Black folks often set trends the rest of the world follows. Drill, the Chicago-curated rap subgenre known for hard beats and violent storylines that blur the line between entertainment and reality, is often branded as dangerous while spreading and influencing music around the world.
And as much as mainstream media maligns Black women who often create social and cultural movements, along with music and fashion, it practices erasure when it fails to credit them.
South Shore-raised scholar and rap artist Jabari Evans is here to “school” the masses with his book, Drill Rap, Sex Work, and the Digital Underground: (Clout)Chasing on Chicago’s Southside.
The book describes how Drill artists, whom Evans calls “Drillers,” along with a network of women, including sex workers, utilize social media to influence the culture.
Evans, who goes by “Naledge,” is an assistant professor in the Journalism and Mass Communications department at the University of South Carolina. He’s one-half of the rap duo, Kidz in the Hall, with Double-O, whom he met as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania.
Evans, who was once named by Vibe magazine as one of the greatest rappers under thirty, is a part of a generation of artists who made waves in the early 2010s during the Blog Era, when artists controlled how and when their music was released to the masses, not industry gatekeepers. Local Blog Era success stories includes rappers The Cool Kids, Mic Terror, Million Dollar Mano, Hollywood Holt, Kid Sister, and Gary, Indiana’s Freddie Gibbs, among others.
“I realized, in dealing with these scenes outside of the studio, where these guys were hanging out, where they were promoting their records. Even how they were sort of going about doing things on social media,” Evans said. “A lot of times it was women that were around them. They were conduits to getting their music heard.”
Jabari Evans sat down with the Weekly to discuss his research, how he became aware of Drill, what the sex workers he interviewed taught him, the negative stereotypes of Drill created by mainstream media, and his own culpability in male-dominated rap spaces, among other topics from his book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why a book about Drill, sex work, and online infamy?
The project happened in three different parts. The first part was being in grad school, working in and around CPS even before I entered grad school. Before I entered grad school, I was working for the Becoming a Man program at Bogan [Computer Technical High School], and in the process of doing that, I was running a studio with two of my homies on 75th and Stewart. So I’m spending my time between Bogan and the studio, and during that period of time, it was just very hard to ignore what was going on in the rap scene in Chicago, and that’s Drill. So trying to do hip-hop-based education through my nonprofit [organization], your entry point had to be different. Like hip-hop for me, the entry point for my generation is just much different from that generation that I was dealing with. I was writing a dissertation about the program that I was helping with.
I became really fascinated with Drill, and I became really fascinated with what students were doing outside of the building, and kind of coupling that with what I was seeing in the studio and the artists that were coming to the studio. The movement that was happening—and not only that, but just how it was being driven by social media, and so I took on a secondary interest and Drill’s sort of rise to prominence. Studying the ways in which these young people were using social media to forge their careers in ways that I thought were unprecedented. I took an internship at Microsoft based on that project, talking to them about what I just mentioned—this idea that tools that you intended for one type of user are being innovated by another type of user. And I wrote a couple of articles about it and presented at some conferences. And ultimately, a lot of the feedback that I got from those papers were that I didn’t talk anything about the women.
Drill as a subgenre is very masculine. It’s very male-driven. So I was like: I don’t know necessarily that there’s a space if I’m going to talk about just the artists—to necessarily talk about women. But then I realized, in dealing with these scenes outside of the studio—like where these guys were hanging out, where they were promoting their records, even how they were sort of going about doing things on social media—a lot of times it was women that were around them. They were conduits to getting their music heard. And specifically, I noticed that the influencer industry more generally is a woman-dominated industry. And so I noticed that a lot of the artists that I was talking to, they would use their songs, and give them to certain women influencers to sort of boost their own clout. And then with the advent of OnlyFans, specifically during COVID-19, I became real interested. At first, I was going to pursue doing fieldwork in the strip club, because I noticed that’s where a lot of these guys were going to get their music played.
I remember when I heard of you and heard your music, and you were from South Shore like me. What was it like being a part of the Blog Era but also being adjacent to Drill at the same time?
First off, there’s always been a dichotomy between the music, right? There was always—and I think you’ve written about this beautifully—there’s always been a hardcore hip-hop underground backpacker, whatever you want to call it scene—and that’s even evolved. They don’t call it backpack no more. But it’s a more conscious, social justice-oriented, almost poetic type of rap that has a scene, right? And then there’s also this more street scene or party scene, and that’s its own thing as well. There’s overlap between the two.
But I feel like during my era, you kind of had to pick a side. You had to pick the side that was most authentic to you. You could like one side and listen and be around, but you had to pick a side if you were going to be an artist. And, you know, I came from that era, but with people like Andrew Barber [Fake Shore Drive] and Alex Fruchter [Closed Sessions] and Ruby Hornet,the culture was moving in a digital way. The Blog Era was influential because it tore down barriers and allowed folks who were from different areas of the city to see what other people were doing—and not just see what other people were doing, but really become fans of what they were doing. Those sites and those bloggers were conduits.
Oh ok. You’re sounding like an athlete that moves into the analyst space. Even then, they had to look at things differently.
We understood that we had to have constant presence on the Internet and constant presence on the blogs, and constant content needed to be churned out to gain the attention that we wanted to get. But our understanding of it was very archaic. It was like: let’s give away all this free content so that we could go do a show and get paid for the show. We weren’t getting paid on time from the actual music labels. Labels always were terrible with payouts, but we had an understanding that if we give out all this free content we can go on the road—and that was our goal. This newer generation has a keen understanding that: hey, you don’t even necessarily have to go on the road to monetize your content, right? There’s a lot of intricate aspects to YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, that allow you to get paid for content. And so one of the most important things I took from the conversation I literally had yesterday with [a friend] was like: we’re no longer in the music business. We’re in the audience business. And so if your audience can be sold to advertisers, that’s all that matters. I think G Herbo has a song where he’s saying, like, “I get $10,000 off YouTube. I get $5,000 off something”; he’s basically breaking down his monthly earnings. And he’s saying: “That’s my play money. The internet allows me to have play money.” And I think that’s indicative of some of the things that I discovered doing this project, and how it differs from my era. I came along where we were transitioning from the Blog Era to the streaming era. The streaming era gives structure to what we were trying to do.
Explain the importance of including the voices of different demographics in your research. You mentioned earlier than your initial research, you got some critiques about there weren’t enough women. And obviously, in the book you’ve got the expertise from women, whether it was academics or sex workers.
I went and talked to a lot of the women scholars that I knew who were already doing that type of work. These are people who I respected, and I felt like I didn’t want to be mansplaining. This is what I was doing, especially with the initial way that the study was gonna move where I’m in the strip club studying women, right? And there’s a power dynamic with that … being a male researcher in a predominantly women-driven space, and trying to interpret what they’re giving to you or not, or just interpret the things that they’re saying to you. And so, yeah, I took that critique to heart, and I made sure that I talked to a lot of people before I even started that phase of the project—my wife included. It’s so fascinating when you’re not in the scene, but you’re there. You’re not there for the purposes of recreation, but you’re there as an observer. It becomes a whole different thing when you start noticing things that you never noticed before.
As I was reading the book, it reminded me of watching the HBO TV series, Rap Sh!tand basically the representation of it. [The main characters] took that narrative, but also at the same time they were victims of stereotypes and all these different things they dealt with over time.
It’s wild you mentioned that show, because I wrote an op-ed about that show when it first came out—and that was one of the things that I noticed immediately, which is how central social media was to the visual of the show. Social media and storytelling [are] within scripts on television all the time. [But] Issa Rae made it to where you could see who they were texting, what they were texting, what they were tweeting, what they were posting, integrated that into the visual aesthetic of the show. And then you see how the sausage is made. One girl who could rap and she’s kind of conscious, and she’s fighting her kind of want to create a certain type of music. But then her homegirl, who’s more hood and is already doing sex work, and is doing hair, doing all these different side hustles. What’s authentic to her is a ratchetness, for lack of better terminology: “Girl, we got to use these n—-s…” It’s a dramatization of how the City Girls were started. But if we think about it, the City Girls are an archetype for which a lot of women rappers have built their careers. And I think that it’s an interesting thing to look at, as much as we talk about women running the game of hip-hop right now. That much is true, but I think we’ve learned how to frame this sort of female empowerment around their sexual content.
During my time as a bouncer, I noticed that when Black women would be out, they’d be viewed a certain way as opposed to white women. When a white woman was dressed really nicely, that would be it. But when it was a Black woman some folks assumed that she was “working”—I guess you might understand what I mean by that. What it was like to see that play out with your data and the research you’ve done?
A lot of the women that I talked to just mentioned that the erotic capital of the Black woman is, one on the one hand, in demand, but it’s also undervalued. There’s assumptions that Black women are more animalistic, more sexually available, more hedonistic, less human. And so that’s why there’s this division. Even when I talk to the girls where they’re like, oh, it’s like, if you work in a Black club, there’s a stigma on that. Not that you can’t get money in the Black club, but it’s like if you work in a Black club, you kind of getting it out of the mud, so to speak. You work in a Black club, you’re gonna have to work longer hours. You might be expected to do more for less. Your beauty or your worth is in your shapeliness, and that shapeliness is also perceived as disposable—versus if you’re able, as a Black girl, to work in a white club, there’s a thought that maybe you have taken, like you’re a little bit more educated, You have the ability to talk to white men in a way that they can perceive you to be their fantasy or whatever. But that’s perceived as a skill, but it’s also perceived as a hierarchy, and that looks a lot different in the digital space and OnlyFans.
And to your point, I found that Blackness in both spaces was seen as like a cheap thrill. So it becomes devalued, the human aspect of who these women are, becomes like, in the way. It’s like: Girl, just turn around.
There may have been moments, especially for me, having been in the hip-hop music industry where I was complicit in some of that. So it’s like, especially when you’re talking about hiring [music] video girls, a scenario in the culture where there’s a lot of stereotypes that I grew up watching before I got in the game—and then you as an artist, also wanting to sort of be one of the guys, and then feel like that’s what you supposed to be doing. But in reality, we’ve seen in recent years that a lot of that was wrong and erroneous.
I saw a couple local media outlets discussing Lil Durk’s arrest, and then mentioning how this person had gotten shot during a robbery outside of his show—basically tying the two together. What are your thoughts when you see stuff like that?
It’s very reductive. I think it’s just easy to make hip-hop a target. It’s a very simplistic way…It’s a shortcut. I think it’s not doing due diligence to reduce anything that’s Black, male and violent to being hip-hop…I think that happens a lot for journalists that aren’t of the culture. I’ve done a lot of work recently with criminal cases, and I think I find it like those in law enforcement and those who work on the side of the judicial system. A lot of times they don’t have an understanding of the culture. So because they don’t have an understanding, it’s like, “Well, what’s the shortcut I can reach for?” And so they reach for these shortcuts because they’re easy; they’re low-hanging fruit.
Drill Rap, Sex Work, and the Digital Underground: (Clout)Chasing on Chicago’s Southside. Jabari M. Evans. 162 pages. Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, 2024. $105. Hardback.
Evan F. Moore is an award-winning writer, author, and DePaul University journalism adjunct instructor. Evan is a third-generation South Shore homeowner.