Bandmanrill brought New Jersey Drill to Elsewhere for his first NYC headliner gig
At Sunday's show, the Newark club star topped a bill that included Brooklyn’s Half Moon crew and Purp — and an exuberant crowd
“New York, we love you!” shouted Newark’s Bandmanrill from the middle of a small but roiling crowd in Bushwick, full of all sorts: Skaters! Baby-faced teens getting sturdy! There were even a couple ravers in sunglasses! All commingled in a dance circle that was nearly a mosh pit.
Rill, who fuses New-York-style drill rap with New Jersey Club music, performed his first headlining show in New York on Elsewhere’s Zone One stage yesterday. The Sunday evening show was an exposition for a sound that’s cross-pollinating across the Hudson. The night began with sets from Brooklyn’s Half Moon crew of musicians, and a prodigious Jersey Club set from New York’s Purp. Even before Rill took the stage, Purp put the bleeding edge of Jersey Club music on display, spinning samples from Katt Williams comedy sets in front of visuals with a heavy 2000s-era, Kazaa-Limewire-esque aesthetic with Dance Dance Revolution arrows flowing on screens in the background.
In the pandemic, Jersey Club — a high-tempo, slightly glitchier and internetier version of Baltimore Club built on the same relentless kick drum pattern, and usually on repurposed samples — has had an internet resurgence. Though the genre has existed for more than a decade in clubs in Newark, Orange and elsewhere in Jersey, the suspension of nightlife moved the genre for a brief period almost totally online, amplifying its weirdest and most aesthetically promiscuous aspects. It flourished there, becoming a chimeric admixture of ballroom, club, internet music and hiphop: since 2020, the genre has inspired countless viral dance memes, has started to include chops of anime intro songs, and generally embraced the kind of eccentric energy that makes people do things like spontaneously start doing push ups in the middle of the Zone One dancefloor.
One of its most recent mutations has been what has been called “Jersey Drill,” with artists like Unicorn 151 aka Killa Kherk Cobain and Bandmanrill rapping with trademark New York drill flows over Jersey Club beats. This of course has all culminated in the release of two massive pop albums that include Jersey club nods — Drake’s “Honestly Nevermind” featured “Sticky,” which Purp played near the end of her set, as she did Beyoncé’s recent dance opus “Renaissance,” the stems of which one hopes all get released or leaked soon.
Club music thrives on the unpredictability that can only exist when artists are free to do what they please with copyrighted material — only then can they produce the alchemy that regularly transforms corny songs into shit that goes crazy. The appropriations and sample flips that give Jersey Drill and recent Jersey Club its energy are funny, but not quite ironic. So in Rill’s “I Am Newark”, Italian Eurovision band Måneskin’s annoying song “Beggin’” gets a V8 engine put in it; the sample is chopped and chipmunk’d and the signature syncopated, high-octane Jersey club rhythm turning it into a machine for Rill to joyride in.
On stage, Rill abided by sudden tempo hikes and jumped into the crowd (“Y’all don’t have that monkeypox shit, right?” he quipped just before). This is rap that absorbs some of the most exhilarating qualities of club music. Rill, a true performer, was covered in sweat by the end of his 30-minute (if that) set. The show had an electric energy, a true spontaneity that can be rare in hip hop performances these days.
