FBG Duck and the other side of Drill
August 4th around 6pm:
I’m on twitter, looking for a meme I saw earlier that day to show my aunt. Suddenly I see multiple tweets stating Chicago rapper FBG Duck was shot downtown.
Twitter is where I get my news first, has been for years. I hoped that it was just a rumor. Duck was on track to defy the odds and finally make it as a rapper after being blackballed since the beginning of his career.
It wasn’t not a rumor. When I seen Spot News, a famous account on twitter that tweets out police radio calls in the city of Chicago tweeted about it, I knew it was official. I was certain Duck would recover after watching the video of him laying down after taking the later fatal gunshot wounds. He was moving and talking while waiting for the ambulance to take him down the street to the hospital. He did not recover, he succumbed to his wounds and died a hour later when arriving to the hospital.
I wasn’t shocked, but highly disappointed. As days went on, I took it harder than I thought. I guess I expected Duck to make it and live through all of this. He was much wiser than his peers. I remember Duck trying to make peace starting with his song “Chicago Legends.” I remember in multiple interviews when he was saying the violence needed to stop. However I did not hear the song that he got killed over, the recent “Dead Bitches” where he disses dead opps. I’m not a drill music fan, I just keep up with it because I’m in Chicago.
My relationship with Drill Music
Contrary to what everybody else believed in 2011, I thought there were other hip hop movements that were more intriguing than the drill movement blowing up in my own city. Foolish of me trying to rap without mentioning opps or guns. My name wasn’t Chance.
I wasn’t too big on what was happening in the streets and I didn’t care either. I was just really into King Louie, whom was the first drill rapper to pop in the city. He was the innovator of drill music, he coined calling Chicago Chiraq. He did claim a set (Dro City) but not in every song and he did not diss dead opps. He is a little older and had a old school gangsta mentality.
I always felt drill music was too one sided and every side needed to be represented. I really did not respect how it popularized the dissing of the dead. The only origin story I’ve heard about that is from FBG Duck himself.
“We said said we smoking Tooka first, outta respect.” FBG Cash proclaimed on the 2015 Zach TV interview of STL/ FBG/ Tookaville. It was mentioned in a early song kind of like pouring liquor out for the dead homies. Duck explained further, “Then they (O’Block) took our shit and made it disrespectful, it wasn’t a disrespectful thing at first.”
When Chief Keef blew up, he took 300 and O block with him. At the time, O block was in full blown war with STL/EBT. It is the most documented, most well known beef in the city. I didn’t have to be a fan to know about that.
By 2014, the violence in the city was inescapable but I wasn’t scared even after being shot myself. So many people asked me who shot me, I didn’t know. I saw the news report on it, a witness said people was arguing and the man shooting hit his intended target. I was either an additional person in the cross hairs or I think I might have been a victim of mistaken identity.
I felt like I need to be informed on street shit since I’m moving around outside Chicago without a car. I watched DJ Akademiks channel for a minute, until I heard enough to decide he was a goofy, and founded out he wasn’t even from or in Chicago. I watched Zach TV interviews, followed the rappers on twitter, and started to listen to the music and watch the videos. People started making Youtube videos on the conflicts across the city. If they were a black Chicagoan (Yes, I can tell) I would watch it. Plus I just asked homies in the street or just knew of street business.
The Other Side
I had a friend how lived in the heart of STL, she did my hair and it was always cracking over her house so I stayed over there from 2011- 2014. We went to parties, hung on the porch, played cards, drink, smoke everything I wanted to do at 19, 20 years old. I knew of Duck and Cash as the firsts to make music from that area. People would call me Big GD, just from picking me up from over there. I would say don’t do that cus I personally do not have any opps. I never stepped foot in O Block. I had no reason to, I didn’t know anyone from over there.
Lil Jojo from Bricksquad clicked up the GD sets and started the BDK movement with the song that ultimately got him killed “BDK” in 2013. This when I started to really hear music from the other side. Lil Mister’s “No lacking”to Billionaire Buck’s “Costa Rica” and P.Rico’s “Hang wit me.” But my favorite was the OG Clout Lord himself, King Lil Jay.
I remember first hearing Lil Jay at a party, he reminded me of Chicago’s old days. He was hype, he had people dancing and I was excited to hear double 0. I thought he would be the one, because he had potential to transcend pass drill music. However, he was doing a lot of dissing and got shot a lot of times. He committed a dumb crime which is why he is still locked up this day. He didn’t deserve to go down for attempted murder and serve 14 years, but he did try to a rob somebody while he was one of the hottest rappers in the city.
Famous Dex picked up the torch from Lil Jay after he went away. Dex was able to transcend pass drill music because he was focused on music and never did any dissing. He took the FBG out his name because he didn’t want to be linked to the beef. He respectfully and intelligently made himself only musically associated with FBG. His breakout was in 2015, 2016. he linked up with Soulja boy and signed to Rich the Kid’s label. Now he is dealing with a different set of problems such as record deals and substance abuse. I hope he gets all the help he needs to overcome.
FBG Duck was rapping while all of this was going down, but in 2017 he would release his biggest song to date “Slide.” This song was everywhere in the city, on the radio, they even played it in clubs downtown and up north. The single would go gold, allowing him to score a record deal with Sony. After the success of Slide, Duck would extend his hand several times to make peace with his opps showing his growth. But Durk and King Von would continue to diss him and his people dead or alive. So Duck made a song doing the same thing they did, but Duck was killed for it.
I remember meeting a guy from Jaro city while playing spades in STL. Jaro was his brother, Tooka was his friend. It was a minute before you could even listen Keef in that hood, they use to throw bricks at cars just for driving by playing any artist from the other side. Things had calmed down by 2014 when Keef started releasing music I liked. Somebody was playing “Earned it.” I never said the phase smoking Tooka , because I know Tooka was an actual person and I don’t diss the dead. When I skipped that part, he saluted me.
“Everybody be saying it and don’t know what they be saying. They just hear them niggas say it and think its another word for weed, it ain’t. Tooka was my friend.”
Drill is very one sided, that something I didn’t like about it from the jump. All of the dudes I named were talented, some were better rappers then their opps. They all had a shot to make it in mainstream industry. However, their opps got famous first, and gained more money and power.
Causes and effects
After Duck died, the fans made it worst like they always do. From making out of wack comments, like fuck the opps or he another dead opp to pressuring the remaining FBG members to slide in Duck’s memory. They even accused King Von for making the rumored million dollar hit on Duck in which proclaimed his innocence.These over zealous fans are part of the problem but not the root.
It is time for an evolution of drill rap and gang culture, since they go hand and hand. Like the fans, the rappers that take the bait are part of the problem but not the root. From Lil Durk tweeting RIP Nuski, his cousin whom was killed in 2014 the day Duck died, to 600 Breezy releasing a diss song toward Duck a day after he died.
The root problem is the gentrification in Chicago that has been an effective plan since the 1990’s. The demolition of multiple projects in the late 90s early 2000s across the city caused those residents to be placed in the cities to South/ West side predominantly black neighborhoods. Chicago has always been a gang banging ass city so when this happened, they put gang bangers in opposition areas. For example, the man of Cabrini Green, a Vice lord had to move to Englewood. To continue being the man, he has to bump heads with the current man in Englewood, a BD. See how that would cause problems?
Crime went up obviously, the police budget went up as the public school’s budget began dropping and kept dropping year after year. After school activities in these neighborhoods dwindled down to none.
This caused miseducation, lack of activities and utter disregard of the youth. The original gang leaders were getting locked up receiving football number sentences. Most kids look to older kids for guidance, those older kids didn’t have any guidance or extra circular activities so they made their own gangs. These gangs tuned out to be very violent causing people to be killed, go to jail or move out of town, This freed up property for white people to buy at cheap prices, as the neighborhood crime decreases, the city can up the taxes and price out the rest of the remaining residents.
The list of problems is longer than this, that was just a quick summary. We can’t fix everything but Duck tried to use his Big Clout status to make things in his circle of control better.
I am in the same age range of these guys, from the same place. Some of these guys were born into wars, they grew hating each other for killing their family and friends. Duck died, trying to be better, people saying fuck that and him getting back to the dissing bullshit that gets the most views so he can feed his people the best way he knew how. It is time for a change.
RIP FBG DUCK AKA BIG CLOUT
