Book review: Forrest Stuart, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Author | Marta-Marika Urbanik |
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806211056766 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Garland D (2012) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Forrest Stuart, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy, Princeton
University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2020; 288 pp.: 9780691194431, $27.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Marta-Marika Urbanik, University of Alberta, Canada
In Ballad of the Bullet, Forrest Stuart provides a timely analysis of the digital economy,
with careful attention to the connections between drill music, social media, and gang vio-
lence. Drawing upon ethnographic observation and interviews with gang-associated
Black youth in South Side Chicago, Stuart illuminates how and why the young men
create violent online personas and engage in ‘internet banging’(Patton et al., 2013).
He traces changes to social, economic, cultural, and gang milieus in recent decades,
arguing that fluctuating conditions have encouraged disenfranchised young Black men
to adapt to the new realities of the inner-city. In doing so, he dissects the youths’motiva-
tions and pressures to participate in and exploit the commodification of urban poverty and
violence via violent music videos and social media presentations. By carefully analysing
the youths’self-branding and participation in online gang beefs and collaborations,
Stuart’s book offers rich insights into the ‘digital street’(Lane, 2016).
The book has broad analytical foci and provides empirical evidence and critical com-
mentary on numerous social phenomena that shape the day-to-day realities of aspiring
drill artists trying to digitally build ‘micro celebrity’(Senft, 2008). To illustrate, Stuart
frames online bravado and carefully curated online gang beefs as a way for disempow-
ered young Black men to resist their oppression and increasingly grim chances of suc-
ceeding via prosocial avenues. He unmasks how the young men struggle to maximize
the benefits of online clout and infamy (which can translate to recognition in the physical
streets)—with hopes of providing for themselves and their families and becoming visible
in a society committed to forsaking them—all while attempting to limit the risks of online
posturing. He also notes white, privileged, suburban youths’perverse fascinations with
and consumptions of racialized poverty and the ‘ghetto’can influence the risks aspiring
drill rappers take to garner and subsequently monetize notoriety.
One of the work’s strongest contributions is its careful contextualization of the shift
that occurs from the longstanding hold that the drug economy had on the lives of margin-
alized youth (and the fracturing of gang structures generally) to the ‘online attention
economy’—specifically in the form of ‘likes’and ‘views’—to reap financial and social
benefits. Stuart meticulously documents the possibilities social media affords drillers,
specifically in terms of upwards social mobility, self-worth, love, and pride. He argues
that while the attention economy can provide those at the bottom of the economic,
social, and racial hierarchy with one of the only feasible (even though only remotely)
and dignified ways to succeed, it also has numerous adverse effects, further perpetuating
youths’marginalization. What really emerges from his account is the level of work and
attention that goes into carefully curating these personas and online beefs; those in the
‘know’can come to understand the digital street’s ebbs and flows while outsiders
178 Theoretical Criminology 26(1)
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