Eric Adams meets with drill rap artists after dissing the genre
Mayor Eric Adams revealed Wednesday he will be “rolling out something” about the notorious drill music days after he called on social media companies to remove the violence-glorifying genre from their platforms.
During an unrelated press conference, Adams also said he had a “great conversation” Tuesday with a group of drill artists in which he clarified his comments to them.
“I don’t know if you saw the picture, but for the first time in my life, I looked cool, hanging out with all of them – and it was very interesting,” Adams said in City Hall.
“Because, I don’t know who said it, but they said, ‘We heard you said you were going to ban drill rapping.’ I did not say that. I was very clear in what I stated.
“And they came in with a lot of energy — of, you know, here’s a 62-year-old guy that [doesn’t] understand young people and you want to destroy. And I let them talk and then I told them what I said: That violent people who are using drill rapping to post who they killed and then to antagonize the people who they are going to kill is what the problem is,” the mayor added. “And they heard me, and we’re going to be rolling out something in the next few days to deal with this issue. It was a great conversation and I was happy to have them there.”
A video posted on Instagram Tuesday night by a Brooklyn rapper Maino shows the mayor in a City Hall office with a group of rappers, including Fivio Foreign, B-Lovee, CEO Slow, Bucksy Luciano and Bleezy, all of whom were tagged in the post.
“There’s been a lot of talk about drill rap, drill music in New York City, connecting violence with the culture, and I just wanted to create a conversation with the mayor,” Maino, whose legal name is Jermaine Coleman, said.
Adams then said “we’re going to roll out something together” alongside the group of hip-hop artists, the 42-second clip shows.
The meeting was prompted by Adams last week calling on social media companies to take down drill content, in the wake of the murder of rapper Jayquan McKenley — an 18-year-old who performed under the stage name Chii Wvttz and was shot dead last week outside a recording studio in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
“I had no idea what drill rapping was. My son sent me videos. It was alarming,” Adams said on Friday at City Hall. Adams’ son, Jordan Coleman, works at Jay-Z’s Roc-Nation, according to his Instagram bio.
In response, Adams declared he wants to meet with social media companies and tell them to take drill rap videos off their platforms, calling it their “civic and corporate responsibility” to do so. The mayor argued it would be irresponsible to continue to give violent rap music videos a platform after Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from the platform.
“We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music [with] displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites,” he said after an unrelated press conference. “We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country.”
His plea comes as shootings have risen in the Big Apple so far in 2022.
There were 100 shootings in January, a jump from the year prior when 76 were logged, according to NYPD data.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said last week that “a number of shootings” in the borough were “directly tied” to the music genre.
“We’ve had a number of shootings in Brooklyn recently that are directly related to drill rap,” he said on Fox 5. “[The rappers appear] on Facebook Live and Instagram Live, and they’re taunting their rivals in the rival gangs’ territory, saying, ‘We’re here. Come get us. If we see you, we’re going to shoot you.’”
Drill is a gritty, nihilistic style of trap music that originated in the early 2010s. Drill videos and songs often feature guns, cash, drug use and threats to rivals.
Brooklyn-born rapper Bobby Shmurda — a 27-year-old who was released from prison last year after serving seven years for conspiracy and weapons possession — is among the pioneers of the genre.
As Soren Baker, author of “The History of Gangster Rap,” previously explained to The Post, “Drill is basically gangster rap driven by social media beefs and social media tactics.
“It’s real-time reactions to music and violence. Artists have gotten killed because they say, ‘I have beef with this person and this is where I am.’”
