back to some of the earliest examples of gangster rap in the 1990s, certainly, the themes and the material in the songs isn't that different. I think when people try to distinguish it from what was around, then they point to a couple of things. One is the combination of the music with social media and the ways that the songs that you hear on record are actually reflective of narratives and posts that we see on social media.

Secondly, some of the production style is a little bit different from what traditional gangsta rap was. Tools of production have changed in hip hop all over the place, and this is just another example. The beats are a little bit different, when you talk about beats per minute. The style of production, when it comes to the vocals, is a little bit different but fundamentally, the material and the kinds of topics that they're talking about can be very similar to things we've heard in rap for a long, long time.

Melissa: Of course, we know that beats per minute and social media are the underlying causes of gun violence.

Michael: [laughs] Yes, that's right. They’ve long been responsible for that.

Melissa: I'm laughing about it, because I feel like I have to laugh to not cry, but I feel like this moment really does feel reminiscent of a time I thought we had moved out of. This sense that somehow a single musical genre, rather than an entire sort of multi-century experimentation with Democratic self-governance that included most of the population being armed is somehow responsible for gun violence.

Michael: Yes. You have to ask yourself then, why is it such an effective or commonplace talking point for elected officials? What it tells us is that the calculus of voting and attracting media attention, and riling up moral panic to animate politics, that calculus is pretty much the same. It's the same, because we're still seeing the same patterns of violence directed against communities of color. We're still seeing the same patterns of residential segregation, and the same patterns of institutional segregation across more than just residents that kind of makes the interests of one group of residents seem to be at odds with interest of another group of residents.

We're seeing it play out at a local level in New York City. The other thing I'll say about this, why we're seeing it now is all the talk about the fact that the great crime decline in the United States, which had happened over a 30-year period, appears to be coming to an end in the past few years. Now, there's sort of an excuse to inject this rhetoric of moral panic back into more mainstream political discourse.

Melissa: I will say, I actually sort of take the mayor at his word that he is in fact having a moral panic. He was just elected-- all candidates are always running, but that he's not running imminently right now. I can imagine that he actually was sort of clutching his pearls in moral panic about seeing these videos and thinking, “Oh, here it is, this must be the reason.” I suppose, part of what took me aback, though, was his decision to put it in relationship to President Trump and to say, “We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing.”

That is not what happened. That was in fact not why President Trump's Twitter feed was suspended. I don't think drill rap is encouraging people to overthrow democratically elected representatives who are government.

Michael: No, it's very curious. As you said, first of all, he's just incorrect about what happened with Trump and Twitter. Let's put that to the side, if we could. Let's put that to the side. Then there's the question of whether or not this is new to him. The way he described it, he called his son, he didn't know what it was. That may all be true, but the man is a career law enforcement officer. That's very disappointing to me that somebody who works in the field would have such a poor understanding of the true causes of crime and violent crime in particular. This is not a mystery.

We have dozens, hundreds, thousands of well-credentialed academics and social scientists working in other places who can explain, and have explained, why it is that violent crime rises and falls. There's been a 30-year decline in violent crime, until about 2015, 2016. If rap were responsible for violent crime, then how could it be that we saw gangsta rap begin in around 1990, and crime went down? By that logic, we should have more drill rap, more gangster rap before he's really concerned about our crime rates. It makes absolutely no sense we need to get to a discussion of what the root causes of these social problems are.

Melissa: Let's take a quick break. We'll have more in just a moment.

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Melissa: Back with you on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been talking about recent attempts by New York City Mayor Eric Adams to characterize drill rap music videos as part of what's causing gun violence in New York City, and how this connects to other moments in history when politicians have tried to tie together crime and hip hop. Still with me is Michael Jefferies author of Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop.

Dean Jeffries, let's dig in on this just a bit more and talk about other key political moments when either elected officials or representatives within political parties found it valuable to take hip hop and call that the problem. I have to say, it felt like a very Bill Clinton Sister Souljah moment here.

Michael: Right, and the moment you're referring to is in 1992, Bill Clinton gave a speech criticizing Sister Souljah who was a hip-hop artist. Who made some comments about white folks’ history of racial violence and the kind of setup of racial politics in this country to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, actually, and sort of blamed her for essentially broadening the racial divide. Many folks on the other side of this issue said that this is a classic example of scapegoating rappers and Black women in particular, to disguise a whole host of other issues that are really responsible for poor race relations, or what we really should call racism and institutional racism in a country.

Then, of course, there was the controversy over Ice-T song Cop Killer. This was around the same time, 1982. Dan Quayle and others made a big deal about this. Two live crew was arrested for indecent exposure at a show in Florida in the early 1990s as well. Of course, the claim there was that they were promoting objectification of women and sexism. At various times, it's been politically expedient for politicians to call out rappers as responsible for the kind of disintegration of the society's morals. No time was is higher than the early 1990s.

Melissa: Now, I want to be clear that there are important reasons for community-based resistance to some musical genres or artists. I'm thinking here specifically of Mute R. Kelly. I don't want us to be sort of making a claim that the relative autonomy of art means that all things are go in the public sphere, but there is something different about the state making a claim about sort of a full set of musical styles and genres that are particularly associated with a racial and an age group, particularly young Black folks.

Michael: As we said they're making a causal argument. That's part of the problem. They're making a causal argument. “This side of rap causes violence.” “This type of rap causes sexism against women.” We know these are institutional problems. Gun violence is an institutional problem because of the gun industry. That's the institution that we're talking about here. Sexism and objectification of women is the institutional problem, because it's institutionalized not only in the workplace but in entertainment industry beyond hip hop. But instead of calling attention to those institutions, we get attention to Black cultural performances.

The sad thing is we know that Black folks and Black cultural institutions have been having these debates internally. There's been no shortage of resistance within Black communities to some of these objectionable themes and the objectionable content. It's just that when it gets elevated into the public sphere in this way and weaponized for political gain, it gets overlaid with a whole history of racist moral panic.

Melissa: I also wonder if there's particular value for Democrats and maybe even for Black elected officials, especially those who hold office not in majority-minority districts-- as we have come to call them-- to perform this distancing from Black youth culture that Republican office holders are more likely to be presumed to already be distant from that culture, to already be oppositional to it. But that perhaps there's value for Democrats, and again, particularly for Black Democrats to say, “Hey, I'm not that kind of Black person.” Does that read as potentially what might also be going on here?

Michael: Absolutely. I think that earlier in the conversation, we gave Mayor Adams the kind of benefit of innocence in saying he didn't really know about this genre. He was just sort of innocently and curiously trying to hold a serious discussion about it. The other way to look at it, the more cynical way to look at it is to say he can appeal to more conservative and perhaps racist voters in New York City who really do believe that the Black crime problem is a problem of Black people.

While at the same time appearing to have some genuine interest in care for the Black communities that he represents. When he calls together and sort of has a forum with some of these rappers, he appears to be displaying a level of care for Black communities, while also holding the line in being tough on crime, which was a central pillar of his campaign. I think there is a way where he stands to benefit politically from bridging those gaps and so not completely aligning himself with dangerous “Black youth culture”, while also appearing to reserve some concern for Black communities by virtue of his willingness to listen to the rappers.

Melissa: Do you find this at all surprising coming out of the Super Bowl where you had Dre and Snoop Dog as the halftime show?

Michael: That Super Bowl was an incredible thing, it really was. To Eminem kneeling like Colin Kaepernick, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog performing in front millions on television and nearly a hundred thousand in the stadium. Snoop and Dre at some points in their career were pariahs, not to mention Eminem. I think on the one hand, what we had was of generational distance between their stardom. Not only their stardom but the beginning of their career, when some of their material was far more objectionable, and their image hadn't been rehabilitated. Dre had the history of violence against women.

Snoop, before he was hanging out with Martha Stewart, he was doing all kinds of different things both in the street and on record, but people have forgotten much of that. Because memory is short, the new targets are some of these Chicago drill rappers, New York City rappers that Adams has targeted. That's part of the issue. \Not everyone is a hip hop historian, and we forget pretty quickly.

Melissa: It's also worth pointing out that Dre and Snoop are now rich people.

Michael: Oh, no question. No question. I think that part of their move away from the early things they were doing in their career is out of necessity. Because if you're a rapper, and you want to prolong your career, you move into other areas. You move from on the mic to in the studio. You take a production role. You move from music to film and movies. Not only Snoop is an example of this, but the aforementioned Ice-T, who wrote and performed the song Cop Killer, now plays a police officer on television. The folks who watch him a as a police officer on television probably have no idea about his music in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

There are other rappers like Ice Cube and LL Cool J who have taken similar paths. Again, these folks have evolved from where they were, when they first came into the game.

Melissa: Michael Jeffries is the dean of academic affairs and professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. He's also author of Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip Hop. Thanks so much for joining us again.

Michael: Thanks for having me.

Female Speaker 2: This is The Takeaway with Melissa Harris Perry from WNYC and PRX in collaboration with WGBH radio in Boston.

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