Dispatches from the Rap Wars My 18 months inside one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs.

When I first started interviewing Chicago youth about their interactions with the police, I never expected that I would spend a year and a half embedded with one of the most notorious gangs in the city. I had devoted the first five years of my career as a sociologist to talking to homeless people on Los Angeles’s Skid Row about how they navigated their lives around police presence. I planned to continue similar work after joining the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2012. But when I began talking to groups of kids in the city about the police, I quickly realized that what they really wanted to discuss was gangs. During one such meeting, I pulled up a map of Chicago on my tablet and pointed to random intersections. No matter what corner, even miles from their homes, these kids had an intimate knowledge of gang activity there. One boy told me, “If I walk down Cottage Grove, I know that in some places I need to keep my head on a swivel. In others, I can relax my guard.” And I’m thinking, There is no real reason this kid should know this much about gang presence on the South Side, because he’s from another side of town. It wasn’t just territory they had down cold. They were up on the latest of basically every gang war in the city. I asked these kids how the hell they knew all this. They looked at me like I was an idiot. “Music,” they said. There are hundreds of gangs in Chicago these days, a splintering that occurred in the wake of the collapse of the traditional “supergangs” like the Black Disciples and Vice Lords in the ’90s. As dangerous as their predecessors, they operate as block-level factions, making the city a complicated patchwork of warring territories. In a relatively recent phenomenon, many of these gangs produce drill music—a Chicago-born low-fi version of gangsta rap, full of hyperviolent boasts and taunts. (Think NWA, but grittier and without the hooks.) By keeping their ears open, these kids I was interviewing can quickly figure out whose territory they are in. If they are walking through a neighborhood and hear a certain kind of drill coming from a passing car or a phone speaker, they know that corner belongs to the gang Diddy Grove. If they’re in Diddy Grove territory and notice songs by O-Block, that tells them Diddy Grove and O-Block are likely cliqued up. After I’d been talking with these kids for months, one of them told me his older brother, Zebo, is a member of the drill gang Corner Boys Entertainment. (Zebo, CBE, and subsequent names in this story have been changed, as have a few identifying facts. As a sociologist, I granted anonymity to my subjects so that they would open up to me without fear of being prosecuted. The National Institutes of Health has certified this approach to my study, and that prevents law-enforcement authorities from compelling me to provide information on illegal activity.) I knew CBE’s music—the gang is one of the best-known drill-rap outfits in the city—so I was interested in talking to Zebo. His brother offered to make an introduction. I met Zebo the next day, and we talked for hours. He told me how drill perpetuates gang wars, how it’s an engine of both truces and feuds. He told me how CBE members will retaliate violently if a song by another gang insults their friends or relatives. He kept returning to a refrain, one I would hear many times during my field research: ‘This is not just music. It’s not just a game. This shit is for real.” It was a couple of months before I saw Zebo again. His cell number was always changing, and he was incredibly hard to pin down. In the meantime, I became close with a young man named Darian from the Lincoln Homes, the public housing complex where Zebo lives. I would see Darian around the neighborhood, and one day he said, “Man, I want to get muscles like you.” I suggested we start working out together, and for about two or three months, we would meet at his apartment, then head to the YMCA. I’d bring protein powder and milk—things he couldn’t afford—and in exchange he’d walk me around the neighborhood and introduce me to people. Sometimes we would see guys from CBE across the housing complex and Darian would yell to them, but they acted aloof. Advertisement One afternoon as we were pulling into a Lincoln Homes parking lot, I spotted Zebo. He had been drinking a lot of lean—a mix of codeine cough syrup and soda—and smoking Scotty, as folks in Chicago refer to PCP, and he was really messed up. He called me over and introduced me to the guys with him, Ruger and Blaze, both CBE rappers. He told them that I knew all about the Chicago gangs and suggested we take pictures together. So we passed around our phones, and they threw their arms around me. After that, we settled under a tree in the shade and I just posed it to them: I wanted to learn about their gang and write a book, and I would compensate them for their time. At the end of the conversation, Zebo took me aside and said that I had the green light. Then Zebo disappeared again. Turned out he had overdosed on PCP and was in the hospital for a couple of days. I was still going down to the Lincoln Homes to meet Darian, and one day Blaze and Zebo approached—Zebo still had a hospital bracelet on—and said they would be shooting a music video later. They invited me to come along. As I’d soon find out, CBE makes three kinds of videos. In one, they talk about nameless, faceless rivals, or haters. In another, they specifically target a rival gang with lyrics like “So-and-so’s a bitch” or “So-and-so’s a snitch.” And then there’s an in-between kind, which to an outsider sounds like generic disses but is actually very targeted, with the rapper flashing a rival gang’s hand signs upside down. This was that kind of video. The shoot took place all over the Lincoln Homes—in the stairwell, in the courtyard. And in nearly every shot, the guys were rolling blunts, smoking, and drinking. A crowd of onlookers soon grew. Most of them were kids who knew every lyric to Blaze’s song. CBE has this real nationalistic quality for people living in the Lincoln Homes. They look at the members as heroes.

Each rapper in the gang has one or two “shooters.” These are the members who make good on the threats the rappers dish out in their lyrics and on social media.

It’s surprising how much strategy goes into the making and posting of these videos on YouTube and SoundCloud. CBE members are constantly considering how to get the most views. (At least one of their videos has exceeded five million.) The thinking is that if a video pulls enough, record labels will start calling. Sometimes the guys will record a video but wait to release it until a rival gang member—preferably one they’ve called out—is shot, so that it seems like CBE is taking credit. It’s all about convincing viewers that CBE really does the violent stuff that they rap about—and often they do. Their model is inspired by the local patron saint of drill rap, Chief Keef, who successfully leveraged the persona of a black superpredator. The more he portrayed himself as a reckless, gun-toting, ruthless murderer, the more attention he got. Eventually, Interscope Records signed him to a $6 million deal and off he went to Los Angeles. Hardly a day goes by without someone from CBE mentioning Keef. The day of the shoot, Blaze introduced me to another CBE rapper, A.J. I recognized the attractive, dreadlocked 20-year-old from social media. He posts tons of pictures of himself holding guns and flashing signs. He’s constantly threatening rival gang members and writing lyrics about shooting at these “opps.” When we started talking regularly, I began to see a very different person: a sweet, caring father figure to his girlfriend’s 3- and 4-year-old sons. He would use baby talk with them and interrupt our conversations to get them fruit punch. Sometimes, A.J. and I would walk around the Lincoln Homes all afternoon, just talking. Other times, we spent hours playing this really complicated version of craps in the stairwell. He ended up taking a lot of my money. I once asked him why he projects such a violent persona in the videos. He flipped the question back on me: “If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?” He was right. As one of the other CBE rappers would always say, “You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.” Advertisement That role means being at the nucleus of CBE. For the gang—and other gangs like it—the rappers are designated as the ticket out of poverty. It becomes the responsibility of the rest of the members to support and protect them. Each rapper has one or two “shooters.” These are the members who make good on the threats the rappers dish out in their lyrics and on social media. And, yes, that means shooting—and sometimes killing—people. CBE has about a dozen shooters. A.J. may be the one holding an automatic weapon in his Instagram photos, but he has never shot at the opps. The rest of CBE—there are about 30 members total—are known as “the guys.” Some are just loosely affiliated with the gang, but others play more active roles, acting as producers or cameramen. Geo and Marcus, for example, basically serve as the tech department. They do stuff like steal the local school’s Wi-Fi password. The Lincoln Homes are surrounded by rival gangs, so the more A.J. fronts on Instagram, the more isolated CBE becomes—and the more dangerous it is for the members. Early on in our conversations, the guys in CBE told me about the genesis of their rivalry with the neighboring gang Murderville. When CBE started rapping in 2012, Murderville made a song insulting a young man named Benzie, one of the first CBE members to get killed. (CBE would go on to rename their neighborhood Benzie Block, using the hashtag #BenzieBlock on social media.) CBE decided they needed to retaliate. It was a defining moment. The guys drove into Murderville territory and started shooting up the neighborhood. They didn’t hit anyone, but a few days later, someone from CBE spotted the rapper who had recorded the song taking a selfie on the street and shot him in the back. (He lived.) One afternoon A.J. and I were in his apartment talking when he stood up and said, “I’m going to show you why I do this.” So he went on Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter and wrote, “I’m on FT for the next 20 minutes” and gave his phone number. FaceTime calls immediately started coming in from across the United States and Canada—male and female, ages 12 to 40, white, black, Hispanic—all like, “Oh my God, I love you. Your music is so great.” He got so many calls that his phone ended up crashing. These are not things your average kid growing up in the hood experiences. A.J. turned to me and said, “I do this when I’m feeling shitty, or when I’m broke, or when I’m bored.” It reminds me of a great lyric in Kanye West’s “Saint Pablo”: “Checkin’ Instagram comments to crowdsource my self-esteem.” Every few calls, a woman A.J. thought was attractive would pop up on FaceTime, and he had a kind of pattern: He would compliment the young lady, ask to see more of her, then goad her to take off a piece of clothing. Women would wind up getting undressed for him. Advertisement The guys have a term for these kinds of fans: cloutheads. The more popular you are as a drill rapper, the more clout you accumulate. The more clout you have, the more cloutheads—easily exploitable groupies—you have. A.J. has a lot of cloutheads. And he won’t just ask them to take off their clothes; he’ll ask them for money, meals, new iPhones—almost always in exchange for the promise of sex. Since most of the guys in CBE are really bad at dealing drugs—they usually smoke up their own supply—the gang relies on the rappers to bring in cash this way. The whole exchange between rappers and cloutheads is a bizarre modern twist on sex work. One of A.J.’s longtime cloutheads is a white law student in Hyde Park. She comes from a conservative family in Pennsylvania and fashioned her interracial, interclass relationship with A.J. as a symbol of her new leftward leaning. She and A.J. see each other regularly—with her sending an Uber to deliver him to her apartment each time. I remember a moment when A.J. started to feel her drift away because he had refused her demand that their relationship become monogamous. So he played his trump card. It was clear she had long had a slumming, voyeuristic desire to come down to the Lincoln Homes, so he invited her to visit during a repass—a celebratory wake—for a resident who had been shot. It was a total bash, everybody outside wearing T-shirts with “CBE” silk-screened across the front. A.J. gave her a tour, walking her around and pointing out things like “Here’s my niggas playing dice” and “You know, the opps might ride through here anytime and shoot up the block.” He was giving this exaggerated sense of his neighborhood because he knew that was what she wanted. He became an ambassador of black poverty in a way that made me uncomfortable. About two months into my fieldwork, the CBE guys pooled their money to do a 12-hour studio session on the West Side. I was looking forward to it—12 hours to witness the creative process and see how drill rap is made. Instead, I ended up sitting for half a day in a sweltering warehouse closet, watching the guys get high and occasionally put down some tracks. In the haze of smoke, I found myself sitting next to Junior, an 18-year-old who had been a shooter in the gang for more than three years. He had been arrested for armed robbery—one way shooters make money is by “staining,” or stealing from people or stores in nearby neighborhoods—and had just come off house arrest. He was broke, his mom had disowned him, and he was on the verge of becoming homeless. His life had basically bottomed out. But sitting there in that closet-turned-studio, he had an epiphany: He decided to become a rapper. He’d seen how those guys were excused from the actual violence, and wanted a legal hustle for himself. So he started jotting down lyrics on a notepad he found in a corner of the room. When hour 11 hit and the rappers had grown tired and there was an opening in the recording booth, Junior jumped in. The rest of CBE didn’t initially support the transition, but that all changed after Junior got shot. About eight months after recording those first tracks, Junior was walking home from school with a friend when a group of guys from a rival gang came up to them, addressed Junior by name, and started firing. Junior was hit in the shoulder, and his friend was killed. When I visited Junior the next day, he was in an incredibly jovial mood. He was like, “Man, Forrest, I’m on! I’ve got clout!” He was tracking his latest rap video on YouTube, and the daily views had tripled. Junior was so excited about having gotten shot and kept talking about how he was finally going to make it as a rapper. And he was right. That was essentially the moment when CBE accepted him in that role. Another member of the gang stepped up to be his shooter, and a bevy of women started following him around. Today, he’s a central figure in CBE.

When I visited Junior the day after he’d been shot, he was in an incredibly jovial mood. He was tracking his latest rap video on YouTube. Daily views had tripled.