‘A generation has been completely wiped out,” says Luton-born artist RIP Germain. He’s talking about the UK drill scene, a subject he explores in his latest exhibition. In an image used to publicise the show, we see the faces of 42 rappers, all of them in prison.
“In autumn last year, there was literally no one,” he says. “The scene was actually dead, everyone was locked up.”
RIP Germain’s brutal, uncomfortable, confrontational installation explores UK drill music’s lyrical violence – and society’s voracious appetite for it. It asks how an entire musical movement could end up being lost to the UK prison system.
The first work is a storm drain cut into the gallery floor, its grates the same size as the peepholes in UK prison doors. Peer down into the dark basement and a police van is flashing its lights. Downstairs, the room has been cleaned with forensics-grade bleach, the air cooled to the temperature of a morgue. That police van is actually a coffin for you to climb into to watch 101 hours of UK drill music videos, documentaries and social media posts. It’s suffocatingly claustrophobic and relentless in its glorification of guns and death. But the real shock is in realising how normalised, how mainstream, how celebrated this level of violence is.
“People nowadays are starved of culture, so anything that seems like the real deal they gravitate towards,” says the artist, who keeps his real name secret. “Any form of subculture that people belong to in a genuine way, people want the keys to access that.” In the case of UK drill, its authenticity is integral to its success, and crime and violence – in the form of murder, assault and drug running – is key to that authenticity. “That’s a quick route to stardom,” RIP Germain says. “Take someone like [Camden rapper] Suspect, the way he blew up is that when he was releasing tracks and getting hundreds of thousands of views he was already on the run for murder and living in Kenya. The reputation is what attracts people to the music, and that’s what determines success.”
Fans consume UK drill’s everyday gang violence in the same way that people consume true crime podcasts: they’re paying to satisfy a thirst for real death, as opposed to the fantasy of violence and gore provided by something like the horror genre. But that reality is also its downfall. The police monitor and delete UK drill videos from YouTube and social media, and at the same time the videos and lyrics can be used as evidence against the artists in court, all while the artists are expected to be authentic and to brag about these acts of violence.
“It’s a trap,” RIP Germain says. “That’s where the audience comes into play. The vast majority of fans are not like the people making the music, and they are using them as avatars and living vicariously through them. For any medium to thrive, it’s going to be white suburban kids that are the biggest pool of buyers. That’s always the plight of Black entertainers.”
Given that these rappers are objectively doing well – making money, signing to major labels – why is the lure of crime still so appealing to them?
“If you’ve grown up a certain way it’s very hard to jump out of your own brain and reformat yourself,” says the artist. “Society is placing an outrageous level of expectation on these people, and there has been no space and complexity given to their lifestyles. This is an industry where a lot of people come from group homes, child services, alternative schooling, young offenders. It’s not a scene where the average person comes from a straightforward middle-class background.”
Drill isn’t unique in its glorification of violent lifestyles: its antecedents in gangster rap and grime did plenty of that. As RIP Germain says: “There was extreme violence way before drill, and there will be after drill.” What’s notable about drill, however, is the way its commitment to violence has led to its own annihilation.
The work isn’t an attack on UK drill culture, far from it. RIP Germain is deeply passionate and hugely knowledgable about the scene. Part-historian, part-archivist, he obsessively collects and saves videos that he knows are likely to be deleted by the police.
Hip-hop culture has played an important part in much of RIP Germain’s work. The artist’s last major installation, Jesus Died for Us, We Will Die for Dudus! at the ICA in 2023, centred on a genuine, blinged-out, Hatton Garden-made thick gold necklace of a white Tupac wearing a crown of thorns, encrusted with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Hip-hop, and more specifically gangster rap, functions for him as a way of attacking dominant power structures and questioning the way society consumes Black culture.
He says he’s using UK drill to make a wider point: “Western culture is in love with violence. It’s a societal violence, it’s across the board. UK drill is the topic I’m using to explore how society functions, and how some people find that the only avenue they have to make it in life is to sell death, to sell their own imprisonment. That’s the currency exchange: ‘I’m exchanging the culture that you want for monetary gain. There’s consequences, but for now I’m going to look the other way to make it out of this neighbourhood.’ These people become products.”
The show acts as a plea for clemency, for nuance, for forgiveness and understanding. “It’s not to absolve anyone of responsibility, it’s to look at the picture and see a group of kids that have been let down, and they’ve let themselves down, in a big way. And the work I’ve done over the past six years is flying a red flag saying we need to get ahead of this.”
The brilliance of RIP Germain’s installation is in first making you an outside observer, peering through the prison door peephole from an objective distance, and then forcing you into that coffin, making you get properly face-to-face with the death that’s being sold and celebrated. He’s showing you that this isn’t just entertainment, these are lives being lost. What’s truly horrifying isn’t the violence itself, it’s the pleasure we take from consuming it.
• RIP Germain: Anti-Blackness Is Bad, Even the Parts That We Like is at Cabinet, London, until 10 May
