Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy

A page-turning ethnography of Chicago South side drillers that shatters stereotypes and one-dimensional views of the genre and its practitioners. This book stands as a nice companion to Jooyoung Lee's Blowin' Up. They both take the readers behind the scenes of their respective rap scenes. But where Lee's rappers joined Project Blowed precisely as a potential escape from gang life, whose cultural trappings were not tolerated at PB, the Taylor Park drillers fully commodify the stereotypical tropes of the gangsters in hope of an elusive social mobility, or, at the very least to get by.
Stuart provides detailed accounts of the benefits and dangers of trying to join the attention economy, a relatively safe endeavor for more privileged show more individuals, a double-edged sword for marginalized young men from the South Side.
The book also provides an interesting discussion of the debates about the ethnography in terms of accuracy and transparency, debates that emerged after the publication of Alice Goffman's book, On the Run.
This is a highly readable book for undergraduate students, for sociology instructors out there, looking for some interesting reads (textbooks are boring) that might engage students and make them grapple with the dilemmas of sociological research. show less