Deep in the Rap Wars

October 1, 2016 11:34 AM

My 18 months inside one of Chicago's most notorious gangs (Forrest Stuart, for Chicago magazine)
posted by box (41 comments total)

Is it wrong of me that I expected this to be another article about the Chicago PD?
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:42 AM on October 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

I can't even imagine amount of stress that lifestyle would bring, but I guess youth and testosterone make you do some really dumb things. I wonder if a teenage boy in that neighborhood has a real choice about entering that life. How do you get around it? How do you get out of it once you're in?

(I'd heard of Chief Keef but I'd never heard his music. It's pretty unlistenable IMO.)
posted by AFABulous at 12:21 PM on October 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Also, the white people's fetishization of these kids was really creepy, though not surprising.
posted by AFABulous at 12:22 PM on October 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

GenjiandProust - I had the exact same thought.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:30 PM on October 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

When I first read this I was a little worried whether these kids could really be sufficiently anonymized but then I did some reading about different drill crews (as documented by fans online) and stuff like this

When CBE started rapping in 2012, Murderville made a song insulting a young man named Benzie, one of the first CBE members to get killed. (CBE would go on to rename their neighborhood Benzie Block, using the hashtag #BenzieBlock on social media.)

really could describe basically any of them :/
posted by atoxyl at 12:44 PM on October 1, 2016

There are plenty of youth who choose not to enter gangs, but pretty much everyone has contact with them. I as white soical worker have contact with gangs fairly regularly, and my job has nothing at all to do with young healthy people doing their thing. But entering and exciting low incone apartments on a regular basis means I've been identified, my purpose has been explained and n I've been labled as okay (and not a drug user, because I get asked if I'm there to buy all the time until I'm in somebody's home 3 or 4 times then they stop asking )

Either choice (being in a gang or not) had pros and cons. Also not being in a gang really doesn't protect you from the random violence, and sometimes its just proof that somebody is willing to kill somebody else.

This was insightful.
posted by AlexiaSky at 1:21 PM on October 1, 2016 [22 favorites]

It was some better writing and nice narrative although I am left wondering whether and how the subjects represented themselves acted differently than they would have in other contexts? Even Forrest realizes that his services (driving them around) were a real asset to them and we're seen that they often change their behaviors and appearances (to cloutheads, to Chad) to obtain what they need or want.
posted by fizzix at 2:47 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

It was some better writing and nice narrative although I am left wondering whether and how the subjects represented themselves acted differently than they would have in other contexts? Even Forrest realizes that his services (driving them around) were a real asset to them and we're seen that they often change their behaviors and appearances (to cloutheads, to Chad) to obtain what they need or want.

the author doesn't quite seem to get that he's a Chad too. but that's the cognitive disconnect you need to keep up if you wanna make it in the academia game.
posted by ennui.bz at 4:11 PM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I am pretty sure the author gets that.
posted by atoxyl at 4:28 PM on October 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

I agree that he gets that, but I definitely want to see the follow-up next month where one of the CBE guys analyzes the mores and customs of the underground network of tenure-track sociology professors who exchange car rides and other small favors for access to rappers and gang members.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:38 PM on October 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

We can discuss the faults of sociological field work - but this guy knows way way more about these kids then I'd ever glean from them.
posted by AlexiaSky at 4:42 PM on October 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

more like Sudhir Venkatesque
posted by The Gaffer at 5:00 PM on October 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Is it wrong of me that I expected this to be another article about the Chicago PD?

Oh I saw it in a waiting room and was like "I'm only interested in this if it's about the police union"
posted by listen, lady at 6:44 PM on October 1, 2016

I'm really uncomfortable with the cloutheads' behavior. It's not just a fetishization of poverty; the performative behavior it encourages is lethally dangerous .
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:01 PM on October 1, 2016

People still do PCP? I thought it was replaced by ketamine back in the 1980's.
posted by bukvich at 10:12 PM on October 1, 2016

Maybe he also changed the name of the drugs to anonymize?
posted by bukvich at 10:14 PM on October 1, 2016

I've only been asked if I'm buying Crack and herion as a white woman.

Seen lots of Crack, herion and weed users.

The PCP threw me off too.

My bet is sort of hallucinagin that is a bit gentler than PCP. Like lsd laced with an upper.
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:47 PM on October 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

(a) It's worth noting that when you google "cloutheads" you get very few mentions of the term not linked to the article. Raises a number of questions.

(b) To the degree it's a real phenomenon, I would expect that relatively few of the cloutheads are UChicago law students, as opposed to around-the-way girls. If that's true, they would generally not be the ones doing the exploiting in those relationships.
posted by praemunire at 10:50 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

PCP is still an abused drug. Honestly, just about anything that will get humans high will be abused, and teenagers are not known to be the most discriminatory selectors of drugs.

Regarding the author, I wouldn't describe him as a Chad, though I hope there was awareness that some of what he saw and was told may have been some of the same act put on for the law student's visit to maintain interest in them.
posted by Candleman at 10:59 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

"Clout" is a thing. I find very few references to cloutheads in writing but it could be specific to these dudes or something that otherwise doesn't make it into writing much.

I was also a little surprised to see PCP come up but I will note there are a number of PCP/Ketamine related drugs around on the grey market. It's not implausible that one of those has caught on as the new "smoking wet" in this circle and not impossible that someone in Chicago still makes or imports PCP.
posted by atoxyl at 11:30 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Living in CA I've heard occasionally that PCP is still popular in Los Angeles.
posted by atoxyl at 11:33 PM on October 1, 2016

A major PCP operation got busted not too far from my current neighborhood in NYC as recently as '09, so I'm gonna venture that it's very much still a thing.
posted by Itaxpica at 2:46 AM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

PCP derail aside, this article does not read to me as very 'true', or as comprehensive and well-researched, as Stuart would have the audience believe. I am not really buying it, just like I'm not really buying Venkatesh or A. Goffman's similar stuff.
posted by still bill at 2:59 AM on October 2, 2016

One of A.J.’s longtime cloutheads is a white law student in Hyde Park. She comes from a conservative family in Pennsylvania and fashioned her interracial, interclass relationship with A.J. as a symbol of her new leftward leaning.

This is really starting to read like right wing ragebait. Anyone care to scoobygang this author's credentials?
posted by CynicalKnight at 5:04 AM on October 2, 2016

I don't think it's that, CynicalKnight--Stuart, at least, is a relatively established sociologist and nothing in his vitae indicates anything right wing. I think it's just more of the 'outsider in a black community doing pop sociology' stuff that's caught a lot of attention recently.

But to me, this is really off anyway. I'm not at all unfamiliar with the field (in terms of method, theory, and topic), and it doesn't read true to me. Why is it 'as told to'? Who uses long, multi-sentence quotations preceded by "As one of the other CBE rappers would always say..."? What sort of ethnographer works in a mention of a participant's admiring observation of the ethnographer's "muscles"?

If this is really supposed to be legit sociological/criminological ethnography, I think it is pretty unreflexive and off-putting.
posted by still bill at 6:20 AM on October 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Here's a story from 2005 about a PCP manufacturing bust in Orange County, CA... I know about it because it happened about 100 yards from my house, I remember the helicopters. Apparently the guy gave up his license and then walked out of the apartment and got away, but they caught him later.
posted by Huck500 at 6:54 AM on October 2, 2016

If the stories in this article are true there is easily sufficient detail to de-anonymize almost all of these kids.
posted by srboisvert at 7:10 AM on October 2, 2016

I recently fell into researching drill and a lot of the stuff that comes up in this article because of a local Periscope broadcast of a Chicago drill rapper hanging out in my town. If you go down the rabbit hole I went down, I'd say much of this stuff rings true to me, especially the feedback loop of social media and the mushiness of how real the violence is per how much clout is gained by people watching *believing* it's real. I believe that social media has opened up pathways to the idea of "cloutheads" for sure. You see the evidence of it all over the place if you know where to look. It is totally true I think that the gangster kids want to make themselves larger than life in any way possible, and the pretty professional organization of their "media crews" seems very real to me. They see this as their ticket out, in any way possible, and the money made really does seem to be favored toward getting it thru the music versus getting it thru drug sales. They would rather get money the legit way, IMO, but are thwarted at every front. It's hustling, whatever way presents itself. But the ego thing is bigger than the gun. I can never quite decide how much of it is fronting.

Though any of these types of outsider-written articles bring out some heavy skepticism in me, I would say that from what I've been reading (twitter feeds, watching videos, and watching live broadcasts) the article is documenting real phenomena. Whether the author himself is actually hanging out in Lincoln Homes? I don't know. I mean, while it's dangerous to some degree, I'd say that these kids want to be famous any way possible. Whether it's a professor or a youtube video, or whatever --they'll grasp the straws that come their way. Unfortunately, it's all too often that they really are straws--and breakable. Once this guy gets his story and his book, just how much has he paid for their time? Fifteen dollars an hour? Meanwhile, he builds his career.

In other words, it's not unrealistic to me that kids of this sort would accept a professor into their midst. As a writer and journalist, I've sometimes been invited into spaces you wouldn't expect to see (white middle aged lady) me. But how much of it is them fronting to impress is always a question. To make a bigger story. But the writer seems to be aware of this, and is watching out for it.

Personally, I found the article fascinating.
posted by RedEmma at 11:52 AM on October 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

I agree with a lot of your comment RedEmma - as a broad strokes representation of this scene there's a lot that appears to be accurate. Also as I said upthread some of the details are less identifying than they sound.

There are some bits that did ping my bullshit detector though like - well for one thing how often does he have a quote from one of the guys to make exactly the point you knew he was going to want to make? You know, things just being a little too perfect. And some of the stuff about the relationship with the fans I'd believe easily if we were talking about Chief Keef four years ago but it seems like he's depicting a longstanding mid/upper-mid tier drill outfit and it's hard for me to to picture people at that level having phone-crashing levels of, well, clout. But it's not like I'm their real target demographic and I can't say I have a strong grasp on what it is to be a social media star.
posted by atoxyl at 12:14 PM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I mean, I think that it would be awfully easy for Forrest to make up quotes. However, in today's world, the chances are incredibly high that the guys he's writing about will read the article, and will have pretty strong opinions about everything he writes. It's not like in the old days where his article gets into an academic journal no one will know about, or that they won't have access to the magazine.

If he's spent "hundreds" of hours with just one of them, the chances of them saying things he's wanting to frame are pretty high. It's not hard to believe that they regret their lives, feel despair, and alternatively, feel glad to gain clout through getting shot and not dying (I've met kids like this, for sure), and openly play "cloutheads" for suckers. Basically, when you're writing an article like this, you collect a shitload of quotes (by recording or making notes) and then you cherry pick the ones that fill out the article as you put it together.

The operative grey area is rather, for me, the fact that hustler-kids like this are incredibly good at reading you, and figuring out what it is you're looking for, or hoping for. They're baby-conmen, right? And so I'm sure that a lot of the quotes he ends up with are said to him fully with the understanding that they are fulfilling the writer's desire for a big-Q Quote. But if you spend any amount of time with kids like that, the veneer slips quite often. They're not savvy like older adults are, in maintaining the front. So, if he's self-aware (which he appears to be), he can shelve the quotes that are too much intended for audience, and sift down to the ones that are real.

Or at least you hope he does. But then there's editors and marketing your article, and sensationalizing can get away from you. A sociologist has a different aim than a journalist and a Chicago magazine editor. That disconnect might very well be a problem.
posted by RedEmma at 12:29 PM on October 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

The Youtube stream of drill production will blow your mind. I mean, they are *so* sophisticated with their social media obsession, and they've learned their PR skills on the fly. It's very impressive to me. Every month you can watch a new sampling of what's come out.
posted by RedEmma at 12:37 PM on October 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

There's an interesting paradox here. The stuff that seems truest to me seems true because I can see it online, and it's not very specific to any particular crew. The stuff that would be uniquely available to him hanging out with these guys I am inherently more skeptical of because I can't see it online, and anyway if he's responsible he's probably intentionally obfuscated some of the specifics.
posted by atoxyl at 12:58 PM on October 2, 2016

The way I got into looking into this topic was because this low-level drill rapper showed up in my local small-city Periscope feed. He's just sitting in the passenger seat of a car, talking and smoking a blunt. I was curious about him, and so dug down into his twitter feed and his videos. Turned out he was what I would say is a wanna-be building his brand, but he's definitely involved in his gang as well. I mean, it seemed pretty likely to me that this guy might have been in town visiting his grandma, but was also part of a black-economy delivery. Icing on the legitimate cake is a basement show in one of his extended crew's temporary hangouts. Or maybe some college-Chad paying him to give his party some cred. I don't know. Listening to him high-rambling was interesting to me because he seemed so simultaneously vulnerable, obsessed with the viewers who show up to chat, and covered with a sociopathic/detached veneer all at the same time... more than anything else, it's about numbers. Views are everything. In the absence of currency-present, it's seen as currency-future.

The guy I dug into is *aspiring* to be included on the compilation videos like the one I linked above. He isn't all that well-respected, because he hasn't built "views"--and it's all about the likes and the views. But I've been watching his efforts to put his life together. And I see a gangster who doesn't want to be a gangster, because he knows it's a dead end. I see the created hype he and his friends feed back and forth to one another, and a constant creeping sense of desperation. Because if you don't make it as a rapper, they think, then you might as well be dead.
posted by RedEmma at 1:16 PM on October 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I've been following the drill stuff for several years now, as a more-than-casual listener. I am also an ethnographer, and have done a bit of work on gangs. The broad strokes don't raise many alarms for me--yes, lots of kids in Chicago are involved in gangs and the drill scene, yes the violence in the gang world flows in and out of the music, yes there is a high value placed on social media and digital marketing prowess, yes there are groupies, etc. What makes me skeptical are the details.

The "like one of the CBE rappers always says..." thing I mentioned above, and lots of other little bits in and about this oddly constructed piece (who exactly wrote this? why is it 'as told to'? why would anyone chose to present serious research, or even pop-soc research, in that way?) make me question the whole thing pretty hard. Even just the basics are pretty dicey to me--how is drill "low-fi"?? How is drill "NWA without the hooks"--how does a song like I Don't Like not have a hook?! It's like 80% hook!!

That, combined with the kind of typical pop-soc subtle self aggrandizing stuff makes me think this is one of those times when the ethnographer does in fact spend a good chunk of time in a place and with some people, but then pieces together selected juicy bits (some from observation, but I think also some from the kind of imagination some ethnographers have that sees what it wants to see and mistakes it for the whole picture, or a 'real' picture) to tell a captivating tale full of description but devoid of any meaningful theory, analysis, or history.
posted by still bill at 2:27 PM on October 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Lo-fi" here means "amateurishly produced with modern software" not "recorded to cassette tape." That seems entirely accurate. I agree with you about the hook thing though - these songs are mostly hook by the definition of "hook" rappers use.
posted by atoxyl at 2:49 PM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean the fi is low as fi goes now - much of it is clearly pretty DIY. Low just isn't as low as it used to be.
posted by atoxyl at 2:50 PM on October 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

if you wanna make it in the academia game

LOL. Playas gonna play, don't hate the playa hate the game.

This is really starting to read like right wing ragebait. Anyone care to scoobygang this author's credentials?

Incorrect, it is a factual observation about the girl's view of herself.

and fashioned her interracial, interclass relationship with A.J. as a symbol of her new leftward leaning.

posted by C.A.S. at 2:19 AM on October 3, 2016

I'm really uncomfortable with the cloutheads' behavior. It's not just a fetishization of poverty; the performative behavior it encourages is lethally dangerous .


'Cloutheads' aside, this raises a pretty key ethical point about this 'research': if the pursuit of fame is such a major driver of youth violence in Chicago, and if Stuart's subjects are seeking fame from Stuart, to what extent is his research implicated in the ongoing violence? I'm not sure how I feel about Stuart's culpability there, but I think it's worth considering.
posted by still bill at 7:20 AM on October 3, 2016

They aren't seeking fame from Stuart, they are clearly seeking fame from the internet and their neighborhood.

Fame from an academic publications doesn't exactly give street cred or impact violence. I'm sure the gang members avoided participation in violence while he's in their presence, so he's probably an inhibiting influence if anything.

He could compromise himself were he to put himself in the position of being a potential witness to acts of violence. They would be aware of this as well.
posted by C.A.S. at 8:03 AM on October 3, 2016

Chicago magazine isn't an academic publication. And I can attest that there are often plenty of people who do assume that there will be some fame that comes with being interviewed, etc. in the course of ethnographic research. It is a common enough thing that I have never experienced a round of fieldwork without it coming up.
posted by still bill at 12:07 PM on October 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Interesting stuff, RedEmma. An incredible amount of material in that Youtube link you posted!
posted by asok at 1:50 AM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]