Feeling Sad About Rap Again

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The last few months I've been in the throes of reading and watching information about the murder-for-hire trial of rapper Lil Durk. It's a complete circus that seems to have it all from an entertainment standpoint: snitching gang members, rap lyrics and interviews with streamers used as evidence, Machiavellian defense attorneys, an audience of fanboys and stan armies drawing attention to themselves to the point where people think they might be paid actors and so, so many people treating actual human lives and deaths as fodder for the content machine. One of the worst offenders, a British white man named Trap Lore Ross, is a doofy acolyte of the DJ Akademiks school of cataloguing the violent sensationalism of gang activities and volatile rappers under the guise of “investigative journalism.” He has decided that the Durk trial is his star-making turn, like he’s the Woodward and Bernstein of gang rap. https://youtu.be/FNFL53i0WB0?si=Fg0QyiRCMkVvyfsf

Read it at Defector ↗

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