The world’s biggest drill rapper may spend the rest of his life in bars—and no one should want his crown. This week, Chicago rapper Lil Durk was arrested in an alleged murder-for-hire plot to kill Savannah, Georgia rapper Quando Rondo in L.A. in August of 2022. Quando’s cousin Lul Pab was murdered instead, spurring Quando’s anguished cries at the crime scene. Then Durk put those “no” wails on the intro to an unreleased song, to the awe of the same voyeurs and Reddit rats now calling Durk foolish for engaging the beef that they giddily spectated.
Durk’s arrest punctuates the beef between his friend and OTF affiliate King Von (killed in 2020), and their rivals Youngboy Never Broke Again (incarcerated) and Quando Rondo (awaiting sentencing next week on a federal drug case). What’s most disheartening is that it’s unclear why the conflict even started — all of these men were cool at one point. Chicago rapper Lil Reese, a close friend of Durk, told No Jumper that NBA Youngboy’s crew would occasionally hang out with him in Chicago. In 2019, Durk made an X post noting, “Young boy so hard.” King Von and Rondo (who’s signed to NBA Youngboy’s Never Broke Again records) had been friendly.
But apparently, something happened behind the scenes to sour their feelings on each other. During a March 2019 Instagram Live session, King Von dissed NBA Youngboy’s music, proclaiming, “you got cap in your raps,” but then walked it back by saying he was joking and they had music coming — in February of 2020, Von made an X post urging Youngboy to drop a song they did together. In August of 2020, Von posted a picture holding hands with someone who fans pinpointed was likely Jania Meshell, the child of Youngboy’s mother (she says they were merely doing a song together). The next day, Youngboy posted a photo on Instagram with a caption proclaiming, “I’m gone make sure my son fuck yo daughter since you trollin,” a shot many people think was aimed at Von. During the same time frame, Quando Rondo and Lil Reese began trading shots on social media.
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Just days before Von’s death, a YoungBoy song with Von’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, rapper Asian Doll, leaked. In November 2020, King Von downplayed the fracture in an interview with DJ Akademiks, noting, “It ain’t nothin’ too serious” and saying the internet was blowing it out of proportion. It was his last interview; later that night, he ran into Quando at a club in Atlanta, fought him, and then was allegedly fatally shot by Quando’s friend, Lul Timm. Things went beyond the point of resolution with Von’s death. Durk had known Von for years, signed him after he came home from beating a murder case in 2017, and together they helped turn Durk’s OTF (Only The Family) label into a formidable rap movement.
Over the next couple of years, Durk and the duo of Youngboy and Quando began relentlessly trading shots on social media and in diss songs. Fans egged on the beef, raiding Durk’s Instagram comment section to tell him to “slide for Von.” For these fans, prone to viewing the street violence tied to rap like a reality show, Von’s death wasn’t a sign that things had gone too far, it was just another plot point. The dividing lines were drawn by the artists but sharpened by fans who poured through Twitter (now X) posts, Instagram Lives, and songs in search of would-be subliminals about the next man.
Whatever was happening between them before Von’s death seems like the kind of oneupmanship that rappers grow out of and reflect on as youthful egotism. Iconic rapper 50 Cent had an aughts beef with Fat Joe that seemed on the verge of violence, but they were able to squash it, and the two now seem like pretty close friends. In February of last year, he told Rolling Stone that maturation made him realize he was “buggin’” for going after Joe like that. He also said that he recognized what was happening between Durk and YoungBoy. “Those things that they’re coming from is making them do that. Their whole experience is in the music.”
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50 has a lot of parallels with both men. His Southside Queens upbringing was an allure for many of his fans. Gangster rap pioneer Ice T called 50 “the last gangster rapper,” telling Soren Baker that he “believed” the Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ artist. “I think a real gangsta rapper has to scare you a little bit. I don’t think there’s no new people that do it,” Ice T said. But in 2024, there’s no long-term incentive for an artist’s main draw to be fear. The fans lurking on Reddit pages and watching Trap Lore Ross videos want to see artists figuratively walking a tightrope between art and reality. They want to feel like Durk’s bars about calling hits on opps are about someone specific. And when an artist inevitably slips during the highwire act and falls, it’s solely on them. They’re “stupid” for wasting their opportunity, even if so much of drill rap’s appeal comes from the very authenticity fans seek. It’s a no-win paradox.
Drill rap is a dead end that artists no longer need to go down. This isn’t a statement on these scenes’ artistic merit; the scene has given us geniuses like Durk, Chief Keef, G Herbo, Sheff G, Pop Smoke, and artists like Cash Cobain and Ice Spice have cultivated the fun, Cobain-coined offshoot sexy drill. But drill scenes as a whole have become too corrupted by the weight of criminalization. There are too many fans ogling rappers as racist, hypermasculine caricatures who don’t consider the anti-Blackness in demanding artists to live their raps at the expense of their life or freedom. There are too many “media personalities” with no respect for hip-hop as an art form, making millions by insensitively feeding these fans their dose of Black nihilism. And, more than ever, there are too many District Attorneys who can’t wait to ensnare artists in their next gang indictment. Drill rap has become a blight on hip-hop not because of the artists but because of people who don’t treat it as art. They’re the people who drill artists are trying to excite to their own detriment.
Much of the violence in the streets stems from people protecting their reputations, and unfortunately, drill music is so inextricably linked with gang violence that the dynamic has bled into its fandom. The music has been reduced to a soundtrack to countrywide gang violence that’s decimating a generation of Black and Brown youth. And instead of this circumstance stoking alarm, it’s become entertainment that artists feel compelled to play into. On “Wonderful Wayne and Jackie Boy,” Durk rapped, “I don’t beef on the net that shit fed years,” but still occasionally played with fire just to let people know who he was. That’s why after Von’s death, Durk’s lyrics have left a trail of damning hints at retaliation that may find their way into a courtroom. It’s why, after Pab’s death, he put Quando’s cries on a song and cheekily told DJ Akademiks he no longer saw “slide for Von” comments on his Instagram “for some odd reason.” His perception doesn’t just hinge on good music. He’s feeding his fans’ desire to believe him. But at this point, after two young men are dead allegedly behind nonsense, it’s worth wondering how many more Black lives hip-hop “believability” is worth.
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These fans didn’t force Durk to do what he’s alleged to have done; he’s a grown man with autonomy. But the five-years-long beef is a glimpse of a rap subculture suffocating on its own bloodlust. In September 2022, Quando told Rolling Stone that “I think about changing all the time, but he “can’t change because people don’t want a nigga to change. It’s like the respect and my rep going to leave if a nigga change.” The very rap fans who prop Quando up are a part of that people. They don’t like him solely because he makes good music, it’s because they think he’s a gangster who makes good music.
Elsewhere in the interview, Quando noted, “Niggas live a violent life. Ain’t no changing that. Everybody could say, ‘You could change…’ It’s over with big bro, nigga too far off.” He seemingly saw no way out. In 2020, Durk rapped, “They ask me where I’ma be in ten years, shit, I said, ‘The feds.’” Both men seem resigned to a dire fate set forth by a country that failed them. Fans spectated the OTF-Youngboy beef like a sporting rivalry, but in the end, only the system won. Even if they escaped their home environments physically, they couldn’t do so mentally. And the voyeuristic fans who watched them court martyrdom didn’t want them to.
