It's definitely something I'm over-exposed to because I love watching terrible tiktok musicians, but I'm really stuck by the fact that everyone in a post-Drill America seemingly wants to be a shooter. Rich southern white girls producing dog ass country music shooting imaginary dual pistols at the camera. Weird conservative rappers flashing guns exactly like ten year old drill videos. Painful "emo" revival artists trying to talk like they're hard by acting out their idea of a gangster. It's so weird to see this spread in the way that it has. Seems like an extension of the Suburban Punisher phenomenon. It's like white Americans have guns, and love John Wick and shit, so much that they're adopting the aesthetic of gangland Chicago as a socially-economical avenue to project this fantasy of being some kind of badass, while also treating it as pure rhetoric and hyperbole rather than just straight up war journals and lived reality and shit. The conservative phenomenon is even more baffling given how blatantly racist they tend to be about gang violence and Chicago in particular, yet they embrace it in such a juvenile way. This, more than anything, feels like it highlights the core truth of American culture. We love gun violence, and the coolest thing you can be is somebody who shoots people with a gun. No matter what form one needs to contort themself into in order to legitimize that. None of this is new, of course, but it seems so distilled in the current moment.
dailybridgerton
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snowghoul
