Defending Digga D: is drill music so dangerous that it should be censored by the state?

“A person is a poet,” wrote the last of the great French symbolists Paul Valéry, “if his imagination is stimulated by the difficulties inherent in his art and not if his imagination is dulled by them.” If this is true and real artistry does lie in the face of adversity, then there can be little doubt that Digga D – the rap artist at the vanguard of one of the UK’s most explosive and controversial new music scenes – fits the bill entirely.

For at the age of just 20, Digga D has faced more than his fair share of creative difficulties. Having risen to fame in 2017 off the back of a standout freestyle performance on music platform Mixtape Madness’s “Next Up?” series, the West London rapper – whose real name is Rhys Herbert – quickly began to carve himself out as a key driver within the emerging musical movement known as UK drill.

With its roots in the sounds of early-2010s South Side Chicago artists like Chief Keef, UK drill is a wildly popular but much maligned subset of British rap, often accused – as a result of its characteristic violent lyricism and menacing soundscapes – of glorifying and even provoking criminal activity.

So in 2018, when Digga D was sentenced to a year in prison on charges of conspiracy to commit violent disorder, it came as little surprise to anyone that the police – drawing a connection between the violent nature of his crime and the violent lyrics of his songs – would look to crack down on Digga’s musical output in the process. Along with his sentence, Digga was landed with a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) that requires him to make an official notification to the police of any audio or visual material that he knowingly appears in within 24 hours of upload, so that its lyrics and imagery may be vetted for violent and inflammatory content.

It is a truly unprecedented stipulation, and one which the rapper’s lawyer Cecilia Goodwin has equated to a form of police censorship, lending renewed urgency to questions around the racially motivated demonization of minority cultural forms. Speaking to The Telegraph, Goodwin noted that “Drill music continues to be the only genre of music that is heavily censored and controlled, making it difficult for artists to truly engage in the creative output of music for fear of the consequences within the arsenal of the state.”

What problems such restrictions would cause for Digga D, nobody could quite say. Lyrical threats against opposition gang members and braggadocio references to gun-toting and drug-slinging had been paramount to the thrust of his earlier work (now viewable only through clandestine reuploads on video sharing platforms), as well as that of his 1011 affiliates – a Ladbroke Grove-based gang-cum-musical group. So for Digga D, who started writing music at the age of just 12 – having grown up on a diet of reggae and dancehall – and left school not long after, twice excluded, with no GCSEs to his name, the stakes could hardly have been higher.

Surprisingly however, following his release from prison in May, Digga D is currently enjoying the best year of his career to date. With a debut performance at Wireless Festival, a starring role in his own BBC Three documentary, and hit singles Woi and Chingy racking up millions of views and streams respectively, it appears as though the once underground sensation has finally broken the mainstream. Which begs the question: have the creative shackles imposed on Digga D by the judicial system done less to fetter his progress than to catalyse it? Has he succeeded, in other words, not just in spite of his limitations, but in part, because of them?

Though such an idea might seem paradoxical, it is certainly not without precedent. For generations, artists across all forms have embraced the power of creative limitation as a means of overcoming the “paralysis of choice” that so often accompanies that falsest of friends: creative freedom. Take Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr Seuss) for example, whose bestselling children’s book Green Eggs and Ham was written using just 50 different words, as part of a wager made with his publisher at Random House.

Or the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who famously denied himself the use of time signatures during the composition of his iconoclastic ballet, The Rite of Spring, for as he put it, “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action.” Or even the great Henri Matisse, who in his latter days, whilst bedridden and unable to paint, continued to make art using paper cut-outs – a technique he termed “drawing with scissors” – producing some of his best-known works in the process. Miles Davis, Piet Mondrian, Ludwig Van Beethoven – the list goes on.

Recently in fact, two parallel studies conducted by Catrinel Haught-Tromp of Rider University corroborated this felt phenomenon. In both experiments, subjects were shown to be more creative whilst working under externally imposed restrictions, thereby adding credence to what they termed “The Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis”.

That Digga D himself may have benefited from such a phenomenon is evident from his own words. In a conversation with his lawyer captured in Marian Mohamed’s recent documentary Defending Digga D, which follows the rapper through all the trials and tribulations, the legal hoop-jumps and the prison recalls that have befallen him since his release, Digga D explains, “They’re trying to mess me up by stopping me from saying all this stuff, but little do they know it’s actually helping me, do you get it?”

And help him it undoubtedly has. Having replaced the overt, unambiguously provocative lyrics of his earlier works with a more heavily implicit lyrical mode, Digga D has gained access to a wider and more receptive audience, whilst all the while continuing to speak – if more circuitously – to the gritty reality of the scene he represents. This new style – a pioneering free play of euphemism, doublespeak and oblique referentiality – has seen Digga D reach out more frequently to popular culture, and in particular viral meme culture, allowing him to increase the virality of his own tracks in turn.

In both Woi and Chingy for example, Digga repeats the line, “Jump out, try put him in a coffin”. At first glance, an obvious red flag – or at least it would be, if it weren’t a reference to a viral dance move, popular on sites like YouTube, TikTok, and the now extinct, Vine. The title of the latter track, Chingy, is similarly double-edged, appearing to refer to the slang term for stabbing, whilst actually forming part of a reference to the noughties American hip hop star of the same name, whose track Right Thurr Digga riffs off in the chorus.

In Mohamed’s documentary, we see Digga in the act of explaining these lyrics and ones like them to his lawyer. There is something undeniably dystopian about the sight of an artist being forced to justify the legality of their art to a legal representative, and the documentary is particularly evocative in its communication of this absurdity.

But with a staggering 90 fatal stabbings taking place on the streets of London just last year, it is easy to see why many have moved to condemn drill music and the culture of violence, gang-ties and criminality that it so often represents. As always however, a little perspective serves well here. Drill is not the first genre of music to become the focus of society’s moral panic, and it certainly won’t be the last. Yesterday it was grime, 100 years ago it was jazz, and four centuries before that puritanical pamphleteers like John Northbrooke and Stephen Gosson railed still against the Digga Ds of their day.

And whilst it would certainly be remiss not to appreciate the unique problems posed by this much-talked about musical movement – namely, that the lyrical sparring upon gang lines might spill out into real-world violence on the streets – it is important to remember that drill music did not birth violence, but rather, was born from it, raised in it, and subsequently became the product of its surroundings.

When the terms of Digga D’s CBO were formulated in 2018, Det Ch Supt Kevin Southworth was unwavering in his claim that the police were interested only in the safety of the public: “We’re not in the business of killing anyone’s fun, we’re not in the business of killing anyone’s artistic expression – we are in the business of stopping people being killed.” Many would argue however, that public resources could be better spent addressing the structures underlying the violence, as opposed to the music that talks about it.

But no matter how many people brand his chosen mode of creative expression a problem, for Digga D and so many young artists like him, drill continues to be a solution; a golden ticket to a life free from the traumas of violence, and away from the magnetic pull of the streets.