In recent years, the genre of UK drill has become the target of a range of ‘posh’ musical parodies. These parodies come in various forms, from private school students making TikToks under the hashtag #privateschool that use the genre’s reputation to illustrate their own privilege (Hall Reference Hall2020; Complex UK 2023), to folky YouTube covers of drill songs that play off the musical differences between the two styles. Some of these parodies juxtapose UK drill’s reputation as a working class and Black British artform with upper class and white stereotypes, providing a sharp reminder of the issues that can arise through unnecessary socio-cultural comparison. In addition, many creators of these parodies appear to hide behind a veil of self-reflexive acknowledgement to mask the various ethical quandaries that arise in their work, often passing harmful content off as self-deprecating fun.
YouTuber Vibrant Salad’s ‘posh’ cover version of ‘Homerton B’, a track originally released by UK drill rapper Unknown T, exemplifies these issues. After a few paragraphs of context, in the following pages, I examine Vibrant Salad’s parody alongside its original text, using it as an example to illustrate how problematic musical parody can be deployed in a clandestine manner. I then consider a wider range of parodies that target UK drill, and question the involvement of the mainstream media in the promotion of this content.
UK Drill, social class, and parody
Originating in South London in the early 2010s, UK drill evolved from a blend of three main genres: grime, UK hip hop, and Chicago drill. Consisting of a mixture of beats with intricate syncopated drilling hi hats, low-pitched 808 samples, dark electronic soundscapes, and lyrical allusions to inner-city life, drill has connected with a young audience (Davies Reference Davies2021). The genre has been vilified for its assumed association with London’s gang culture (White Reference White2020), especially in the press, with journalists citing song lyrics as proof of a supposed link between drill, knife crime, and gang membership (Kingsley Reference Kingsley2021). Just as scholars have argued that grime highlights aspects of the ‘lived experience of young metropolitan black working-class life’ (Perera Reference Perera2018, p. 87), UK drill may have the ability to provide insight into aspects of the lives of many of its creators. As Lambros Fatsis (Reference Fatsis2019, p. 130) puts it, ‘drill music opens a window into the patterns of inequality and social exclusion that disproportionately affect young Black people’. It is important to note that UK drill is assumed to be created primarily by artists from Black British and working-class backgrounds.
To understand the ‘posh’ parodies discussed here, a general overview of the complex social class system in British society is required. In a 1957 book entitled The Uses of Literacy, Richard Hoggart outlined what he labelled the ‘them and us’ divide (Hoggart Reference Hoggart1957, p. 72), describing what he saw as a two-world split between the working and upper classes in Britain. More recent studies have attempted to understand the UK’s class system by outlining class models with five, or even seven tiers (Savage et al. Reference Savage2013). These models are often built around various sub-categories derived from three main class groups: the working class, the middle class, and the upper class. What is important to note in this context is that where UK drill is mostly assumed to be a working-class artform, the term ‘posh’ is attributed to people, places, objects, or behaviours primarily associated with the upper or upper-middle class.
Some theoretical context is also necessary to understand the parodies in question. Linda Hutcheon’s (Reference Hutcheon1985, p. 20) definition of parody as ‘repetition with critical difference’ has proved useful in the identification of parodic works, both here and in other writings discussing parody in popular music (Curry Reference Curry1990). This is because Hutcheon’s definition illustrates how parodists can provide critical comment on whatever subject they choose, without necessarily relying on the presence of humour – though whether or not the example discussed is an attempt to be humorous is up for debate. Both Hutcheon’s (Reference Hutcheon1985) and Henry Louis Gates Jr’s (Reference Gates1988) writings on self-reflexivity, or the way in which a parody refers to itself and highlights its own artificiality, are important in understanding how parodists get away with presenting problematic or offensive content as benign. Certain musical parodists display a self-reflexive acknowledgement in their performances, which allows them to provide critical comment on a ‘target’ (Hutcheon Reference Hutcheon1985, p. 51) whilst making it seem as if they are engaging in a form of self-critique. This self-reflexive acknowledgement is not always explicit; it is often subtly communicated through less obvious aspects of the music or performance. Scholars have previously identified examples of comedians using self-reflexivity as a means to negotiate the ethical issues that arise through musical parody, packaging themselves as nice guys or engaging in self-deprecation to obscure the damage caused through their work (McCarthy Reference McCarthy2019). ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, for example, regularly dressed his music up as a ‘respectful homage’ (McCarthy Reference McCarthy2019, p. 21) to mask the ethical issues that arose through his work. For my purposes here, I call this ‘the myth of the respectful parodist’. By the end, it is my hope that this myth will have been debunked.
‘Homerton B’, Unknown T, and Vibrant Salad
East London, UK drill rapper Unknown T (real name Daniel Lena) released his single ‘Homerton B’ in August 2018 (GRM Daily 2018). The track proved to be something of a ‘crossover hit’ (Davidson Reference Davidson2024, par. 1): it peaked at number 48 in the UK singles chart, was certified silver, and received a positive response from the UK’s tastemaker press (Gorton Reference Gorton2018). Plays on BBC Radio 1 and a performance on Charlie Sloth’s Fire in the Booth on BBC Radio 1Xtra led to ‘Homerton B’ trending on the video-sharing social media platform TikTok which, in turn, introduced the rapper’s music to a wide array of new followers.
‘Homerton B’s’ lyrical themes and menacing instrumental share many of the musical hallmarks typical of UK drill, however the track also benefits from a catchy lyrical hook introduced after a four-bar instrumental introduction. This hook is then repeated throughout the track, each repetition further emphasising the track’s memorable rhythmic patterns and intricate rhyming structure. The result is an earworm that makes the song radio-friendly, which may have contributed to its commercial success. ‘Homerton B’ represented something of a watershed moment for drill in the UK, shining a light on the commercial potential of a previously underground movement.
Vibrant Salad’s parody of ‘Homerton B’ is perhaps the most successful of the various ‘posh’ parodies targeting the track. The singer (real name Magnus Williamson) released his cover in 2018 on various social media platforms, using a combination of TikTok, SoundCloud, and YouTube to distribute and promote his work. At the time of writing, Vibrant Salad’s parody has been viewed over 500,000 times on YouTube and has received support from various UK radio stations including BBC Radio 1 and Capital XTRA. Although he hasn’t achieved the same level of global commercial success as other noteworthy parodists such as the Lonely Island or ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, his contribution to the phenomenon of ‘gentrified’ (Finiin Reference Finiin2020, p. 14) or posh drill has captured the attention of a young British audience.
It is important to point out that Williamson has released two parody versions of ‘Homerton B’, first as a video on his own YouTube channel (Vibrant Salad 2020), and subsequently for DJ Charlie Sloth (Reference Sloth2020) on his YouTube series Rap Renditions; it is the Rap Renditions version of ‘Homerton B’ that is the primary focus of this analysis. Both Vibrant Salad’s original version and the Rap Renditions version employ similar instrumentation, but the backing vocals on the latter version are sung by a separate vocalist and the strummed guitar patterns are slightly more folk-influenced. It is also important to note that Vibrant Salad never explicitly states his social class in his videos in the way the #privateschool parodies do, so it would therefore be unwise to assume his social positioning. In ‘Homerton B’, however, he uses various aesthetic techniques to allude to an assumed middle- or upper-classness, thereby using the social class stratification so ingrained in British society as a point of critical difference.
UK drill shares similarities with other originally working-class and Black British genres such as jungle and grime (Fatsis Reference Fatsis2019). If ‘grime set out to portray the gritty, “grim(e)y” reality of life in London’s council estates in an almost ethnographic fashion’ (Fatsis Reference Fatsis2018, p. 449), then we might consider UK drill with its hyper-realistic, often graphic, depictions of the pressure of working-class inner-city and suburban life as grime’s natural successor. Unknown T has previously commented on the social pressures of his upbringing, stating ‘[Growing up] was difficult. There were a lot of social pressures, the kind of thing a lot of young black people go through in deprived areas. But in life you have to push and keep going’ (Lena in Dymoke Reference Dymoke2019, p. 9).
In contrast, the genres of folk and singer-songwriter are mainstays of the twenty-first century UK popular music scene, and are mostly associated with white middle- and upper-class artists. Ironically, folk has historically been a genre which ‘defined itself as working class’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 90), though twenty-first century British folk music, spearheaded by singers and bands such as Noah and the Whale, The Staves, Lucy Rose, Johnny Flynn, and Mumford and Sons, has moved away from its traditional roots and coalesced with other guitar-led genres to create hybrids such as nu-folk, indie-folk, alt-folk, and folk-pop. Devoid of much of its revolutionary potential and critical ability, folk and its hybrids are considered by some as symbolic of middle- and upper-class banality (Okiji Reference Okiji2018).
In his parody, Vibrant Salad reinterprets ‘Homerton B’ as a quaint, folky singer-songwriter cover, setting the original lyrics to a new melody sung over a softly strummed nylon string guitar. His lead vocal is accompanied by a backing singer, who harmonises certain phrases, further emphasising the parody’s new melodic nature. By interpreting Unknown T’s track in this manner, Vibrant Salad removes all of the instrumental grit, percussive bounce, and atmosphere that make Unknown T’s version so effective, rendering the lyrics absurd. The result of this is that the track emphasises the obvious differences between the two genres, highlighting their various musical incompatibilities, and also becomes a wider metaphor alluding to the possible socio-cultural differences between the two musicians.
It is not only elements of folk that Vibrant Salad incorporates into his parody. The song has also been re-harmonised, with Williamson choosing to transpose the track from its original key of B minor to D major, incorporating elements of jazz harmony in the process, injecting the parody with a different harmonic language from the original. When delivered in tandem with the stripped back instrumentation, this shift in tonality and harmonic language from minor to major, dark to sunny, further undermines the serious nature of the lyrics.
Alongside the various reinterpreted elements, it is important to note which elements of the track Vibrant Salad decides to keep the same, and why. Keeping the original lyrics, for example, is particularly noteworthy, given the linguistic vernacular used in Unknown T’s ‘Homerton B’. Certain UK drill musicians such as Unknown T represent part of ‘a new generation of Black working-class youths’ (Perera Reference Perera2018, p. 83) symbolised by their use of London slang and ‘Black British English (BBE), a [spoken] combination of the Jamaican language Patois, West African Creole (Pidgin), White Mainstream English (WME), and Black-British vernacular’ (The Runnymede Trust 2022, p. 1). Lyrics from the track such as ‘I’ve got gyallie on me, opp block, bally on me’ display how the rapper incorporates elements of the vernacular as part of his lexicon. As with much localised vernacular, the language used in ‘Homerton B’ is born of the complex relationship between cultural background, social class, and locale in the UK (Drummond Reference Drummond2018). Unknown T’s use of language and slang may well stem from a linguistic tradition used ‘historically by marginalised communities as a palpable way in which to communicate while avoiding the prying eyes of institutional bodies’ (De Lacey Reference De Lacey2022, p. 498).
In his parody of ‘Homerton B’, Vibrant Salad performs the lyrics of Unknown T’s original version verbatim. In a similar manner to other parodies, particularly those that belong to the #privateschool trend, Vibrant Salad articulates the lyrics in a stereotypically ‘posh’ manner, using an accent that contains elements of Received Pronunciation (RP) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE). Scholars have argued that RP and SSBE accents have become so synonymous with certain dominant cultural and social groups in Britain that they are no longer even seen as accents:
the ‘accents’ of the dominant southern English and speakers of RP are so ingrained into the subconscious (much like Whiteness and White culture) that they are not even recognised as accents at all. It is this absence which ascribes them their power and maintains social order (Donnelly et al. Reference Donnelly2022, p. 1106).
By juxtaposing Unknown T’s use of BBE by singing his lyrics with a stereotypical RP or SSBE accent, Vibrant Salad’s ‘Homerton B’ further emphasises the assumed socio-cultural differences between the two artists, this time in relation to their accent and spoken vernacular.
It is important to understand the effects of perpetuating existing cultural and class stereotypes in this manner. As Stuart Hall put it, ‘stereotyping […] is part of the maintenance of the social and symbolic order’ (Reference Hall1997, p. 258) and ‘tends to occur where there are gross inequalities of power’, in what he later labelled an ‘exercise of symbolic violence’ (Reference Hall1997, p. 259). Vibrant Salad’s awareness and acknowledgement of his own positionality (or at least the positionality of his performing alter ego) through his use of a stereotypically posh accent, and therefore the artificiality of his performance of UK drill, displays both an understanding of the latent power imbalance that exists between himself and Unknown T, and a willingness to exploit it.
It is worth noting that Vibrant Salad’s particular brand of posh drill has not received any significant criticism in either the press or published academic writings. The reason for this may be that the singer uses self-reflexivity to make it seem as if he is a harmless, respectful cover artist. A key to this is the fact that Vibrant Salad doesn’t appear to create a fictitious or comedic character with which to perform his parody, but rather presents himself as a semi-legitimate artist, embracing some of the tropes associated with bedroom singer-songwriters in an attempt to sell his parody as a legitimate cover, or respectful homage.
Posh UK drill and the media
Vibrant Salad and the #privateschool trend are not the only successes born out of the musical parody of UK drill. Comedian Michael Dapaah, for example, had a major UK hit under the pseudonym Big Shaq with his 2017 parody single ‘Man’s Not Hot’, a song released after a comedy freestyle on Charlie Sloth’s Fire in the Booth segment in his BBC Radio 1Xtra show went viral. Similarly, a BBC Three comedy sketch series entitled Famalam included a scene in which fictitious drill artist Drilly T performed in a meeting at a corporate office to celebrate employee Charlene’s birthday.
Perhaps the most famous example of ‘posh’ drill is by the comedian Munya Chawawa, known for his fictitious parody persona Unknown P. Unknown P’s name may well be a parodic play on Unknown T – the P standing for Percy Picklesworth – and the comedian sometimes directly parodies Unknown T’s work, re-contextualising the original lyrics and enunciating them in a posh accent. In songs like ‘Piers Morgan’, Unknown P (Reference Unknown2020) delivers lines such as ‘Sippin’ on tea, pass me a bourbon, had to run a man down in my wellies’. A cursory glance at Unknown P’s lyrics is enough to demonstrate how the comedian invokes subject matter commonly associated with the upper classes in the UK, a background that appears to be different from Chawawa’s own.
There are numerous other examples that place drill at odds with varying aspects of upper-class British culture (BBC 2019; Imogen Andrews 2022). In fact, Unknown T could even be seen as culpable in helping maintain this trend, as he made a number of appearances between 2018 and 2021 in posh drill-themed content. The rapper was interviewed alongside Vibrant Salad on Capital XTRA’s breakfast show by DJs Yinka and Shayna Marie (Capital XTRA 2020), appeared for afternoon tea in a video alongside Unknown P (Munya Chawawa 2020), and featured as part of a video series for Capital XTRA where UK rappers explain their work to Classical Kyle (Capital XTRA 2018). Classical Kyle is a self-professed classical music expert who – if the YouTube videos are to be believed – has very little knowledge of UK drill. In the videos, he undertakes a cursory analysis of drill tracks using terminology and jargon usually reserved for western art music. Kyle’s analysis could be argued to be problematic as it both emphasises the musical differences between the two genres for effect and perpetuates the notion that due to a lack of complexity, UK drill can easily be understood through classical terminology, thus maintaining an outdated high/low distinction between classical and popular music. As with many of the parodists discussed in this article, Classical Kyle appears to get away with this by presenting himself as a harmless, polite, smiling classical music expert.
What is particularly noteworthy is the ease with which many of the videos that exploit class stratification and cultural difference still find their way onto mainstream UK media platforms. Classical Kyle and Vibrant Salad’s heavy exposure by Capital XTRA through their radio broadcasts and online videos demonstrates how such exaggerations of stereotypes are still actively promoted by the media, just as they were in the 1990s and 2000s. Although the platforms are now slightly different, it is hard to ignore the role the mainstream media still plays in the promotion of this content. The media appears to display direct bias against promoting legitimate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural production, whilst parodists, satirists, and content creators who hide behind the facade of the respectful homage and exploit UK drill’s reputation for critical difference are so regularly given airtime. Aside from a few notable exceptions, such as comedians Michael Dapaah and Munya Chawawa, this mainstream media promotion is often reserved for parodists, satirists, and content creators that are white and middle or upper class, while many parodies by working class and Black British content creators, such as Shadrack and the Mandem (2010), fail to receive any exposure outside social media platforms.
Conclusion
Vibrant Salad’s folky aesthetic illustrates how comedians are still finding ways to dress themselves up as harmless and banal in order to disguise and absolve themselves of any potential harm caused through their work. In his version of ‘Homerton B’, we can see how self-reflexivity is used as a device by comedians attempting to circumvent the ethical quandaries that can arise through parody. A self-reflexive awareness does not negate the damage that exploiting difference can cause. It should therefore be treated with caution.
The mainstream media still plays a major role in the promotion of this content. Even in the twenty-first century, we see the media broadcasting exaggerated performances of stereotypes as humour. This promotion seems mostly reserved for creators from upper- and middle-class white backgrounds, many of whom use the perceived difference between themselves and other cultures and classes as a vehicle for humour. Films such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G Indahouse and Borat display how, historically, exaggerated performances of social class and cultural stereotypes have received widespread promotion from major media platforms (Atluri Reference Atluri2009; Frazer-Carroll Reference Frazer-Carroll2020; Low and Smith Reference Low and Smith2007). Vibrant Salad and Classical Kyle indicate that these problems still exist.
In this short article, I do not aim to offer solutions, but rather to highlight a set of issues. With UK drill being a fledgling artform, a nuanced conversation concerning the minutiae of the tensions outlined here may take a while to evolve within academic circles. However, there is a broader issue at hand: parodies of all kinds that use cultural background and social class as a point of critical difference have been around for a long time but, aside from a few isolated studies, have scarcely received any attention from the academic community. It is my hope that this work will stimulate a wider conversation on the topic.
