Over the past year-and-a-half, drill music has gone from constituting approximately none of my music-listening to constituting the majority of my music-listening.

Drill music seems out of character with my outward interests and my internal self (at least based on traditional ideas concerning who listens to drill music). Resultantly, I have often found myself asking, Why do I listen to drill?

Why do I listen to drill?

I used to think it was to vicariously live the hedonistic lifestyle. (Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is both a great way to vicariously live the hedonistic lifestyle and a great book.)

I know that I do enjoy vicariously living hedonistically (I think this is largely because I would never enjoy actually living hedonistically – I am too risk-averse when it comes to my personal safety; although I am happy to risk many things, my personal safety is not one of them). My enjoyment of Future’s music is almost entirely explained by my interest in vicarious hedonism (notably, this interest arose before my interest in drill music and before the event(s) to which I attribute my interest in drill). I think my enjoyment of Lana Del Rey’s music (previously documented in this post) is similarly atrributable to my interest in vicarious hedonism, although I also attribute it to an ironic admiration of her “commitment to the bit” of Americana-based nostalgia.

Drill, on the other hand, is much more depressed. It doesn’t glorify a lavish lifestyle or even (as Future sometimes does) lament the general malaise that accompanies a too-lavish lifestyle. Instead, it mourns dead friends, while both embracing and fearing – but mostly just accepting – the inevitability of more pain and more death. This is not a lifestyle that a person would be expected to seek out, even vicariously. So if I don’t listen to drill for the vicarious hedonism, why do I listen to it?

I used to fear that I listened to drill music in a “slummin’” sort of way: I wanted to somehow align my backstory with a harder lifestyle than the one I’ve experienced. But some of the things I’ve experienced are, objectively, tough. I also understand the extent of my blessings – which, to be clear, is quite large. Because of my self-awareness of my privileges, and because of the undeniable toughness of some things that I have experienced, I often reject this explanation, but it lurks.

Today, as I listened to Polo G in-depth for the first time, I arrived at what may be my most conclusive answer. First, and most shallowly, I listen to learn about a lifestyle I don’t know, but that people I know do (or did) know. I was largely aware of this before tonight.

Tonight, though, I realized that I also listen to it for validation: to see that other people have felt what I’ve felt and feel what I feel. That way, I know I’m not just being soft. They show me that my feelings are valid (even if others’ are perhaps more valid), that I’m not weak (even if some are stronger), that I’m not making excuses (perhaps sometimes I am, but certainly not always), that I have gone through some stuff (even though there’s plenty I’ve been wildly blessed to not go through).

They show me that my feelings are valid (even if others’ are perhaps more valid), that I’m not weak (even if some are stronger), that I’m not making excuses (perhaps sometimes I am, but certainly not always), that I have gone through some stuff (even though there’s plenty I’ve been wildly blessed to not go through).

For “whatever” reason (“whatever” is in quotes because the reasoning is more known to me than I care to reveal at this moment), the line “Five years later, thousand tears later, still feel like the day when they hit ‘em” in Polo G’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” hit me especially hard. It made me feel some type of way, and I briefly questioned why I put myself through that feeling (I often get hit by something when I’m listening to drill). Moments later, I figured it out: To realize a hard guy cried that much, and that he’s still feeling it years later, and that he’s become a rap star in the meanwhile, gives me both hope and validation.

The most comparable feeling of validation that I experienced is when, in an article about teammates’ reactions to the death of Tyler Skaggs or José Fernández, someone mentioned the pain of seeing this guy in the clubhouse one day and never seeing him again the next. Again, these are hard guys: after all, they endured minor league baseball.[1] But this still (understandably) hit them. The idea of an athlete dying young (see this poem) is, in some ways, uniquely tragic: your most recent and most vivid memory of this person is of them performing now-painfully alive feats. Reconciling the idea of someone jumping higher than anyone else or running faster than anyone else with the idea that this person can no longer do that or anything else is, quite honestly, impossible.

Anyway, I’ve got work to do, but these thoughts were good to put into writing. Maybe I’ll come back and revise them at a later date. I’m sure I’ll come back to them in a later post.

[1] Note: I now realize that it may be have been this article about the death of Aaron Lowe, who was killed less than a year after the death of Ty Jordan, his college and high school teammate. I’ve apparently read several articles about the deaths of teammates.