In this op-ed, writer Saheim Patrick argues that criticism of the violence of Atlanta drill music, and particularly the music of teenage rapper Baby Kia, goes against the ethos of Hip-Hop and limits the unfiltered expression of marginalized artists.
Content warning: this story includes graphic and violent lyrics.
Baby Kia forces his right to be heard through some discolored and half-broken Bluetooth speaker whose EQ almost romantically favors the low-end, somewhere in the corner of some classroom of some way too laid-back teacher, at some predominantly Black high school tucked away in some urban-suburban anomaly of Georgia.
His shrill and belligerent yell can be heard rolling, reverberating, and tumbling within nearly every pocket of the greater metro Atlanta area, a sound that rejects compliance and tradition, a rasp more akin to that of Linda Sharrock’s catharsis on the title track of the 1969 avant-garde jazz record Black Woman than any of the popular records that have come out of the Atlanta rap scene in recent years.
Atlanta drill rapper Baby Kia, colloquially referred to as BK, gives a brazen “f*ck you” to musical and cultural norms with his rash provocateur sound. His deliberately loud, aggressive, and ignorant chants have captured the attention of members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, not only in metro-Atlanta, but widely online.
BK's Apple Music bio characterizes his music as “apocalyptic" and “dystopian,” defining him as “the sound of unfiltered aggression.” Perhaps the most oft-repeated descriptor of his sound is Crash Out Music, a subgenre named after the “slang verb usually meaning to commit an act which will result in a long prison sentence or even death," per Urban Dictionary.
“Fully automatic rocket launcher rippin' through his house / I come through, f*ck up movie night, sticky bomb blow up his couch,” Baby Kia raps on his 2023 record “Bk Back.” The teen's top three most streamed songs on Spotify, “OD CRASHIN,” “GET JIGGY,” and “LET'S PLAY A GAME” — which have over 49 million combined streams at the time of writing — include graphic lyrics that illustrate extreme brutality, including murder, dismemberment, slashing, torture, bombing, decapitation, and gun violence.
With this widespread attention has also come backlash — Baby Kia's music has been labeled, sometimes in jest, as “demonic,” “villainous,” and “evil.” From a wider lens, drill, the kind of music BK makes, this genre of the almost absurdly provocative, has even been called “genocidal" by its critics, who claim the genre exploits violence rather than chronicling it.
This panic and backlash, however, is blown out of proportion. BK and his colleagues’ outlandishly twisted and violent lyrics and the aggressive scream that they are filtered through immediately recalled, to me, the art of well-respected agitators of music past. Artists like Slipknot, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Stooges, and various other frequenters in the punk-rock and metal traditions come to mind, not to mention the entire subgenre of horrorcore rap.
Because, though this music isn’t “punk-rock” in terms of its musical form, it is in the sense that it is abrasive music meant to challenge norms and embrace freedom of expression.
When understood through this framework, BK’s style becomes part of a rich lineage of dissident art — a reaction to mainstream and societal pressures to be acceptable or tamed, a depiction of the violence he and his community are surrounded by. BK's April 2024 record “LIFE LESSON” could almost be categorized as conscious rap, a singular departure track that lends an inside look to the true horrors he has witnessed in his young life.
On the other hand, I believe that we should welcome the panic and backlash, its existence an echo and reminder of Hip-Hop’s heartbeat. While Hip-Hop should not, and is not, necessarily or inherently a medium to “scare” those foreign to the subject matter, the genre and culture operates best, and originated as, a medium opposed to mainstream interests and tastes, created and appreciated by otherwise misunderstood and subjugated peoples.
It operates best when I hear my young Black male peers at my high school in metro Atlanta congregating over its abrasive and unapologetic nature — music denigrated online as a contribution to genocide. It operates best when no one gets it but us.
How quickly we seem to have forgotten that the creation of the Parental Advisory warning sticker was motivated by one artist's abrasive musical expression, belonging to a discography that is now praised as one of the best to ever grace our ears.
That is not to say that Baby Kia is Prince reincarnate or Gen Z's Hip-Hop savant, but that our culture cannot hope of creating another Prince without the conditions and support in place that allow artists like BK, others in the burgeoning Atlanta drill scene, and those inhabiting any area in which Black cultural expression takes shape the freedom to express themselves.
It is the contradiction between commercial and community interests and tastes that created the culture we claim to love. Who embraced NWA? Who embraced Tupac? Who embraced Hip-Hop as a legitimate musical form? Certainly, it was not the mainstream masses looking for something “safe” to listen to.
Baby Kia and other young drill rappers are not a deterrent to our culture — they are artists of survival, as legitimate as the great artists who have preceded them in their tradition, who too faced outrage by hostile audiences, confusion on the ways they chose to express themselves, and were embraced by those on the fringes of the world who committed to understanding them.
To write Baby Kia off is a synecdoche for something darker, and not to mention an ignorance of music history.
Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, writer of the 2016 Academy Award-winning film Moonlight, writes beautifully the stories of those whose stories aren’t often told. The first two plays of his Brother/Sister trilogy In the Red and Brown Water and The Brothers Size, respectively, tell the story of a Black teenage girl living in the projects and of two Black brothers from the projects. McCraney writes in the voice of subjugated peoples, with Hip-Hop frequently featuring as an ever-present motif in his work.
In a 2017 speech given at UC Berkeley, McCraney proclaimed: “Plays, nor art, of any kind, actually saves lives. It is in the discourse caused by the collective imagining of beauty and horrors supreme that shifts lives into action… Theatre should scare the sh*t out of me.” I beg that we make a similar observation, and plea, of Hip-Hop.
