“Dispatches from the Rap Wars: My 18 Months inside One of Chicago’s Most Notorious Gangs”, 2016-09-19 (; backlinks):
…I knew CBE’s music—the gang is one of the best-known drill-rap outfits in the city—so I was interested in talking to Zebo. His brother offered to make an introduction. I met Zebo the next day, and we talked for hours. He told me how drill perpetuates gang wars, how it’s an engine of both truces and feuds. He told me how CBE members will retaliate violently if a song by another gang insults their friends or relatives. He kept returning to a refrain, one I would hear many times during my field research: ’This is not just music. It’s not just a game. This s—t is for real.”…They didn’t hit anyone, but a few days later, someone from CBE spotted the rapper who had recorded the song taking a selfie on the street and shot him in the back. (He lived.)
…One afternoon A.J. and I were in his apartment talking when he stood up and said, “I’m going to show you why I do this.” So he went on Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter and wrote, “I’m on FT for the next 20 minutes” and gave his phone number. FaceTime calls immediately started coming in from across the United States and Canada—male and female, ages 12 to 40, white, black, Hispanic—all like, “Oh my God, I love you. Your music is so great.” He got so many calls that his phone ended up crashing. These are not things your average kid growing up in the hood experiences. A.J. turned to me and said, “I do this when I’m feeling sh—tty or when I’m broke, or when I’m bored.” It reminds me of a great lyric in Kanye West’s “Saint Pablo”: “Checkin’ Instagram comments to crowdsource my self-esteem.” Every few calls, a woman A.J. thought was attractive would pop up on FaceTime, and he had a kind of pattern: He would compliment the young lady, ask to see more of her, then goad her to take off a piece of clothing. Women would wind up getting undressed for him.
The guys have a term for these kinds of fans: cloutheads. The more popular you are as a drill rapper, the more clout you accumulate. The more clout you have, the more cloutheads—easily exploitable groupies—you have. A.J. has a lot of cloutheads. And he won’t just ask them to take off their clothes; he’ll ask them for money, meals, new iPhones—almost always in exchange for the promise of sex. Since most of the guys in CBE are really bad at dealing drugs—they usually smoke up their own supply—the gang relies on the rappers to bring in cash this way. The whole exchange between rappers and cloutheads is a bizarre modern twist on sex work.
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. She and A.J. see each other regularly—with her sending an Uber to deliver him to her apartment each time. I remember a moment when A.J. started to feel her drift away because he had refused her demand that their relationship become monogamous. So he played his trump card. It was clear she had long had a slumming, voyeuristic desire to come down to the Lincoln Homes, so he invited her to visit during a repass—a celebratory wake—for a resident who had been shot. It was a total bash, everybody outside wearing T-shirts with “CBE” silk-screened across the front. A.J. gave her a tour, walking her around and pointing out things like “Here’s my niggas playing dice” and “You know, the opps might ride through here anytime and shoot up the block.”
…When I visited Junior the next day, he was in an incredibly jovial mood. He was like, “Man, Forrest, I’m on! I’ve got clout!” He was tracking his latest rap video on YouTube, and the daily views had tripled. Junior was so excited about having gotten shot and kept talking about how he was finally going to make it as a rapper. And he was right. That was essentially the moment when CBE accepted him in that role. Another member of the gang stepped up to be his shooter, and a bevy of women started following him around. Today, he’s a central figure in CBE.
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