In early October, a video of two high-school students and a teacher dancing to a rap song began making the viral rounds. The clip, which runs just nineteen seconds, shows a middle-aged white man and two teen-age Black boys, facing a camera in a classroom. The boys are dressed in blue hoodies and black sweatpants. The middle-aged guy’s look is teacher casual: he is wearing baggy jeans and a shirt and tie, with several pens in his shirt pocket. He has a close-cropped beard, a ponytail, and is carrying a few extra pounds.
The video opens with the teacher and students mugging and pantomiming conversation over a singsong sample from a children’s record. Then, nine seconds in, the beat drops, and the trio erupts into a dance routine: leaning back, bouncing on bent knees, swaying from left to right. The main feature of the dance is a clumsy bit of hand jive. While a bass line thumps and a rapper barks lyrics (“Notti, Notti Boppin’, punchin’ my hips / Come here, gotta do it like this”), the dancers ball their fists and repeatedly deliver punches to their own midsections.
It’s a goofy spectacle, like many “dance challenge” videos. The humor lies in the contrast between the students—who execute the dance moves, such as they are, with ease and glee—and the teacher, with his fashion-backward apparel and enthusiastic but tenuous relationship to the beat. Over the past couple of months, videos set to the same musical excerpt—from “Notti Bop,” by the Brooklyn rappers Kyle Richh, Jenn Carter, and TaTa—have exploded on TikTok, with untold numbers of young people (and, occasionally, roped-in adults) grooving and punching to the song’s blaring soundtrack.
There’s nothing novel in this; these days, pop hits routinely inspire rafts of TikTok videos, and many videos feature custom dance steps. But “Notti Bop” is different in a crucial respect: the song, and its accompanying dance, lampoon the murder of a child.
On the afternoon of July 9th, Ethan Reyes, fourteen, was fatally stabbed at the 137th Street–City College subway station, in Manhattan. The incident began with a brawl on the street that spilled onto the uptown 1-train platform, where Reyes suffered a knife wound to his abdomen. He was pronounced dead after being rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside hospital. The following day, police arrested Reyes’s alleged assailant, Kelvin Martinez, fifteen, filing a second-degree-murder charge that prosecutors downgraded to first-degree manslaughter when they learned that Reyes and a friend had cornered Martinez and beaten him with a broomstick. In October, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed that it had dropped all charges in the case, stating that prosecutors could not disprove that Martinez had acted in self-defense.
Reyes was better known as Notti Osama, the name he used while building a reputation as a rapper. He was a rising star of drill, a brooding and aggressive strain of hip-hop that chronicles, and occasionally promotes, street violence. Like much New York drill, Notti’s songs—often recorded with his older brother, the rapper DD Osama (David Reyes)—focus obsessively on the byzantine rivalries and turf wars of the city’s gangs, with lyrics that pour out in a rush of hyperlocal allusions, acronyms, and slang. “Dead Opps,” released just days after Notti’s death, is typical: a string of taunts and threats aimed at “opps,” or enemies, delivered in a rasp over a scraping, scouring beat. One of Notti’s opps, evidently, was Martinez. According to the Manhattan D.A., the boys were “associates of rival gangs.”
For months, Notti’s death has been a hot topic in the world of New York drill. On the Web sites and apps where drill discourse unfolds—an ecosystem of YouTube videos, Instagram live streams, TikToks, message boards, and comment threads—fans have mourned and mocked the late rapper, while following the ongoing hostilities between Notti’s crew, OY, from the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, and its adversaries. A video posted on TikTok shows Notti’s friends grieving at a sidewalk shrine where Notti’s name is spelled out in candles; a subsequent TikTok captures an opp sabotaging the shrine. DD Osama has put out a string of tribute songs and social-media shout-outs. Other rappers have released songs, and teasers for forthcoming songs, with rhymes insulting Notti.
Dissing the deceased is a standard move in drill. To be “caught lacking”—ambushed by an opp when you are unarmed or otherwise not on your guard—is considered a failure worthy of ridicule, and many songs include taunting references to real-life murder victims. Followers of the city’s drill scene have grown familiar with the names of several New York teen-agers, killed over the years in gang-related violence, who have become something like stock characters, invoked repeatedly by rappers as objects of pity and scorn. Notti himself often engaged in this brand of insults. In “Dead Opps,” he derides the rapper C-HII WVTTZ (Jayquan McKenley), an eighteen-year-old from the Bronx who was killed in a drive-by shooting in February, and Rah Gz (Ramon Gil-Medrano), an alleged member of the gang Young Gunnaz, or 800 YGz, who was shot dead in a livery cab in the Bronx in the summer of 2021. Another Notti song, “41K,” features mocking rhymes about both Rah Gz and Esmerlyn (Smelly) Toribio, a seventeen-year-old who was stabbed to death in the Bronx in 2016, during an altercation arising from the sale of a motorcycle. “Smelly a bitch,” Notti raps. “He got poked for a bike.”
It’s not surprising that Notti’s death has inspired a round of cruel musical commemoration. “Notti Bop” minces no words, with rhymes that savor the grisly details of the killing: “He got poked one time, stopped breathin’/ His mans left him, he was on the floor bleedin’/ I cannot die on a train like Ethan.” But it is the dance—those punches to the midsection, mimicking Notti’s stabbing—that has set the song apart and made it an Internet sensation. It can be difficult to pinpoint the origins of viral trends, but “Notti Bop” appears to have first surfaced online around September 20th, with the arrival of a brief teaser video that features Kyle Richh and a young child dancing to an excerpt of the song. On October 3rd, another clip previewing the song was posted to Richh’s TikTok feed, showing him doing the dance with a bunch of friends. By the time the official music video was released, five days later, the wildfire spread of the “Notti Bop” on social media was well under way.
There are videos of teen-agers Notti Bopping on street corners, in subway stations, in clothing stores, in bedrooms. There are countless TikToks shot in schools: in cafeterias and gymnasiums, in science class and a music room, during a lockdown drill. School bathrooms, evidently, are Notti Bopping hot spots. “Damn everybody notti boppin down to teacher, family members, and house pets” reads the caption on a video, posted by a user with the TikTok handle zayybandz. There is indeed a subgenre of “Notti Bop” videos starring cats, dogs, iguanas, and, in the case of one viral clip, an otter. Notti Bopping infants are also a thing.
At first, the “Notti Bop” appeared to be confined to New York, but it swiftly migrated beyond the five boroughs. A high-school football player in New Jersey celebrated a pick-six interception return with a “Notti Bop” end-zone celebration. The song reached school kids in Massachusetts, Florida, Ohio, and Indiana. A video surfaced that seems to capture members of the Golden State Warriors Notti Bopping during a preseason game. Another TikTok shows two young men in military fatigues, evidently members of the U.S. armed forces, dancing to the song. (The caption reads, “Notti Bopping our country to safety.”) In the U.K., a drill hotbed, TikTokers recorded “Notti Bop” videos on the London Underground and in front of Buckingham Palace.
At a time when the phenomenon of viral videos has become familiar, even banal, “Notti Bop” stands out in its capacity—its eagerness—to appall. A subgenre of “Notti Bop” videos moves past the simple slapstick of the dance’s signature “stabs” to more elaborate reënactments of Notti’s death. (One TikTok, filmed in a Boston subway station, re-creates the fatal showdown, complete with the chase down the platform, the broomstick attack, and the lethal “knifing.”) Then, there are the many videos in which apparently unwitting authority figures—cops, clergymen, mailmen, “my 73 yr old sub”—join kids in Notti Bopping. Schoolteachers are by far the favorite marks.
In recent weeks, TikTok has apparently made efforts to purge “Notti Bop” videos from the platform. Yet new clips continue to materialize, on TikTok and other sites. To view these images in bulk, swiping through as one “Notti Bop” after another flickers past, is to experience a peculiar kind of disquiet. On the one hand, it is a sort of horror show. The seeming callousness with which the dancers burlesque a fourteen-year-old’s death—the breezy way that the dance turns a killing into a sight gag—induces a shiver. Yet the videos also feel oddly innocent. What you behold, in TikTok after TikTok, is kids having transgressive fun, and revelling in their own brazenness. They are experiencing some of the keenest and most primal pleasures of youth: the thrills of mischief-making and putting one over on clueless adults.
They are also engaging in age-old traditions. Slapstick violence has been a fixture of art since antiquity and is one of the defining features of American popular culture. It’s tempting to see “Notti Bop” as a parody, a macabre sendup of both viral TikTok fads and the long lineage of songs—“The Hokey Pokey,” “The Twist,” “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” and so on—whose lyrics offer step-by-step guides to dance crazes.
As for the moral questions: they loom large in the “Notti Bop” conversation. Alongside the proliferating “Notti Bop” clips, the Internet has filled up with scolding reaction videos, explainers cautioning kids not to do the dance, social-media jeremiads expressing outrage. There is a much shared TikTok in which three girls angrily confront a boy about Notti Bopping. Many “Notti Bop” videos include captions expressing ambivalence and guilt. (“Rip notti but this dance hard asf.”) A TikTok that has been viewed more than eight hundred thousand times shows a young man arriving in Heaven, only to be cast out when “God Pulls Out My Playlist on Judgment Day.” The video ends with the kid Notti Bopping in Hell.
The fact that young people are engaged with the thorny ethics of “Notti Bop” may not assuage those who see drill, plain and simple, as a malevolent force. There are many such critics, and some of them are highly placed. In New York, the music has come under attack by Mayor Eric Adams, who earlier this year floated the idea of a social-media ban on certain drill videos, arguing that they promote gun violence and endanger the public. The N.Y.P.D., which has long maintained an intelligence unit devoted to hip-hop, has been accused of waging a “war against drill rap”—monitoring artists’ online activity, shutting down video shoots, and preventing New York concert appearances by leading rappers. Drill rappers have characterized the N.Y.P.D.’s actions as assaults on their character and livelihoods; police have insisted on the connection between drill and “acts of violence citywide.” In April, the police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, announced the arrest of twenty alleged Bronx gang members in “Operation Drilly,” which gathered evidence in part from music videos. The success of Operation Drilly, Sewell said, was a step forward in the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to bring to justice “the relatively small percentage of people responsible for much of our city’s crime and disorder.”
The correlation of drill with street violence elides trickier questions of causation, while revving up the moral panic that has greeted not just rap but nearly all forms of Black popular music for more than a century. Denouncers of drill also tend to overlook how the music functions as art and protest. The genre took shape in Chicago, in the early twenty-tens, as a grimmer, more bruising offshoot of trap, the dominant hip-hop style for much of the past two decades. Drill’s bleakness and nihilism, its immersion in gang conflicts, its incorporation of local color and local lingo, gave voice to young—often, very young—Black men, and stood in contrast to a hip-hop mainstream that had in various ways lost touch with its grass roots.
Drill spread from Chicago to London, where producers incorporated beats, derivative of genres such as grime and garage, that gave the music a dark, symphonic sweep. And it took hold in Brooklyn, first with viral hits by rappers such as Bobby Shmurda, and, in the late twenty-tens, with a new wave of m.c.s who began to record songs using beats by U.K.-based producers that they’d discovered on the Internet. The most charismatic voice belonged to Pop Smoke (Bashar Jackson), from Canarsie, Brooklyn, who emerged in 2019 as New York drill’s first true superstar. In the hits “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior,” which reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100, he delivers sly rhymes—about gangs, guns, getting high, getting laid, and other perennial topics—in a commanding basso profundo over production that booms and tolls.
Pop Smoke was so magnetic, and his songs so catchy, that many missed the politics: how the lyrics smuggle in laments about the criminal-justice system, how the ominous throb of the drums and 808 bass lines drain glamour from the narratives, evoking a world of desperation and dread. Drill fans understood, though. When the rapper was shot dead at age twenty in an attempted robbery at a Los Angeles Airbnb on February 19, 2020—a killing not linked to gang activity—young New Yorkers hailed him as a martyr, spontaneously assembling in the streets of Canarsie, where they rapped along to “Dior” like a church congregation reciting scripture. That spring, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the song took on new dimensions. Suddenly, Pop Smoke’s rhymes about a luxury shopping spree—“Christian Dior, Dior / I’m up in all the stores / When it rains, it pours”—sounded prophetic and exhortative, the soundtrack to a wave of revolt sweeping across New York. “Dior” became a looter’s anthem, thundering out of speakers while crowds smashed the windows of high-end stores, as well as a chant of resistance—the song that played as protesters marched and faced down police in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
Drill, in other words, is a generational sound, channelling the anger, foreboding, and ambient bad vibes of our historical moment as powerfully as any popular music. Drill is also symptomatic of changing modes of production and distribution in hip-hop: how kids with laptops and smartphones can flood the Internet with songs and videos and, if they’re lucky or talented or both, kick-start their careers. Of course, there are countless drill rappers who want to be Pop Smoke, and precious few who land record deals, or even turn rapping into a remunerative gig.
Which isn’t to say that some don’t achieve a measure of fame or score viral hits. In the drill underground where Notti made his name, renown is predicated on beef—feuds with opps that play out, soap-opera style, in the tit for tat of diss tracks and social-media posts. “Notti Bop” is a product of this cycle. The song is a response to Notti’s “41K,” which directs insults and death threats at 41, Richh’s Brooklyn-based crew. (The title “41K” is shorthand for “41 Killer.”)
Notti may have earnestly regarded Richh and company as his mortal foes. Or he might have been beefing for beef’s sake, to keep the songs and clicks coming. A similar ambiguity marks the claims of gang affiliation and criminal activity made by most drill rappers. Hip-hop fans long ago learned to suspend disbelief, relishing the wit and conviction with which m.c.s perform the role of outlaw and not worrying too much about what’s real and what’s imaginary.
The mystique of drill—or the scrappy tier of New York drill to which Notti belonged, at least—lies in a different kind of authenticity. It is epitomized by Instagram and TikTok videos that offer glimpses of rappers on their home turf—in the streets of heavily policed neighborhoods and in unglamorous apartments. As recording artists, they are often subpar, shouting clichés in ungainly rhyme-flows over generic beats. But these rappers have unassailable bona fides—namely, their own social vulnerability, the patent truth that they are teen-agers whose everyday existence is defined by danger and want. Whether or not their tales of gang warfare reflect reality, there is no doubt that drill artists inhabit a world shaped by violence—the structural violence of inequality, austerity, and a society that construes young Black and brown men as criminal by definition, no matter how they lead their lives, or what they rap about.
The questions of voyeurism and slumming that have hovered over hip-hop fandom since the rise of gangsta rap are heightened in drill. One much viewed “Notti Bop” TikTok features a white teen-ager, seated in a handsome bedroom, offering commentary on the song in a thick “blaccent.” The boy concedes that he is a “civilian”—i.e., a non-gang member—“from the burbs.” But he goes on to assert that, if he were in DD Osama’s shoes, he’d be “going to fucking jail”; he would avenge his brother’s honor, consequences be damned. It is unsettling to contemplate how fans who sit at vast social distances from drill’s stars indulge fantasies and extract frissons from the rappers’ real-life tragedies.
Drill artists are aware of these dynamics. In “Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy,” Forrest Stuart, a professor of sociology at Stanford, argues that drill is a creative response to stigma and marginalization, whereby “gang-associated youth are exploiting digital platforms to commodify and cash in on the public’s long-standing fascination with ghetto poverty.” Stuart, who spent years studying a group of “drillers” in Chicago, shows that the rappers’ dreams of stable lives are tied to “online infamy.” The more florid their social-media performances of violence and deviance, the greater the number of followers they are able to attract, increasing the possibility of monetary rewards and upward mobility. Stuart concludes that drill rappers’ displays of violence in the virtual realm may in many cases be a strategy for avoiding actual violence. “Behind their online bravado is a desperate attempt to build a better future for themselves, to feel loved, to be seen as someone special,” he writes. “In that respect, they’re flocking to social media for some of the same reasons as anyone else.”
Of course, online bravado can have terrible offline consequences. Notti’s cousin Kelvin Ventura, forty-three, told the Daily News that he believes Notti’s killing was an example of “art turning into violence.” The critic Alphonse Pierre, one of the shrewdest observers of drill, wrote in Pitchfork that “Notti Bop” represents “a disturbing new low . . . the darkest side of New York drill,” lamenting how gatekeepers—the social-media platforms and “beef pages” that chronicle drill’s dramas—fan the flames of rivalries because it’s good for business.
But to dismiss “Notti Bop” as purely exploitative is to ignore that it is the creation of young people with agency and ideas. “Notti Bop” videos aim not just to shock but to satirize and subvert, cracking dark jokes about race and power. When you view TikToks such as one where a group of Black kids entice a white N.Y.P.D. street cop to join them in the “Notti Bop” dance, or the remarkable video in which a Black kid Notti Bops while wearing a whiteface mask emblazoned with the legend “GOD,” you are witnessing digital-age vaudeville that prods at some of the deepest pathologies in American life.
Many believe the pathology lies within teen-agers themselves. We have recently endured an election cycle dominated by fearmongering about urban disorder, with candidates competing to assert tough-on-crime credentials while—tacitly and, in many cases, explicitly—demonizing Black youth. There is no mistaking the message elected officials are sending, and it is not just coming from the G.O.P. President Biden used his State of the Union address to proclaim, “Fund the police!” In New York, Mayor Adams, a Democrat, came into office proposing draconian cuts to public-school funding, and seeking a two-hundred-million-dollar increase to the N.Y.P.D. budget. This year, Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have overseen an N.Y.P.D. “surge” in the city’s subways to fight a dubious “crime wave”; statistics indicate that the main result of the subway deployments is an explosion of arrests for low-level crimes such as fare evasion, a form of de-facto profiling, critics argue, that overwhelmingly hits young New Yorkers of color. In September, the Mayor and Governor announced a new multimillion-dollar initiative to install surveillance cameras on M.T.A. trains. “You think Big Brother is watching you on the subway?” Hochul said, at a news conference. “You’re absolutely right.”
One might reasonably draw the conclusion that adults in power are more invested in policing and punishing the young than in safeguarding their rights or providing them with a decent education, to say nothing of insuring that they will inherit a habitable planet. “Notti Bop” videos may be best understood in this context: as expressions of generational rage and abandonment, dramatized in the Kabuki of figurative murder (or, you could argue, figurative suicide). A useful comparison can be made to another spectacle that made news in mid-October: the footage of activists from the environmental group Just Stop Oil throwing tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting at London’s National Gallery. The Just Stop Oil action is an explicit protest; the “Notti Bop” dance operates at the murkier level of the subconscious. Both are viral-video stunts that call attention to leaders’ inaction in the face of crisis and to Gen Z’s despair for the future.
But “Notti Bop” is not just a provocation or remonstration. It is a memento mori. The paradox of “Notti Bop” and other songs of its ilk is that even as they malign the dead, they pay tribute to them. Generally, the killings of gang- and drill-affiliated teen-agers garner a few days of coverage in New York’s tabloids and on local TV news; occasionally, politicians squeeze out crocodile tears while intoning sermons about wayward youth. Soon, though, the victims vanish from headlines and collective consciousness. But drill doesn’t let them disappear. Through the harsh backhanded homage of diss tracks, New York drill has waged a war against forgetting, keeping alive the names of C-HII WVTTZ and Rah Gz and Smelly—and Noah (Moises Lora), Woo Lotti (Glenn Cole), Naz Rolla (Nisayah Sanchez), Jayrip (Jaryan Elliot), and many others. Now Notti has joined that pantheon. “Notti Bop” desecrates the memory of Ethan Reyes. It also memorializes him.
Adults may recoil at drill’s cruel rituals of remembrance. But surely our dismay should be directed at the broken world we’ve made, the conditions we create and tolerate, not the art children produce in response as they struggle to make sense of senselessness. Back in July, a video recording of emergency workers carrying Notti’s slumped body out of the 137th Street–City College station went viral online. Perhaps the most haunting “Notti Bop” TikTok is a reënactment of this scene, showing a group of boys bearing the body of a classmate up a school stairway.
The clip hovers between travesty and tragedy; the kids perform the slapstick “Notti Bop” stabs, yet the procession up the stairs has the stately dignity of a funeral march. Like nearly all “Notti Bop” videos, it includes the children’s music sample that opens Richh’s song, a snippet of “Castaways,” from the cartoon series “The Backyardigans.” This was a canny production choice: in context, the song’s bossa-nova chord changes and chirruping child vocalists sound eerie and forlorn, an effect intensified by the lyrics. “Castaways,” the children sing. “We are castaways / We’re stuck where we are.” It plays like a requiem, and not just for Notti Osama. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
