You can’t see the sea from here. The air temperature is approaching 34 degrees on this summer morning. The moisture that makes the skin sticky is a reminder that the sea is actually not far away. Probably a few streets away. But from the 200 houses in Roquetas de Mar you cannot see the Mediterranean, you can only see a huge white expanse shaking in the wind like a huge bridal veil that wraps the kilometers of land of the so-called plastic sea. A sea that tourists don’t want to see.
As soon as you enter the district, a Civil Guard car slowly drives past and makes its rounds. It will happen twice more during the morning. The sun’s rays hit vertically and there are hardly any trees. At a bar on Plaza de Andalucía, the neighborhood’s central promenade, around which floors rise from cracked white concrete blocks, cold, non-alcoholic cherry mojitos are served while Arabic music plays. In one corner of the square stands a black preacher trying to capture souls with a microphone connected to a Bluetooth speaker. It’s Saturday and no one is looking at him.
The producer Slow, in Vallecas (Madrid). Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
“My father worked in the fields when he came here,” says Key-21 (stage name like everyone who appears in this report). “The conditions in the sea of plastic are terrible. It’s very hard. You don’t leave the field. “Children see their parents do this and don’t want it.” Most of the 200 men work in the plastic sea. Men who came from North Africa between the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is also the same sea that their children, almost all of whom were born in Spain, have learned to hate. The first generation of Spaniards in their families dream of more than just picking tomatoes in the greenhouse. That’s why when Key-21 walks through the neighborhood where he grew up, he’s chased by teenagers on bikes, the little ones running after him. Is a star. The son of a Mauritanian father and a Senegalese mother, who left in the 200s and became a musician. The boy who started uploading songs about neighborhood life to YouTube and now wears a watch shining in the sun, Burberry print shorts, and a huge silver chain. For the teenagers of the 200, a neighborhood that Vox Almería described on its official Facebook account as a “multicultural dunghill,” Key-21 is an aspirational idol: everyone wants to be like him. “Now the police don’t stop me because they know I’m dedicated to music, but when I was underage they used to stop me all the time,” he admits. The unmistakable sign of success.
In February of this year, Key-21 gave a concert in El Ejido with El Patrón 970, one of the undisputed stars of Spanish drill. Born in Humanes (where the Madrid population postal code 970 comes from) to parents from Equatorial Guinea, El Patrón has more than 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. His most famous song, Jordan Manchás, has reached 46,700,000 views on YouTube. He also has a conflict, reflected in song lyrics and music videos, with the other Spanish drill camp: MDLR, the acronym for mec de la rue, an expression of French origin whose translation would be “street boy”, and Morad, representative of Catalan drill , is used in almost all of his songs. The conflict between El 970 and the MDLR on social networks is described as beef and includes attacks on each other’s neighborhoods and ridicule in the texts. Like Quevedo and Góngora, but in 2023, with tattoos and marijuana.
Lilmmei, “Drillera”. Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
It is difficult to define the exercise. The short explanation would be that it is a style of music whose branches grow from the tree on which the branches of rap and trap also grow. The lyrics are rougher, the music is harder and the main theme is life on the street. The long explanation is to repeat what every driller interviewed in this report said: It’s not just music, it’s a way of life. With all the consequences that entails.
The drill, which means drill or perforation in English, was born in 2010 in Chicago, on the south side of the city, among teenagers living in marginal neighborhoods and suffering from a crisis of constant murders. The violence they saw in their daily lives formed the common thread in most of their writing. They began to sing about the shootings, the stabbings, the harshness of the neighborhoods and childhoods where lack of opportunity and poverty had taken hold, to create young people who now wear a balaclava or a hat and meet their friends in the square to sing the lyrics they write at night when they can’t sleep.
A group of young drillers from Puche (Almería) with the aesthetics that define drill.Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
Music served as an outlet and success became a lifeline that pulled you to the surface and left the fringe world behind. Drill texts hardly contain any metaphors. They are raw, nihilistic, pessimistic, soulful, powerful and honest. In fact, honesty is one of the genre’s most valued themes, both in music and in movement. That’s why the most purist drillers demand that the rest who sing drill also live drill.
“What I see in Drill are not real children. I see children whose parents give them money and who talk about killing people. You can’t do that. We kill and die. It is what it is. Nothing else. It’s ugly, but that’s life, you don’t want them to kill you.” The speaker is Chacheblack, one of the greatest exponents of drill in Madrid. Chacheblack released his first album at the age of 16 in Villaverde. “They took me out of social services because I was a child from a broken family. I was on the street all day. When they told me we were doing rap, I was like, “That’s mine,” he says. The first album is not on YouTube, but the second one he released is, which he called “El puto negro del cole”. He meant himself. At 16, Chache was living on the streets because he had problems with his alcoholic mother and stepfather. Still, the largest necklace she wears around her neck is a huge locket full of shiny crystals and a photo of her mother giving her a kiss. On the back the date of his death.
Kid Flako, producer and trap artist.Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
When Chacheblack says in a song, “And we’re prepared in case someone wants war / ‘Cause to me everyone is everyone.” / You don’t know what I did to fill my fridge. / Imagine anything but good things,” he asserts that he says it because it is. “Drill is everything you can’t see. Reality. The stabbings. That’s why we’re covered. And those who sing things they’ve never done will meet us one day and do something strange and we’ll hit him and his face will fly,” he says as we sit in a place I won’t mention and he smokes a joint. Hashish. Chacheblack doesn’t want to answer when I ask him if the guns in his music videos are real. Not even when I ask him where he works.
Slow has just had a tattoo inked just above the collar of his shirt that reads “Drill Mafia,” the name of Madrid’s most famous drilling studio, based in Vallecas, in a storage area where it coexists with a store selling therapeutic marijuana and a scrapyard . The studio, which opened about three years ago, is furnished with wrought iron garden furniture that looks like it has been discarded, a small refrigerator, the Play 4 connected to a plasma television and the crown jewel: a desk with a computer and mixer. Slow has invested a large part of its budget in order to to improve the quality of the music he produces. After the purchase, he set up an alarm and cameras in his studio. Although no one tried to rob him. “Everyone knows where we are, and if you want trouble, look, the doors are open,” he says. What the cameras recorded are several police recordings, which Slow assures will be repeated from time to time. In the video shown, the agents enter the production company to ask the teenagers for their documentation. After checking everything, they leave.
Maraattak, stripper and professional dancer. Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
Although Slow runs a production company whose artists have 100,000 listeners a month, he has neither studied music nor pursued a career. “I have led a complicated life and I have chosen to do so. “It was a way out for me.” Currently there are about 50 amateur singers who want to stop being amateur singers. Teenagers who use the place not only to record their songs, but also as a meeting place on days when everything goes wrong at home or at school. “I try to teach children that music is a journey. There is everything here, not always a good atmosphere. Drill is very dark and many children come from reform schools, but that is the system’s fault, not the children’s. We just pick these people up and show them an escape route.” Their main job is not only to make their songs sound good, but also to give them security. He produces a song for 35 or 50 euros. He doesn’t say “no” to anyone. “We won’t judge anyone based on where they come from, but rather where they end up,” he says.
Flaco and Cuatro gather around a table on the terrace of a bar in Fuenlabrada. They both sang drill, although Flaco rarely devotes himself to music anymore (he will work as a waiter in a bar) and Cuatro releases trap songs from time to time. They are close to the troupe La 970 de Humanes and turn our meeting into a debate between the two about music and life on the street. A conversation between them is reproduced below:
Skinny: The only thing I don’t understand is why all subnormals become famous in Spain. Like Bb Trickz.
Fourth: Bb Trickz has an agent and has been advertising since he was five years old, including in a strawberry Nesquik commercial.
Skinny: But doing an ad doesn’t give you the right to be a musician!
Fourth: Brother, and as a politician you don’t have the right to steal. In my opinion, you can’t sing drill if you can’t do what you sing on the street. If you don’t want to shoot in the streets, don’t sing a drill. Because singing drill puts you at risk of being robbed.
Flaco: Well, I crossed all parts of Madrid and no one robbed me.
Fourth: Cousin, what have you been through? What did you have with you that was so valuable that someone would take it away from you?
Skinny: Anything, bro. What is valuable to you?
Fourth: A gold bracelet, a pair of sneakers, something you can see. You try to catch me, come and rob me and you know how it can end.
Skinny: Well, I’ll hit you.
Key-21 and his admirers in the 200 houses of Roquetas de Mar (Almería). Balaclavas are part of the aesthetic. Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
The lack of women in the drill is often explained by the amount of testosterone contained in the lyrics. The violence and aggressiveness means that they end up merging sounds, drifting more towards trap than the street rawness of drill. “At first I didn’t care that there were so few women in drill, but now I think I wish there were many more,” admits Lilmmei, one of the few women currently doing drill in Spain continues: “When I go there, I always try to work with someone as an aunt. Especially if it’s not very established yet.”
Lilmmei was born in Getafe but has lived his entire life in Valencia. Born to Nigerian parents, the young woman has just completed her double degree in Ray Technique because from the start she ignored the siren songs of music and fame and opted for a job. He started doing pure rap and uploading his videos to Instagram when someone told him about drill. He was encouraged to give it a chance. Today, Rain Von, Aya Ayat and Omaigold are other drillers on the Spanish scene. All with a migration background. For Lilmmei, however, drill was a way to find his way, but he considers it a fleeting genre. “I don’t see a future for drilling in Spain,” he says.
Although drill was born in the United States, it exploded in popularity in the United Kingdom. While in Spain it remains a marginal and underground genre, only played on the streets or in the neighborhoods, in the United Kingdom it has reached the radio and the bars. But it was precisely this popularity that condemned the movement to police persecution. London police have repeatedly called for exercise videos to be removed from YouTube, claiming they “increase violence in neighborhoods.” Rondodasosa, Italy’s most famous driller, has been banned from pubs and venues in Milan for two years following riots at a nightclub. Morad, the drill’s national exponent, was banned by police from La Florida, his neighborhood in L’Hospitalet, “for encouraging unrest.” For Slow, drill is not violence. “Drill is the art that reflects the system as it is. For the police, the fault lies with the music, not with the system, not with the shops that sell machetes. They could regulate it like they regulate alcohol and tobacco,” he argues.
A group of teenagers at the El Patrón 970 concert in El Ejido. Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
One of the features of the genre is the youth of all its stars. The boys start composing teenage songs. Chief Keef, the first and biggest drill representative in Chicago, was 16 years old when he signed his first record deal. Chacheblack is 31 years old and the oldest of everyone we spoke to. Slowly, 29 years old. Flaco, 27. Four, 25. Lilmmei, 21 years old, same as Kid Flako. Kid Flako is exactly the only one who reveals his real name. His name is Alejandro Ruiz and he claims that he no longer exercises. “I don’t like the fantasy that exists and the movie they make up about drill. Once you see their faces, you can tell whether they really went through that or not. And someone with a perfect face and a hairline that he got on his eyebrow at the hairdresser tells me that he’s hungry, that he beats up at night, and that he’s the worst, and that’s a lie. I know many people who are bad and are Cayetans. I’ve been at it for a month, but actually for a month, and I’ve only eaten milk and cookies,” he admits. He started making music at a very early age. He had already recorded in a studio at the age of 14. Now you have your own. Record everything from trap to reggaeton and praise. One day he even recorded an opera. Although he didn’t study music, he learned everything he knew about editing and producing songs on YouTube and the Internet.
One of the characteristics of drill is precisely the ability to create music with very few elements. Using almost always precarious means, teenagers record videos of each other, post them on YouTube, and hope to publish them (to succeed). What is important is the lyrics and aesthetics seen in the videos: clothing that is almost always black, sweatpants, puffy jackets, hoods, necklaces, balaclavas (the drillers across the pond justify it with the phrase “no face , no”) case, without being able to identify who is in the video, the police cannot arrest them based on their text), fanny packs, tattoos, branded clothing with huge logos (among amateurs it is almost always fake, but serves to imitate famous drills). ).
Chacheblack, “drillero” from Madrid and one of the biggest representatives of the music genre in Spain. Lúa Ribeira (Magnum Photos / Co
The general feeling is that we are on the verge of something. At our feet lies the social revolution that has not yet broken out in Spain and that has already taken place in countries such as the United Kingdom and its ghettos or France and its banlieues. To talk about drill is to talk about the generation that has lost all faith in social progress. Or that he never believed in him. It is also about the channel that young people from Spanish migrant neighborhoods use to assert their origins and their own existence. They want the flashes, the listeners and the likes that validate them. They want the admiration of their loved ones.
Drill sings to real life. Here’s to a complicated childhood. To the hardness of the asphalt and the suffocation of the dust. The general feeling is that we are facing a generation that is more than dissatisfied, but feels abandoned. The police are the enemy. The press, the sneaky arm of the law. Most of the respondents did not know what El País Semanal or even EL PAÍS was. Although everyone asked if the photos from this report would be posted on Instagram.
They live on the shore. On the edge of a world that she never let enter. “You want to be in society, have a normal job and be trusted. But when you come from World B, they don’t even give you the simple opportunity to try. Drill is the lifestyle that we young people lead in protest against state oppression. The same as always: that we are against the system,” explains Chacheblack. Drill music is the only float they can hold on to. At least these rules were written by them.
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