I Will Disrespect You

By Adrian Nathan West

Philadelphia’s drill rap scene has experienced an outbreak of violence at a scale unimaginable to previous generations. In Baffler no. 80, Adrian Nathan West sets out to understand why.

ON AUGUST 22, 2024, YouTuber Brandon Buckingham, whose gimmick is traveling to dangerous neighborhoods and posing alongside their residents holding guns, posted a video, “The Most Hated Rapper in Philadelphia: Life as Mr. Disrespectful,” about a young man named Abdul Vicks, more popularly known as YBC Dul. In it, Dul and his friends show off their weapons and the abandoned house where they used to sell drugs. At one point, he takes Buckingham for a ride near the block of his “opps,” or enemies, in a “striker,” or stolen car; they hear gunshots. Ominously, Dul boasts of being “feet on land,” or out in the street. “I never got robbed,” he says, “I never got touched, I never got shot at in the city yet.”

The next day, Reddit user BigMoneySw posted “RIP DUL” on r/PhillyWiki, the subreddit for Philadelphia street culture. Users reacted in disbelief, but as is common with murders in the city, social media had the story well before the news. Reports would soon confirm that Dul and his manager, Baby 35st, had been stopped behind a bus on Olney Avenue when a white SUV pulled up beside them and fired several times into their vehicle, striking Dul in the chest and hand. After stopping at his nearby home, Baby 35st drove Dul to the local Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The killing wasn’t a surprise. Dul’s gang, the Young Bag Chasers, had been warring with a slew of rivals. Tied to dozens of shootings, YBC had taken so many losses that their foes had begun taunting them as the Young Bullet Catchers. In Philadelphia’s drill rap scene—where songs ridicule the dead, describe slayings in explicit detail, and dare opps to try and seek revenge—Dul’s affronts were one of a kind: he threatened to slap the grieving mother of one of YBC’s victims, crowed about YBC shooting an opp’s six-year-old sister, and filmed himself digging up the grave of a murdered fifteen-year-old, laughing maniacally about how the teenager still didn’t have a tombstone. After Zyir Stafford, a.k.a. Booga, was shot and killed while leaving his job at McDonald’s, Dul dropped the video “McButtons and McNuggets,” which shows him placing an order at the fast-food restaurant before dragging a body from a car, tossing it in a pit in the ground, and slowly sprinkling out a box of french fries, as if pouring out libations for the dead.

“The killing wasn’t a surprise. Dul’s gang, the Young Bag Chasers, had been warring with a slew of rivals.”

To understand Dul and today’s Philly drill, you have to understand the Chicago drill of the early 2010s, and to understand Chicago drill requires a revision of received wisdom about gangs and their motivations. In the popular imagination, gangs are organized, hierarchical criminal enterprises, a source of profit and protection, guarded by secrecy and nearly impossible to escape. This notion is a blend of half-fictions gleaned from rap music and crime movies and fails to register the long-standing decline of the corporate gangs of the crack era, which used murder and extortion to establish monopolies on drug distribution. In reality, even organized crime is disorganized; gangs tend to be overlapping, permeable, small, and short-lived. As crack use has declined, drug markets have moved toward an independent-operator model, often facilitated by the anonymity of the internet; street dealing, for all but the most successful, has become a dangerous and unprofitable enterprise. This is not to say modern gangs don’t do it, but it rarely provides sufficient motivation for group cohesion.

The typical gang is a group of boys aged fourteen to twenty-three who met through school or have family ties and identify with a tightly circumscribed area, sometimes as small as a single block or corner, anchored by a takeout Chinese restaurant or a corner shop of the kind Philadelphians call a papi store. Many still live at home, with single parents or grandparents; most smoke weed and drink lean, and, at least in Philly, they pop percs. They have guns, often shared, that they like to hold up in photos, along with real or fake money, fanned out or in thick stacks. They have a penchant for three-letter monikers—CTS for Courtois TrapStars in Saint Louis, FBG for Fly Boy Gang in Chicago—and these often precede members’ nicknames: CTS Luh Wick, FBG Duck. They tend to have disciplinary problems and have often cycled through correctional facilities, Department of Health and Human Services programs, or alternative schools for disruptive youth.

They want what seemingly everyone wants: to get rich and famous on social media.

Continue reading “I Will Disrespect You,” an essay by Adrian Nathan West, on our site.

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