Love, hate, beauty and justice: affective and aesthetic economies of UK drill and its criminalization

This paper offers a cultural-legal examination of UK Drill – a genre of drill music, a Black music subculture – contrasting its cultural significance and public popularity with its institutional and legal framing as a dangerous practice associated with youth and gang violence and its relation to criminalizing legal processes and practices. By adopting an aesthetic approach, the article contrasts two different imaginaries of UK drill – the 'street' and the 'criminal justice' imaginaries – with a particular focus on how these imaginaries frame and articulate the relationship between drill and violence. The analysis in the paper is developed in three steps. First, it explores the different aesthetic economies built around drill in the two imaginaries. In both the 'street' and the 'criminal justice' imaginaries of UK drill, there are complex dynamics of love and hate, or attraction and repulsion in relation to violence that are both aesthetically driven and aesthetically mobilized. The second move then turns to develop an aesthetic analysis of aspects of form, style and presentation in relation both to UK drill and to its criminalization to show how different and largely disparate images of violence percolate the context of UK drill and its artistic output. The final section of the paper brings together the previous analyses by discussing them in relation to the concept of aesthetic injustice.