Audiobook11 hours
Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy
Written by Forrest Stuart
Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
5/5
()
About this audiobook
Amid increasing hardship and limited employment options, poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, they're capitalizing on the public's fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys, a group of thirty or so young men on Chicago's South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of "drill music" (slang for "shooting music"). Drillers disseminate this competitive genre of hyperviolent, hyperlocal, DIY-style gangsta rap digitally, hoping to amass millions of clicks, views, and followers-and a ticket out of poverty. But in this perverse system of benefits, where online popularity can convert into offline rewards, the risks can be too great.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and countless interviews compiled from daily, close interactions with the Corner Boys, as well as time spent with their families, friends, music producers, and followers, Forrest Stuart looks at the lives and motivations of these young men. While these virtual displays of ghetto authenticity can lead to online notoriety and actual resources, drillers frequently end up behind bars, seriously injured, or dead.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and countless interviews compiled from daily, close interactions with the Corner Boys, as well as time spent with their families, friends, music producers, and followers, Forrest Stuart looks at the lives and motivations of these young men. While these virtual displays of ghetto authenticity can lead to online notoriety and actual resources, drillers frequently end up behind bars, seriously injured, or dead.
Related to Ballad of the Bullet
Related audiobooks
I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Changes: An Oral History of Tupac Shakur Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Why Young Men: The Dangerous Allure of Violent Movements and What We Can Do About It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys: Surviving Brooklyn's Colombo Mob Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, a Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLife Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Police Brutality and White Supremacy: The Fight Against American Traditions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Colony in a Nation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Murder City: Cuidad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Conspiracy to Riot: The Life and Times of One of the Chicago 7 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Complex Presents Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ine & The Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Citizen Outlaw: One Man’s Journey from Gangleader to Peacekeeper Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Year of Dangerous Days: Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Social Science For You
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Name of the Wind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Hunger Games Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Parable of the Sower Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Left Hand of Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Overstory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kindred Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lonely Dad Conversations Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Razorblade Tears: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Year of Magical Thinking Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Small Mercies: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Myths of Meritocracy: A Revisionist History Anthology Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Ballad of the Bullet
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
5/5
1 rating0 reviews