Forrest Stuart Interview

Thanks again for taking the time. I really appreciate it… I’m really excited to get to talk with you. This is one of my favorite books ever, so I really appreciate it… I figured we could start with why you decided to write this book about Chicago, and maybe situate some of the history in Chicago.

This book actually started as a project about policing… My first book was about policing. It was about the kinds of spillover and everyday ways that policing seeps down into the social fabric of a neighborhood in some pretty damaging ways. And I focused mostly on Los Angeles… In LA it’s like I was mostly focusing on broken windows style policing, with homeless folks and street vendors… public disorder type [of] policing. And so I wanted to see how a lot of those things transferred into a city where so much of the policing is more of this like jump out crew, gang suppression, that kind of stuff. I wanted to see how that stuff… permeated communities. A quick side note… a lot of my policing academic buddies are like, dude, we thought that you were like a police scholar and you’re writing a book about policing. But I think you can see one of the reasons why I’m writing the book is because this stuff is getting policed so heavily, and there’s so many misconceptions and myths that are circulating [about drill]. So I wanted to put a definitive, on the record, early on, of like, here’s what’s actually going on, so we can see just how misguided the police policies are.

I arrived in Chicago in 2012. Actually speaking of South Side Weekly [earlier], such a great forum, I started doing a lot of work with the Invisible Institute, right there next door. And one of the things that we were doing, I brought some undergrads with me, and I was working in the Youth / Police Project… eliciting stories from young people about their experiences with policing. I was sitting down and I was interviewing all these students from Hyde Park Academy, and they were giving me a lot of these really horrendous stories about the police. And one of the things that they were talking about was the ways that they had to act–or not act–while moving through public. And one of the crazy things that they would share with me was that sometimes they would pretend — like if it was like a lone guy walking down the street and he saw a police car, he would go up to young women to kind of pretend like he was in a romantic relationship. Or people would have their sisters walk with them down the street. There was something about the protective factors that young women could provide young men, because the officers thought, oh if somebody’s in a loving relationship, they’re not the kind of gang member that we’re after.

And so… you have all these kinds of creative strategies that young people were using to navigate around police. But then there was this other thing that was going on that the kids really wanted to talk about, even more so than policing. And where this was different from my previous work in LA, was that they were like, “no no no, you don’t understand how difficult this is. Not only do we have to navigate around police, where it’s like in front of the officer, I have to pretend like I’m not tough, I have to let my guard down, I have to pretend I’m vulnerable” … but they were like, “But at the same time we got cops looking at us, and depending on where we are, we’ve got… the dudes who control that block looking at us. And in their eyes, we don’t want to be seen as vulnerable, we don’t want to be seen as kids who won’t stand up for ourselves.” And so they started really getting into this crazy set of performances and contradictory sets of performances they would have to do, and one of the things that they did, and I loved this strategy, you know when you hear something super interesting and it just gets in your mind and you can’t let it go?

This was probably the genesis of the book… They started talking about how they would put their headphones in and not turn on their music. And what they would do, was essentially walk through neighborhoods, if they were in a neighborhood that they didn’t necessarily know anybody, and they would listen to hear what drill songs people were playing in their phones, on their stoops, and in their cars, and they would listen to try to see like who is the drill rapper? Who are they talking about? Who are they talking about being cliqued up with? … And by doing that, they would be able to tell in real time like who the rivals were, who the allies were, of the particular faction’s territory they were in. So they would know… “Do I increase my pace and walk out if somebody walks up to me and asks me where I’m from? Do I lie? Do I tell them the truth?” They were deriving all this amazing intelligence about the status of the gang feuds around them by listening to music, and it’s just like, it totally blew my mind. When I was hearing young people talk about this strategy, immediately a light bulb went off in my head… I immediately was like… no academic I know was talking about this, the media is not talking about this, there’s a way that there’s this… phenomenon that’s moving online and offline that really needs to be unearthed and revealed, that young people know really well, but nobody was talking to young people, so we just don’t have a good handle on it.

As I probed them more, and what became obvious, like, why they’re listening to music to figure out the gang affiliation of someone they’re passing by on the street… One of the things that they hipped me to is… gang colors are irrelevant nowadays. The old days of like, I don’t know, the Latin Kings wearing yellow, or like the BDs wearing red… the young people were like, “That is out the window. Everybody’s wearing black, everybody’s in a hoodie, everybody’s got dreadlocks. So instead of being able to look at what somebody’s wearing to see what gang they’re in, we have to resort to some other creative strategies. And that is listen out for the music that they’re listening to.” I mean… the move away from colors and the move to everyone is dressed the same, is very much tied to the kind of splintering and fracturing and balkanization of those major super gangs, right? That used to control large swaths of Chicago gangland and gangland really across the country and across the world. The splintering… because of these larger structural factors that are tied to the kind of emergence of this kind of new sonic way of identifying gang affiliation, but also kind of waging this online sonic gang warfare.

Yeah… that was great, thank you. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the theme of the digital disadvantage vs. digital divide, because I feel like that’s a very big theme in the book too, and something that I want to get across at the beginning.

As a sociologist, as an ethnographer… one of the things we do is, you spend a lot of time in a field site. You talk to a ton of people, you hang out, and then you kind of… you take a break, you go back up into like the academic sphere, and you try and figure out… is there a concept out there, is there a theory out there that helps me explain the stuff that I’m seeing on the ground? And what was I seeing on the ground? I was seeing like this amazing innovation and creativity on behalf of some of the most disadvantaged people… in America. Some of the most stigmatized people, some of the most demonized people, are online gathering massive amounts of followers, massive amounts of clicks and likes, and they’re parlaying that into… rewards, monetary, emotional, social rewards, and… I kind of went out into the academic literature and was looking around to try and figure out like, who’s talking about this? What’s the theory that can help me understand how these young men are doing this? And I couldn’t find any. But the one thing I kept finding… and I talked to colleagues and whatnot… and they would just say two words over and over: digital divide, digital divide, digital divide. And the digital divide is this notion–and a very accurate notion–it’s a kind of description of the fact that like, typically what we see is, in more privileged communities, we see faster internet, we see more internet technology accessible to young people. Which leads them to be far more like technologically literate, and allows them to do, in the case of the pandemic, online school a lot easier. Meanwhile there’s a divide between them and more disadvantaged communities, where we see spotty internet, where we see less tablets in school, where we see… sometimes the only internet access is the computers in the library, right? And we see… older… less powerful kinds of mobile technologies.

But there was something about that that didn’t quite work, right? Like what I was seeing was young people overcoming the supposed digital divide to do something else. And what I realized was that the digital divide didn’t work on two levels to think about drill. The first one is that, when we think about the digital divide, it’s about quantitative rates of access. And it’s also about consumption of media and technology, right? Like how fast am I able to download a homework assignment? I’m a consumer and it’s about my access. And so I realized we need a different kind of term, a different theory to be able to think smarter about what we’re seeing with drill. And so I thought maybe a good way of thinking about this is the digital disadvantage. So if the digital divide is about quantitative rates of access, I realized that the digital disadvantage is about qualitative kinds of meanings and uses of technology… So the digital divide is thinking about how people consume internet technology and media, but the digital disadvantage is more about the people producing it.

So I think about digital disadvantage as having three components. And it’s squarely about how your position in the social location, your class, your race, how many resources you have to bear, impact your technology use. So the first one is about, what are the meanings of your technology use? So like, what are you using YouTube for? You know, in the case of these young people, this is not a hobby. You know, this is not something they’re doing during their high school years and then once they get into college and discover… accounting and chemistry, or like poetry, like, they’re going to ditch whatever they were doing during high school… No, for these young people, that YouTube video means a ton. This is a way that I am going to feed myself, you know, for the next week. I spent time with young men who were homeless making drill music… This was like how they fed themselves. This is how they paid someone to let them crash on their couch, right? So that’s the first way that, you know, the meaning that this technology has in their life is different, depending on how much disadvantage you have in your life.

The second component is about the stakes of this stuff. So yeah, I mean I guess I just spoke a little bit to the stakes, but yeah, this is not something that I can necessarily shut off. For someone who’s in a more advantaged neighborhood… if they spout some insults at someone… it’s unlikely that this is ever going to turn into a conflict offline where someone could get shot. However, in neighborhoods where reputation and kind of having a persona for being tough, where those are like high stakes commodities, and that’s the currency, well, then an insult is gonna bring different kinds of stakes and consequences.

And then finally, the third part of digital disadvantage is about how we as a society view and interpret and act on people’s online behaviors has a ton to do with their structural location and their existing kinds of disadvantage, right? So we see young, middle and upper class white kids on the internet… all the time posing with AR-15’s and walking in public. I mean shit, like the stuff that Kyle Rittenhouse was doing before he shot anyone, or… there’s kids all over rural Michigan posing with guns and shotguns and these kinds of things. There are young people on the South Side of Chicago who are doing essentially the same exact thing, holding guns in the same way, all this kind of stuff. But for these young people, even if they’re not holding guns, even if they’re just talking about guns or if they’re waving their fingers in the shape of guns, they’re treated very differently than other people who… come from a more privileged race… or more privileged class background. So yeah, long story short, this digital disadvantage is just trying to get us to think differently about what differentiates the kinds of meaning, stakes, and reception of different young people’s uses of technology.

Definitely, thank you. The main thing that I think is really important to stress… is that the drivers of this are so structural, even though people like to blame the violence on the music itself. But in fact the music is really just a reaction to their reality and everything. So could you maybe speak a little bit to that?

Folks blame the music, and some folks target the music itself, as though if we could just erase that music… if we could just lock up everybody making that music, the problems that are associated with it would just go away. Which I think is just so naive and so pollyannaish. But it almost feels like intentional ignorance, because we have to remember that as you mentioned… what we’re hearing in the songs and what we’re seeing in music videos is just the manifestation of the ground level conditions that are intergenerational, that are reflective of not just like state neglect, but state injustices and state violence that have been perpetrated on the communities that this [music] is coming out of, right? And so I think it forces us to ask, why? Why would a 16 year old young person want to engage in this artistic endeavor that could land them in jail, that could… in a rare occasion land them dead… or at minimum cause some incredible difficulties in their life. Like what conditions have to be present such that someone would go to these lengths to risk their freedom and their life to make some songs. I think that’s really the question that we need to ask, and this is the question that I’m trying to answer in this book.

What we essentially have is a series of communities, across the South Side, but, obviously on the West Side, and we’re seeing it nationally and internationally, of young people who are looking out at the prospects that they have in their lives, and they’re realizing the deck has been so incredibly stacked against them, that suddenly making an art form that could get you killed or could get you locked up becomes the best option. This is quite a rational decision, right? So we have to remember… At the time when I was writing this book, I think the statistic is still true, it was something like only eight percent of CPS students, by the time they were like 25, would ever go on to get a B.A…. We see the kind of unemployment rates that for folks working in the formal economy, there’s not really a route there, right? So [higher] education… young people know, like that’s not gonna happen, right? “My schools are underfunded, teachers aren’t necessarily empowered to do what they need to do. There’s not the resources, certainly not resources in my community… I can go off and get a low wage labor service job, but I’m gonna drive for either Uber or for Doordash or I’m gonna work the counter at a liquor store. I certainly can’t make much ends meet on that.”

And then the problem was that like now thanks to… partly mass incarceration, also thanks to our opioid epidemic–which has been in large part pushed by the pharmaceutical industry–the former ways of doing this in the illegal economy have bottomed out. You know, crack is no longer king on the streets of urban America. Opioids reign now… synthetic drugs now have come in. And so the kind of old school era of like, you’ll get a pack of drugs and a corner and become a corner boy and work your way up through like the crack gang structure, like that’s not even there. And so, what it’s done is for young people, “I’m wondering, what am I gonna do now? I can’t do it through those old venues.” So what they’ve done is… They’ve seen how the kind of culture industries are changing, right? How young people are becoming influencers practically overnight. And then they’re looking at that, and they’re saying to themselves, wow, well… I don’t necessarily have like the resources to do half the stuff that young people are doing online, right? But what is at my disposal? It turns out the internet really, really loves stereotypical portrayals of the ghetto. And it turns out the internet really loves conflict, and it turns out the internet really loves… stereotypical caricature-ized images of urban Black America. And these young people quite explicitly, like they tell me these things all the time, they say like, “I’m gonna go on there, and I’m gonna give them exactly what they want… I’m going to give them that stereotype like hopped up on steroids… So those folks who aren’t from Chicago, who don’t know this life, who want to slum and see what it’s really like inside the ghetto, like I’m going to give them a hit of exactly what they want.” And so that’s essentially what we’ve got: desperate young people looking for any way to improve their situations. And they’re turning to drill and they’re turning to the associated practices.

Definitely. One thing I wanted to ask you about, to kind of contextualize… was to explain a little bit about like the possibilities that could happen in the lives of some people that you talked about in the book. So, could you like on the one hand maybe explain the rise of Keith Cozart/Chief Keef, but then also on the other hand, you start the book with Joseph Coleman/Lil Jojo, who was killed. And that I think really shows the stakes here, and yeah, I figured that would be a good thing to explain to the readers.

For sure. The story of drill I think starts, of course, a long time ago. You can’t actually tell the real story of drill without going into, like, the Great Migration and segregation and mass incarceration and those things. But the first time drill kind of gets onto the radar in a way that really makes people beyond Chicago (and even really in Chicago, as in like the Chicago police) take notice, is Keith Cozart/Chief Keef, a young man on the South Side, who, while he’s on house arrest, posts a series of music videos, kind of homemade music videos with… his buddies in his gang faction bouncing around shirtless in the kitchen and living room of his grandmother’s house. And through a number of the kind of hype machine dynamics that we see going on on the internet now, it kind of spirals out of control, and gathers him all kinds of views and followers. And in a pretty quick fashion, he is picked up by Interscope, and I believe he signed a $6 million record deal. And they essentially take him, and at the time some of his boys, like out of Chicago, out of the South Side, and fly them to LA. And he makes it, he becomes the first viral star in the drill world, and the first success story that becomes the model that everyone afterward tries to emulate. And they try and emulate his formula. It’s describing what the hood is like, talking about his opps (rivals), talking about what he does to them, talking about his shooters, talking about dealing drugs, talking about doing drugs. And so this becomes a pretty formulaic way that young people start to do this.

So, I think Chief Keef is probably the most financially successful drill artist. There have been people since, who I think have become richer than Chief Keef, but they’ve, in the process, kind of distanced themselves from drill. Other folks have landed… there’s a guy Montana of 300, he landed himself a small part on the show Empire. Other folks have landed record deals, but those are really the super duper rare instances… I want to draw an analogy, as dangerous as this analogy is, I think there’s an important analogy of like… There are a very minuscule percentage of young people who are ever going to become a professional basketball player, professional football player, professional soccer player. But just that small percentage doesn’t stop the millions of other young people coming from their same situations from trying their damnedest to be a professional athlete as well, right? I think we see something similar with this… People have often asked me, like these kids don’t really think they’re going to get big and famous and rich, do they? And I responded, like, they know the odds are stacked against them, but one, what else are they going to do? And two, like why not try? You know?

So those, those are the big ones. But like for the majority of people, I would say their continued quest for drill world stardom… I would say, on a day to day basis, are actually driven by something very different than the kinds of financial rewards that they saw Chief Keef get. Because I think on a day to day basis… participation in drill, whether you’re a driller, or you’re a videographer, or you’re a shooter and you’re standing in the background, like the daily rewards are pretty amazing, particularly for young people living in crushing poverty.

So monetarily, you know, there’s… one of the ways that you build your own popularity is linking up with someone who has a little bit more popularity than you do, right? You’re doing some music video with them, that like when somebody searches in Google for them, there’s a likelihood that it will pull up a video that both of you are in. And once they watch the video with both of you, they now know your name, and they’re gonna go looking for your videos. So doing collaborations with people who are slightly more popular, it’s a great way to grow your own popularity, but this comes at a cost. So you can charge people who have less popularity than you money, to do what’s called a feature with them… The young people I was shadowing for these few years charged anywhere from like $50 to like $600 a feature. And so… for a young person, unemployed 17 year old who doesn’t know how they’re going to pay for their next meal, a sudden hit of $700 does a lot for you… Sometimes I’ve seen folks do things for in kind compensation, sometimes like things as mundane as food, gift cards, cellphones, computers, cameras, you know, in some cases guns, drugs, right? Like getting a discount or getting free weed that you can then sell, or you can then smoke, like that matters on a day to day basis.

So there’s that kind of compensation. But one of the things I really want to draw people’s attention to in the book, which I actually think is the main driver for why people continue to do what is essentially a quite risky endeavor, are the emotional and social benefits that you get. I don’t think we can overstate this, that’s how important it is. So, for young people who have spent their lives demonized, I would argue demonized more than any other group in America, suddenly they are told–sometimes for the first time in their life–that they’re special, they’re worthy, that they’re doing something that is unique and worth paying attention to, right? These are young people that… They’re put up against a wall every day by cops who tell them that they’re menaces to society, that they shouldn’t have been born, that society is worse with them in it. But yet, once they start making real music, once they start getting on the internet, once they start putting out social media content, people start contacting them saying… “You inspire me, you’re amazing. Like, here’s some artwork that I did of you. I went on your Instagram and I grabbed some photos. I’m an artist… I just painted like an album cover… Can you use this for your next album? Can we talk on the phone? Let me send you some money.” … It’s just this, seeing the ways that young men finally feel like they’re human, that they’re seeing that they’re special, is something that I think we don’t often think about. And I think that’s something that like we forget about, particularly when we’re thinking about policies or policing around this stuff.

There’s a way that adults marginalize how important it is that folks get recognition and popularity… I’ve heard the police chief and the mayor and other folks throughout multiple administrations say… These guys are going on social media and flashing guns so that people will like their tweets… or people are going on talking trash about each other so that they could get popular. I think that’s like such a dismissive and ignorant statement to make. Like it’s true, it’s absolutely true that they’re doing this stuff to get popularity. But I think what they miss is why that popularity matters so much… I think when you have other things to rest your sense of self, or your sense of self worth on, like a job, like a degree from college, many family members who are supporting you in great ways, a pet, a house, an apartment, all these kind of trappings of success, like when you don’t have that, that popularity means a whole lot more to you.

And then I’ll transition to Joseph Coleman, but what’s so interesting about social media is that it’s almost like it incubates and it puts on steroids this phenomenon where people are looking for recognition of their self worth, because we literally quantified one’s self worth and degree of specialness and worthiness, right, by like, you can see how many views you have, you can see how many likes you have. I can see that like, oh, the last thing I did online, which wasn’t very violent, it had no guns in that music video, it only got like 30,000 views. But this one, I called out my opps, and I put a gun in the video, it got a million views. And so it’s very clear like, oh, people will respond to me better and more intensely–which is exactly what I want–if I do a certain set of practices which… in this case with drill is like the more violent you may get, the more aggressive you make it, the more people are gonna tune in. So I’d say that’s like the big reward.

But yeah, but the costs are extreme, which… speaks to just the incredible level of, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s not absurdity, it’s a tragedy… It just goes to show how tragic it is that we put these young people in this situation where one of the only ways they can be made to feel special is that they engage in these practices. And then we roll out things like policing and prosecution that use those practices as ways to investigate them, arrest them, get warrants for them, prosecute them, indict them, and sentence them at an even more aggressive and intense pace and level. So that’s one of the very steep costs that’s happening now. Like, any of the stuff that these young people put up online… whether it’s a fake gun, whether you’re bragging about killing someone that doesn’t actually even exist, whether you have fake lean in a cup, or you got fake drugs in a prescription bottle. All that stuff is taken hook line and sinker as if it were real by the criminal legal system. It is used to… lock young people up.

I am actually currently doing a project where I’ve been interviewing public defenders from around the country to ask them about how social media is coming into court and fueling the kind of mass incarceration machine that we have here in America… One of the cases that I’ve been following: there’s a young man who was convicted of possessing a single firearm. The police came up to him… they gave chase, they found a gun on him… At sentencing, there’s the federal sentencing guidelines for firearms. There’s an enhancement if you’re caught with three guns on you. Well, the prosecution found pictures of two different guns on his Instagram account, and were able to get him sentenced as though he had three guns on him, rather than a single gun that he was actually found with… So like, because this young man who was doing these practices that I just described in the hopes of gaining some attention, he’s now spending even longer behind bars because he had pictures of guns on his Instagram. It was never asked if the guns were real, it was never asked whether the guns were his. The content was just seen as evidence of his offline behavior, right?

That’s a massive cost and then, you know, the kind of Joseph Coleman story… Joseph Coleman, an aspiring drill rapper, calls out Chief Keef and Chief Keef’s gang. This is another way to build your popularity. If you can’t collaborate with a more popular driller, then you insult a more popular driller. And this is exactly the tactic that he tried… He talked enough trash, and gave up his exact location, and dared someone to come and shoot him… And a few hours later he was dead. I mean, that’s a far more rare example… It’s important to recognize that it is rare that there is a kind of retaliation that’s like that immediate, and that connected to a feud online. But nevertheless… I’m not naive enough or pollyannaish enough to say that like these things don’t stoke some fires that are already raging… These things can help propel feuds that might have simmered out if there were no social media, if folks weren’t participating in drill. It certainly creates these permanent records of the things that people say about each other that are hard to erase, that are hard to squash, even in a truce.

That’s the other difficult consequence… Even if people aren’t in, you know, mortal danger because of the things that they put online, it could certainly make them feel like they’re in mortal danger… It can make them, say, not want to go to school. It can make them not want to walk down the street. It can make them not want to go to work. I had a young man who I write about in my book, who kind of distanced himself from drill, distanced himself from his gang, and he started driving for Lyft. And one of the problems he ran into was that sometimes he would get a Lyft call that was in the gang territory of young men who he used to diss online, and he had to start declining those rides. And so over time, we know what happens if you’re a Lyft driver and you start declining rides… Lyft kicks you off… You’re not allowed to do that according to Lyft policies… This is a clear example of a way in which this young man was trying to find some formal employment in like the low wage service economy, and the things that he had posted like five years ago got in the way of it. And he ended up not being able to drive for Lyft anymore, and had to go look for work elsewhere… and for young men who are as precariously employed as many young people on the South Side… that’s a pretty big hit to your monthly income, to your chances of monetary financial survival.

Definitely. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but this has been a really awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. I guess for some final questions, I just wanted to ask what you thought would be the way forward. I mean, I really loved how you drew, at the end of the book, drew back to the New Deal and the funding of artists, and how we need to look at these young people as artists and value them. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I really appreciate that… I feel like sociologists offer such, I don’t want to throw my entire discipline under, but I’m trying to think of how to say this. We often do these studies, and we do a great job diagnosing the problem. But then like, you’ll often come to a conclusion of a book, and the policy recommendations are like wildly out of touch, out of sync with what you’ve just been reading the entire time. And so I’m actually proud of this suggestion that I have… I think it’s actually really in line with what I’m trying to do in this book, and what I have put my finger on, which is that these are young people who are like masterful, creative, innovative folks at getting eyeballs and ears directed toward them, right? Like these are phenomenal content creators in the online attention economy… These dudes are crushing it, and they’re crushing it with shoestring budgets, with out of date technology, making things up as they go along. It just strikes me that… Wouldn’t it be beneficial for us as a society, us as a federal government and state governments and as city governments to enlist these young people to use those exact skills to… do the things that we need? And following this model from the New Deal where… the Roosevelt Administration realized… We have these amazing creative folks, artists who are out of work, like let’s give them stipends, let’s give them an income, so that they can do beautification projects and oral history projects and art projects, and do so many of the kinds of community based things that we know that society needs to thrive. And so I thought, like, why don’t we enlist young people who are involved in the drill world in the same way?

And you know… As the book was coming out, the pandemic was hitting, and I thought that… What a great example this provides… At the beginning of the pandemic, one of the problems that public health departments were having was disseminating accurate systematic information about all kinds of things, from masks, to social distancing, to transmission of Covid, to where you could get a vaccine, to where you could get tested. Public health agencies were having a really hard time disseminating this period, but also in particular, disseminating this information in the exact neighborhoods where drill music proliferates and is so popular. And so I thought… What a missed opportunity, that these are young people who already command the eyes and ears of their neighbors, their communities, you know, this population, these neighborhoods that so desperately need accurate information disseminated. Why not link up with these young people, why not give them jobs? Why not highlight… their networks and their reach to actually do really meaningful messaging for public health departments? I think the list goes on and on and on for how we might… enlist them. You want young people, young, Black and Brown folks from disenfranchised neighborhoods to come out and vote… Well here’s a set of cultural producers who have direct access to their eyes and ears. And I feel like these young people could do us some real good if we treated them as artists and creatives and cultural producers first, and then as bright young people making content that happens to have, you know, violence and gang related imagery in it second, if not last.

Exactly. And with the caveat that like… That [the music] is… just the reaction to their reality and everything.

Absolutely. Just one quick last point… This speaks to some of the issues in the beginning. You want these people, you want these young men to stop making songs waving around guns and dissing their rivals, well then give them something different to make songs about. You know what I’m saying? Like it’s not, it’s not as though they have many other options. And so my thing is like, oh, you’re tired of this kind of music, you’re tired of this kind of art form. Well then… give them something else to rap about and compensate them for it. And I guarantee you they’re gonna stop rapping about that stuff, definitely.

I just wanted to ask you at the end, to plug anything new that you’re working on. I know you said you’re working on like a project involving prosecutors using rap lyrics and things like that. But was there anything else you wanted to mention?

Uh huh. You know, I’m doing a lot of work right now in the kind of like violence prevention, violence interruption sphere. And really thinking about how we need to wrap our arms around, you know, communities that are hurting, families that are hurting, victims, victims’ social networks that… I’m doing a bunch of work that essentially shows that if we really want to reduce gun violence, then we need to heal so many of the wounds that are intergenerational, but also, you know, acutely impacted by violence.

Definitely… really great work. So thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me. I really enjoyed this conversation…

Thank you. Thank you so much. My pleasure.