The naked lady at both ends of society...are we censoring youth voice?

The culture of drill is an identity that young people all across the country look to identify with these days. Through our work (even down in the seaside resort of Torbay), working with vulnerable young people in challenging circumstances we often find that young people are passionate about writing lyrics that are frequently glamorising behaviours that as an organisation with youth music funding, we look to actively challenge. More often than not young people look to brag about sexist, homophobic, drug taking and violent behaviours, which are usually not apparent in their lives.

Working in this sector for a number of years I have previously been able to challenge these attitudes through grime and hip-hop as they were more popular then. Both these genres contained more reflective and emotive songs and this could channel the young people to open up more through their lyric writing. With drill being such a dominant part in the media formats these young people access nowadays, we have had a real struggle in how we censor the content the young people are producing in their lyrics.

Of course if the content is true and it is describing their real life struggles, then as long as the young people are producing this in a reflective way rather than an aggressive manner, we are happy to work with this. What we are frequently seeing (especially in group work) is a high testosterone and macho atmosphere as these young people fear looking vulnerable in front of their peers. There’s less opening up and more putting on a fake bravado.

As an example if a young person puts into their lyrics ‘ I am going to fucking break your legs’ we would certainly not allow this. However, if they put ‘I fucked my life up’ then we would encourage them to explore this emotion and allow this content in their song. Frequently we see lyrics around stabbing people, carrying weapons, attacking other gangs and drug references. More often than not we cannot let this content be shared.

It pains me that these young people who are not in mainstream education, who typically will not achieve GCSE’s, who can only maintain attention for short periods and may have an undiagnosed neuro diverse disorder, HAVE produced pages and pages of lyrical content they have written themselves including similes, rhyming words, structure, intelligent language and shared their emotions.  And we are telling them what they can and can’t say. They have achieved this by being influenced by drill artists and the after working with us in the production/recording process we are telling them they cannot have this work due to the risky themes involved.

Is this right? Are we actually censoring young peoples voices? Our organisation is all around ensuring the power of young people’s voices is heard.

After years of this issue nagging away at me, but always being confident in my stance on boundaries, I had a real awakening moment when in discussion with a teacher in a PRU. He said to me ‘if a young person draws a naked lady in an art lesson, they will get punished for it being inappropriate and sexual. However if we were to take them to a famous museum in London, society celebrates the value of famous art works of pictures of naked ladies worth millions of pounds.’ How can we say this is wrong? Aren’t we giving them real misinformation here?

Ultimately, I think there are two things going on here. Firstly, drill music is overall just another culture similar to punk and hip hop which challenged the social systems and oppression that our young people face.

Secondly, our young people are being silenced for achieving though inspiration from a culture they can relate to. It oddly seems we should be celebrating that our young people are finding their voice and identity through a form of music which signifies so much anger at their life challenges.

It’s taking me a while to share this topic although it’s an issue that I face more and more in our work down in Torbay through our youth music funded project. Although typical thoughts of Torbay are of tourism and luxury, it is an areas faced with huge levels of deprivation and is actually the most deprived in the South West. Perhaps that’s why this type of youth movement is so relevant here. I’d be really interested to hear how others have found their experiences working with drill music.