We republish this article from Prairie Fire News, an independent, proletarian, anti-imperialist, and revolutionary newsletter based out of New York City. This is featured in their first issue and we republish this article here, not only because of the great analysis but also due to its timeliness, with rapper Young Thug getting 15 years probation in a show trial in Georgia. The repression of Black art is not new but we must unite to fight it at every turn. – Eli Sorrel
By Chris Smith
New York City’s cultural innovations have long carried an element of fame, between numerous artistic movements such Harlem Renaissance led by New African sharecroppers displaced from the south, the distinct Puerto Rican (“Nuyorican”) diaspora community, and various musical styles. In particular, NYC’s history regarding music is closely tied to the Black nation, from the aforementioned sharecroppers who flooded into NYC in search of factory jobs, formulating a distinct jazz scene, to various Caribbean immigrants displaced by imperialism, such as DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant widely considered the father of the groundbreaking hip-hop genre.
Serving as the cradle of hip-hop, all eyes have been on NYC’s artists within this genre ever since its inception. As of the past decade or so, a new form of hip hop has rapidly risen in popularity, all but captivating the youth: drill. Originating in the ghettos of Brooklyn, this unprecedented innovation came as the hip-hop scene in New York was widely perceived as stagnant. With the advent of East Flatbush-born artists Bobby Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel in 2014, the stage was set. Numerous artists would spring up out of various disenfranchised, working-class Black and Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods in Brooklyn, 22Gz, Sheff G, and Sleepy Hallow being just a few of these artists. Pop Smoke would later come along, revolutionizing the drill scene until his untimely murder in 2020. Almost immediately after Pop Smoke’s demise, as if a time bomb had been set, several Bronx artists coming from oppressed neighborhoods began to take off, Kay Flock being the most prominent of them, along with Dthang, Sha EK, and many others.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest transfer of wealth to the ruling class in recent history, was also ongoing. Just a few months later, pigs from the Minneapolis Police Department murdered innocent Black man George Perry Floyd, serving as the “single spark to light a prairie fire”, so to speak. Millions of working-class Americans of all backgrounds mobilized against police violence, striking fear into the heart of the capitalist class. Despite the widespread demands which the capitalist lackeys who call themselves politicians feigned to be moved by, little would change due to the lack of a class-conscious leadership guiding this sea of masses, and liberal counter-insurgency from the democratic party. Politicians around the country would increase police funding to record levels only a year later while the NYPD began to ramp up gang indictments.
Fast forward to 2022 and we see NYC’s pig mayor, Eric Adams, being elected. A Black man who himself grew up in the ghettos of Brownsville and South Jamaica, having been arrested as a fifteen-year-old, Adams supposedly desired a sense of change as a young man. He joined the NYPD in 1984, claiming to desire to fight for underrepresented Black cops, even forming “100 Blacks in Law Enforcement”. With a cursory glance, anyone can see how that reformist attitude went!
Adams went for drill rap’s jugular from the very start, attacking the genre as promoting violence while refusing to address any underlying issues, instead calling for a blanket ban. Returning to the point regarding indictments, Adams oversaw numerous gang indictments (despite himself ironically being under indictment for corruption and facing rape accusations now!), which statistically often target young Black and Latin American men for the crime of association, for growing up in ghettos and barrios and hanging around the “wrong people”.
Adams promoted the narrative that this dynamic came from genuine community building, conducting a “meeting” with several prominent rappers such as Fivio Foreign and B-Lovee in which Adams paid lip service to their music and essentially staged a photo op. Now, two years later, little has changed. The NYPD and their enablers in the ruling class continue to stage exponentially more indictments targeting minority communities while claiming to care about “public safety”. We must cast aside these illusions and launch into struggle, for the Black nation and for the entire working class whose power is usurped by the American nightmare.
Crusader News 
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