Into The Music
Drill music was born in Chicago’s South Side around 2011 and 2012, and the name came before the fame. “Drill” was already street slang in that neighborhood for the act of shooting. The music that took the name was harder and slower than the trap that preceded it, built around minor-key melodies, pounding 808s, and a lyrical mode that was less about aspiration than documentation.
Chief Keef was the center of it. He was 16 when he made “I Don’t Like” in 2012, a track that Kanye West remixed within months, pulling the sound into a mainstream conversation it wasn’t necessarily built for. Lil Reese, Lil Durk, G Herbo, and dozens of others followed, each with their own take on what the sound could do. The production largely came from Young Chop, whose spare, ominous beats defined the template.
What happened next is what always happens with regional sounds that blow up: the original geography loosened. UK drill emerged around 2016, taking the Chicago template and running it through a distinctly British experience, harder and faster in tempo, with a different street vernacular and a music press that paid close attention. Pop Smoke brought it to Brooklyn and reached levels of mainstream visibility that even the Chicago originators hadn’t achieved before his death in 2020. New York drill became its own thing, sonically distinct from both its predecessors.
The argument about authenticity has followed drill everywhere it went. Every new regional iteration faces the accusation of being derivative, and every iteration eventually produces artists who sound nothing like the original. That’s how genres work. Jazz did it. Rock did it. Drill is doing it now, which means it has survived long enough to have a history worth arguing about.
Chief Keef is still making records, as his new album Skeletor shows. Lil Durk headlines arenas. G Herbo makes albums that reflect a decade of distance from where it all started. The sound they built is now foundational to a large percentage of what plays on urban radio, even when nobody calls it drill anymore. That’s the best measure of a genre’s health: when it becomes invisible because it’s everywhere.
I find it most interesting as musicological phenomenon. In Russia we have similar situation , regional sound from one city becomes national genre through mechanisms of commerce and radio, not through organic spread of folk tradition. What the article calls “drill” reminds me of how certain Soviet-era regional styles were suddenly declared representative of something much larger than their origin. The South Side is very specific place. The worldwide adoption is very different thing. Both facts can be true and in tension.
The article’s framing of drill as a “sound that conquered the world” is worth slowing down on. What traveled wasn’t just a sonic template , it was an emotional vocabulary attached to very specific material conditions. When UK drill emerged, it didn’t simply copy Chicago; it processed those sounds through entirely different social geography. Same with Afro-drill in parts of East Africa. The question of what stays local and what translates is never just about the music itself.
Chicago to London to Lagos to right here in my neighborhood , that’s the story!! Drill is doing what reggaeton did, what salsa did before it. A sound born in one specific place that speaks something universal enough that everyone wants to grab it and make it theirs. That’s not appropriation, that’s music WORKING. The Chicago kids who started this should get their flowers though, for real.
The ‘conquered the world’ framing is doing a lot of work that deserves unpacking. Drill traveled fast but it also got laundered pretty quickly , by the time it hit mainstream streaming, a lot of the specificity that made early Chief Keef stuff feel genuinely transgressive had been sanded down for palatability. I’ve covered enough genre migrations to know that ‘conquering the world’ and ‘being understood by the world’ are two very different achievements.
Chicano rap and West Coast gangsta had their own version of this story , a sound born in specific communities, with specific grievances, that then got picked up, stripped of context, and sold back to us as entertainment. I’m not against drill being global but somebody should be asking who’s getting paid when London or Lagos builds a whole scene on a sound that originated in neighborhoods that still don’t have the resources they need.