BONUS: George Chidi on Atlanta's Rap Murder Spree
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Hey guys, Sean here and welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Now, normally we put the following episode out as a bonus for our Patreon subscribers. Thanks as always to you guys, especially if you stuck with us and you helped keep the lights on over the past couple trying months. On that front, we'll actually be back with some big news and an actual real episode early next week, guys. Trust me when I say we've been itching to go for a long, long time.

But given what's happened today, Danny and I wanted to put this show on the main feed. If you haven't already seen, last night the rapper Takeoff was shot dead at a bowling alley in Houston, Texas. Takeoff, real name Kersnick, carried ball, age 28, was one third of the Trio Migos, an Atlanta group that's become one of the world's biggest rap outfits the past decade. And they've really helped keep the Georgia capital scene one of the highest on earth.

Atlanta's rap scene has also been mired in gang violence and death. In a place, Atlanta, whose murder rate has gone through the roof in the past couple years, it's outstripping Chicago, which, as we know, is every politician's favorite bellwether of a failed city.

And I just came back from Atlanta like two days ago. And while I was there, I headed to the east of the city to meet George Chidi, a crime reporter who's done a bunch of work on this stuff and who had some really interesting things to say about this whole cynical ecosystem of music, gangs and corruption in town. Well,

We'll definitely do a longer show about this further down the line because it's such a rich and complex subject and it definitely needs picking apart in fine detail. But for now, straight from a beer bar in Atlanta, like three days ago I think, here's this week's episode. Hope you enjoy. Yeah, okay.

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Underworld Podcast. I'm Sean Williams and I'm at a bar in Decatur. Did I say that right? On the east side of Atlanta with George Chidi, a reporter writing as the Atlanta Objective, former journal Constitution staffer and contributor to a whole bunch of other outlets as well. George is hopefully going to enlighten us on what's going down with Atlanta's music business.

young thugs incarceration, I guess we'll talk about. A bunch of other guys who are getting done on gang-related charges and, well, mayhem. It seems like it's going on. So, first, thanks for talking to me, George. I mean, let's start off with your own work. Tell us a bit more about yourself, first off. So...

My life is weird. It has been for a long time. I bounced back and forth between being a journalist and being an activist, I guess, in Atlanta for going on 15 years. I spent a lot of time writing about and working on issues of homelessness and mental health and imprisonment.

With the pandemic hit, I was in the street with everybody else looking at criminal justice issues. And while I was there, I noticed that the crime rate was starting to tick up in town in ways that were really disturbing. And because I've been a political writer for a long time, I realized it was going to have a political effect. Like when crime moves up, politicians stop voting.

They stopped doing the reforms that everybody was in the street about. So I started writing very carefully about why crime was rising in Atlanta, looking very closely at the causes. One of those causes, it turns out, is that rappers behave badly in Atlanta.

that there's a gang problem in Atlanta and the gang problem is connected to the music industry. So one thing leads to another and I'm ahead of everybody else on this arrest of Young Thug and the members of the YSL gang slash music label. Suddenly I'm a music journalist. Like...

And I got to tell you, like, if it's post-Wu-Tang Clan, I need a map and a compass most of the time. But the last year has been a primer. Like, I'm starting to get it. Who are your favorite artists coming out of the city at the moment? Lil Nas X all day long. Look, I've been a Killer Mike fan forever and ever and ever and ever. And in particular, Killer Mike is woke and...

Depending on who you're talking to around here, that could be pejorative or not. Mike is both authentic and cares about his community, and it shows. My rap interests are eclectic. I personally give me... I mean, I like Future locally, but I'm also...

I'm in the Odd Future set, all right? So, I mean, just like sort of geek rap. That's me. And I mean, in the last few years, like in the last five or so years, it's like really Atlanta has been the city for kind of the lineage of American rap music. But it's had this kind of indelible link to the underworld here as well, right? And how did that all kind of kick off in the first place?

So it's interesting and a long story. I mean, first things first, absolutely. Like, Atlanta is dominant right now in terms of who people around the country and the world are listening to for rap music. Maybe one out of four top 20 rap artists, like, on any given week is going to be an Atlanta musician, a future little baby, young thug before he went to jail. The...

And I think that that's likely to continue even after all of these arrests are taking place. But yeah, there's absolutely a link to the street culture and to street gangs, all of which are name checked regularly in music that's being made here. I don't think the connection is incidental.

I think the street gangs tend to use music as a way of attracting new gang members. If you're a 14-year-old and you want to get into the music industry, it's really easy for one of these groups that's linked to a music, like a, you know, and people are going to yell at me when I say this, but Lil Baby name checks 4PF regularly. That's a street gang called Four Pockets Full.

Four Pockets Full has legal problems, frankly, and some of their people are in jail. But it's easy if you're a Four Pockets Full guy to say, look, come join our gang. Maybe you'll meet little baby and maybe we could get you some studio time.

That was certainly the case with YSL. Like, their guys would... Some of their guys would go to jail, they'd come out and they'd immediately go into the studio. They would immediately go into the studio. They would be picked up outside of the jail and driven to a studio to start rapping. So this is a label like YSL that... It's not just playing off the kind of street rap of its artists, right? It's like...

It's a kind of like feedback loop where it's deliberately saying we are gangsters. This is what we do. We're criminals. If you do crime, you can actually come join us. I mean, where does the record label end and the gang begin? Like the amazing thing is that like it's this Schrodinger's cat kind of thing. It's a Rorschach test. Like they want to be a gang when it is advantageous to them

Like when they're on the street and they're trying to recruit gang members and they want to be a record label when they're in court and being accused of being, you know, an illegal criminal street gang. I think they deliberately cultivate ambiguity about that. The like YSL, for example, like like Young Thug sponsors a Pop Warner football team.

called like the Cleveland Avenue 49ers, showing how he's giving back to the community while ignoring what may potentially be 50 murders that have taken place in this gang war between YSL and YFN. YSL predates the music.

And there's a direct lineage you can draw between Young Slime Life, the street gang, and earlier incarnations of street gangs on Cleveland Avenue in Atlanta, like the Raised on Cleveland, which gets name-checked in his music, like Raised on Bleveland, where you replace the C with a B because you're Bloods, which itself was an outgrowth of 30 Deep, which was a street gang that tended to do a lot of...

robberies of high-end fashion where they knock over the place, steal a bunch of $100 blue jeans and then sell them out of somebody's house for $20. The media called them the blue-jean bandits at one point. Members of YSL today were arrested, charged, and convicted for crimes like 10 and 15 years ago with 30 Deep. 30 Deep, also something Young Thug name-checks in his music.

It's, you know, they want to claim this lineage because it creates street authenticity. And that authenticity sells records. But they also don't want to say that they're a street gang when they're in jail and facing a charge of being a member of a violent criminal street gang. And...

Some of the city governance here has been talking about RICO in these guys, right? Is that happening at the moment? So YSL is one of several street gangs that are facing a state-level racketeering charge. YSL has a racketeering charge. YFN, which was their main rival in Atlanta, is also facing a racketeering charge.

There's a group called Rich Gang, not Rich Gang, Drug Rich, which is actually out of DeKalb, but they were robbing houses, including Mariah Carey's house in North Fulton. And so they're facing a racketeering charge. And the district attorney, Fannie Willis, is...

Fannie Willis is aggressively using the racketeering statute in order to prosecute local gangs in ways that we haven't seen before in 20 years. And, I mean, you've written a lot about kind of the cops here as well, use of forces. Kind of the policing around Metro Atlanta is questionable, is it fair to say? I mean, how...

What's the relationship like with the city and the cops and everything going on like that as well? It's a fascinating question. So people were in the street two years ago over police brutality, and they burned down... I watched them do it. They burned down a Wendy's where police officers killed a guy at a traffic stop. Those police officers were exonerated a couple of months ago, and...

There have been six fatal police shootings in Atlanta this year, which is three times the normal number. But there hasn't been some massive outcry by the public.

In part because violent crime is up and people are far more concerned about violent crime than police brutality issues, or so it would seem. Honestly, I think that the media is falling down here. We should be presenting all of this stuff in exactly the same way, like with exactly the same amount of urgency, and we're not. That's part of the reason I do the work that I do.

And the murder rate here now has topped Chicago. And we're getting to Central America levels, I think, where I've seen it. It's like, I mean, it's getting pretty bad. So we are higher than Chicago. Like the murder rate. And like, I want to make sure because people like numbers, it gets weird. There have been roughly 160 murders over the last 12 months, sort of 12 months running.

And there were 160 or so murders the previous year, but there were only 100 murders the year before that. Like the violent crime in Atlanta exploded during the pandemic and it has not receded yet. Like the irony is that violent crime in Chicago, like it increased, but not nearly by the same percentage amount, even though they'll probably have 800 or 900 murders this year.

They're also six times as large as Atlanta. The city of Atlanta is only about 500,000 people. So that's what we're looking at. But we're talking about a murder rate like that's 40 per 100,000, where the national rate is more like 6.5 per 100,000. It's a serious problem. It's a real problem. It is like it's still not as bad as it has been historically.

Let me hasten to say, the murder rate in America and in Atlanta peaked in the early 90s. We're still safer today than we were back then. But there's been this massive change. And people react to that with panic. And I wish people wouldn't panic. Because it gets more people killed. I'm anti-panic. That's a good thing to be. I mean...

In terms of this, like, the gangs and the music and how these are interlocking at the moment, I mean, there was even a case this week, right? There's a guy being put down, sent down for murder. He's YSL, right? So this stuff is very alive. Like, so he is... And I don't understand what he was doing on the stand. He... Jaden Myrick is one of the...

two dozen people who are accused in this wide-ranging RICO and gang case that is also with Young Thug and Gunna. But he was also charged with a murder in 2018 of killing some people at a country club, like in a robbery.

And he took the stand a couple of days ago and said, yeah, I was with YSL. And like, you know, I'm obliged. And like, you know, I was jumped in at some point. But it took a while because I was too young when I first joined. And oh, by the way, I rep for PF now. And I've talked to little baby since I've been in jail. Like, and he's saying all this stuff on the stand. And I'm looking at this like.

You still have another trial coming up on the gang stuff. Now, yes, you just got convicted. You've been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. You're never coming out. I legitimately don't understand what he thought he was going to gain by testifying. But it speaks to the brazenness of a lot of this. At the end of the day, somebody wants to stand up like...

Like it's Game of Thrones and you want to call somebody a bastard before you get your head cut off and just say it out loud. Here we are. And like, what's the deal with Drill here as well? Drill is kind of getting more popular. I mean, that's my touch point with this because Drill in London has been such a kind of like media...

Black Beast in that like you've got the right wing saying this is this is like the worst thing in the world these guys are it's there's like veiled racism going on there for sure and on the other side you're like well he did rap that he killed this guy with a knife at this time on this street and he pretty much fucking did do that so it's like Drilly's getting big here as well right in Atlanta yeah so pandemic

Here's a little history. Pandemic hits, everybody shuts down, everybody shuts down, and then Atlanta opens back up again because our governor, Brian Kemp, is a moron. But also because he's pro-business and all the rest of this. So our clubs reopened when everybody else's clubs were closed. And suddenly we started to have this influx of people coming in from out of town to party here, some of whom were from Chicago.

The working theory is that Chicago began to influence rap. Now, there was a drill element to Atlanta rap that had started to emerge before this. How could there not be? The music is universal. Everybody's listening to it everywhere. You could assume it's going to be influential here. But it really started to infect the music here. Trap is very different from drill. Trap is about

Guys who are poor trying to get paid, like running drugs and women and clubs. Trap is different from Drill, which is about ops and getting shot and shooting people. And that was not Atlanta rap culture before. It is starting to be Atlanta rap culture now. And there's one artist in particular who's called Baby Drill, who is going to go on trial for murder.

He is accused of leaving a strip club in Atlanta a few months ago, getting in the backseat of an SUV and blowing the head off of the guy in the front seat of that SUV. There was a music executive from one of the labels who testified at his bond hearing. I mean, because that's where things are right now.

It's not like this connection between the violence and the music industry is not incidental. Not when industry reps are showing up in court and paying people's legal fees. And it's got to stop. Like, I don't like I'm not going to be some like conservative, you know, like all rap is evil and you need to stop this stuff and whatnot.

But like the community needs to come together and say, look, this is not of us. Like this is Atlanta influences everything. Like so we have some social responsibility to not spread that influence any farther than it needs to go. And midterms just around the corner as well. How is is this becoming a big part of the narrative for the midterms?

Crime is a big deal in the midterms. Conservatives have been pushing crime and they've been trying to link Democratic politicians to the defund the police thing, which is untrue, which is fundamental. Not that the truth matters in politics these days, but...

There's no mainstream Democratic politician who's ever been calling for police defunding. They added to the police budget in Atlanta significantly, I might add, honestly, in ways that I find disturbing.

But, yeah, it's like we're just right at the edge of Willie Horton ads where they're going to start putting the pictures of maybe rappers who've shot people up and saying, hey, if you want this guy to shoot someone else, vote for a Democrat. That's the tenor of Georgia politics right now. There isn't really a lot of issue advertising going on. It's all visceral, personal, personal.

fear-mongering, and it's exactly what I was afraid of. Is any of this... Is any of the gang stuff and any of this, like, blood-influenced gang crime... I mean, are you seeing it on the street? Like, from day to day, is Atlanta a particularly dangerous place to be walking about? Absolutely not. So that's the other thing. Like...

You really have to be looking for trouble in order to be the victim of violence. Like when somebody who isn't is a victim of violence, it is both rare and extraordinary and newsworthy. But I mean, if you're a white guy in Atlanta, I'm just going to say this. If you're a white guy in Atlanta, your odds of being killed here are actually lower than they would be in Boise, Texas.

Last year, the city went six months before its first white murder victim. There were 158 people who were killed in Atlanta last year, and 142 of them were black.

And it's because Atlanta's poverty is racially identifiable in ways that is not so much in other parts of the world. The average income for a white household in Atlanta is over $80,000 a year. For a black household, it's around $30,000 a year. It's the largest gap in the United States. And the violence follows the poverty.

It is the inequality that drives the violence. It's why things increased as much as they did in Atlanta. It's because Atlanta had more inequality than basically any other city in the United States. Like, and that's the thing. If you're not staring at a problem that can't be solved except with money, like you're not... If you and I have a problem, bearing in mind I'm African-American, but I've got a little money. Like, if I have a problem, I will write a check. Yeah!

I'll hire a lawyer. I'll call a cab. Like, I can fix it. Like, if you're poor and you're black, violence looks like an option because you don't have other options. And that's why it happened. I guess there's not so many white rappers coming out of Atlanta rapping about slinging drugs to make a living. I can't think of one. There are none. The short answer is there are none because there are literally not enough poor white people in Atlanta. Um,

The poverty rate for black people in Atlanta is around 30%. The poverty rate for white people in Atlanta is around 6%. Yeah, that kind of speaks for itself. What do you think, being a local reporter, what do you think people are missing about the music and the gangs here? Like...

On the country-wide narrative, or even outside of the country, do you think there's a lot of stuff going over people's heads, or are they deliberately mischaracterizing the whole thing? I think, to start, I think people are... I think they make light of the real...

casualties here. There's a cynicism. If you're listening to Trap or Gangster Rap, Drill, whatever you want to call it. If you're listening to music where they're talking about people dying on the street, it's not... They're talking about actual people who are dying on the street. And I can name names. This isn't arbitrary. Lives are changed. Communities are changed.

And I think people don't understand their personal culpability in this. If you're putting money in the pockets of people who are profiting from the death of poor black people, you have to ask yourself whether or not you bear some social responsibility for that. Because the whole purpose of this music is to get paid. And you're the one who's paying them.

I'm not saying don't listen to rap music. Please listen to rap music. Please listen to Atlanta rap music. But understand that when we're talking about real street gangs like YSL or YFN or Four Pockets Full or 4PF or Play for Keeps, that's PFK, or Homicide or The Henchmen or 5L or 4L or any of these guys, like...

There's when they're talking about like the bodies that they've dropped, there are human beings who are dead. And if you're listening to this music and you don't care about that, like there's a moral judgment to be made. Like that's what. And are there any like big moments coming up in the near future then? Like any trials, any cases that are going to kind of further define this whole thing?

Like the big one, of course, is YSL. Now, on paper, it's supposed to start in January. There's no way it starts in January. It's probably going to be pushed to late March or maybe later. The YFN case with YFN Lucci and the other YFN gang members is also going to hit sometime in the middle of next year.

The Baby Drill case, I think, is important. There's also some smaller cases, like for people that you probably have never heard of before, like Glock 40 Spaz. That's a real game. Baby Drill has got a record label, but most people haven't heard of it. What I'm waiting for, other...

music groups slash street gangs to get rounded up in big RICO cases. And like the district attorney's got her eye on like a half a dozen street gangs, most of which are tied to one rapper or another. I don't think it changes rap in the sense that I think Atlanta is going to be a rap metropole basically forever.

There's just too much infrastructure, too many people paying attention, too much love for this city. And I love this city. And the rappers who are rapping here love this city, I think. This is like... But this gang culture is a product of...

of the inequality and poverty that are endemic in this city. Like, that is real. They are rapping about things that are real. And I don't think that changes until the reality of that actually changes, where a black person with a clean criminal record is as likely to be called into a job interview as a white person with a recent felony conviction. That is a measured statistic.

As long as the sort of like real racism that black people in Atlanta endure continues the way it does, you're going to see rap music made the way it is. I really wish people would focus more on fixing those problems. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we like to try and dig into on the show as well. So, yeah, thanks for joining us, obviously. And where can we kind of find your work?

So look for me first on Substack at theatlantaobjective.substack.com. I also write semi-regularly for Rolling Stone and the investigative journal The Intercept, also Atlanta Magazine, and also Decaturish, like when I'm feeling political.

Nice. Well, George, thanks ever so much. And I think it's definitely a topic that we're going to keep an eye on as well because definitely in Danny's wheelhouse, it's really fascinating and it sounds like there's tons more to come out in the near future. Cheers. Thanks. I'll help out.