num_pages: 288
description: How poor urban youth in Chicago use social media to profit from portrayals of gang violence and the questions this raises about poverty opportunities and public voyeurismAmid increasing hardship and limited employment options poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube Twitter and Instagram theyre capitalizing on the publics fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys a group of thirty or so young men on Chicagos South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of drill music (slang for shooting music). Drillers disseminate this competitive genre of hyperviolent hyperlocal DIY-style gangsta rap digitally hoping to amass millions of clicks views and followersand a ticket out of poverty. But in this perverse system of benefits where online popularity can convert into offline rewards the risks can be too great.Drawing on extensive fieldwork and countless interviews compiled from daily close interactions with the Corner Boys as well as time spent with their families friends music producers and followers Forrest Stuart looks at the lives and motivations of these young men. Stuart examines why drillers choose to embrace rather than distance themselves from negative stereotypes using the web to assert their supposed superior criminality over rival gangs. While these virtual displays of ghetto authenticitythe saturation of social media with images of guns drugs and urban warfarecan lead to online notoriety and actual resources including cash housing guns sex and for a select few upward mobility drillers frequently end up behind bars seriously injured or dead.Raising questions about online celebrity public voyeurism and the commodification of the ghetto Ballad of the Bullet offers a singular look at what happens when the digital economy and urban poverty collide.
language: English
title: Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy
publisher: Princeton University Press