The Laughing Stops

I don’t know what sparked conflict between the gang members of London Fields and the gang members of Homerton and Holly Street but I’m sure that it was something stupid. That’s the way with these things. They begin with something stupid and then escalate to something seriously stupid. Years on, gang members barely remember the initial cause of the beef. Enough blood has been spilled to keep the violence rolling on.

In January 2015, 17-year-old Jeremie Malenge, associated with members of the Homerton gang, was hanging out with friends — or, at least, with people he thought were his friends. One of them, 18-year-old Sanaa Sayed, was setting him up. Malenge was being hunted down by members of the London Fields-based gang Zero Tolerance (ZT). Tragically, after managing to escape them once he messaged Sayed and told her where he was. She passed the information on to his enemies and he was brutally killed.

In April 2018, 18-year-old Israel Ogunsola, a member of the Homerton gang, was cycling through Hackney when he was confronted by two members of ZT. A knife fight ensued, and Ogunsola was outnumbered and killed.

Members of ZT were jubilant. In their drill rap songs, they mocked the “98s”, formed of gang members from Homerton and Holly Street, ruthlessly. “There’s no way they can let this die down,” spat Sheikh “Blacka” Dibba on his song “Die Down”, “We put two of their guys on the news” (Dibba was later sentenced to decades in jail for shooting at three people he thought were from the 98s but who turned out to have no connection to the violence). “Minus two,” rapped ZT members “Latts” on the song “Inferno”, “How long till we make it three?”

In August 2022, Kacey Boothe, who had been a member of the original London Fields gang and was associated with members of ZT, was sitting in his car outside a birthday party his child was attending when he was shot and killed. Not long afterwards, Kadeem Henry “Kay-O” Richards of the 98s released his song “Laughing Stock”.

Kay-O is an unusually talented drill rapper, with a calm, menacing flow and a creative — if, of course, exceptionally morbid — way with words. I’d put him up there with genre legends LD, Mizormac and CB (all of whom, coincidentally enough, are in jail).

Kay-O, “Like That”

He could probably have had mainstream success, with his eerily compelling “Mad About Bars” freestyle clearing eight million YouTube views. But when a gang member enters the music industry they bring more baggage than an 18th Century princess travelling across Europe. Their loyalties are still rooted in the violence — besides which, their music was built on the association.

“Laughing Stock” was an unusually shameless track in a genre hardly known for its surplus of shame. The 98s had spent years listening to vile insults being aimed at their dead friends. Having eaten shit, they were enthusiastically serving it.

“Funny how we’re the laughing stock, someone gets slapped and the laughing stops.” “Revenge has no expiry. Really, it should have been sooner. Sure, there’ll be more in the future.” It wouldn’t have taken the Metropolitan Police’s most elite intelligence offers to work out what this meant.

Savouring the moment, Kay-O dropped two remixes — one with drill peers Digga D and Kwengface and one with members of the 98s. On the former, Kay-O dropped a line that would come back to haunt him, referring to two brothers who had “got hit, same SIG, that’s a sour family.”

SIG Sauer is a gun manufacturer. Apparently, the Met hadn’t known that Kacey Boothe and his brother had both been shot with bullets from the same gun on different occasions. But in fact they had — and if Kay-O had known, that meant he was at least close to the perpetrators.

Kay-O was arrested, along with other members of the 98s. This week, four of them — one of whose elder brother was already in prison over a different killing — were found guilty of murder and conspiracy to murder. The prosecution’s case drew on various lines of evidence, including forensics and cell site data, but Kay-O’s unwise bar was one of them. It was not proof that he was one of the killers, of course — inasmuch as someone could have told him details of the crimes — but it was still monumentally stupid to establish at least some form of complicity. Perhaps he was just too proud of his pun not to include it. There is something to be said for “kill your darlings” after all.

The extent to which drill fuels violence is a valid question. Still, there is some extent to which it helps the police. While Cosa Nostra mafiosos disappear for decades, London gang members can’t stop leaping in front of cameras to talk about their crimes. There should be some caution in the criminal justice system, of course, because a rapper can be no more than a gang’s spokesperson and gloating about a crime does not mean they did it personally. Still, if rappers insist on divulging specific details they can hardly blame the police for paying attention. Slapping “THIS IS FICTIONAL” in front of a confession, as rappers often do at the start of music videos, need not make it so any more than slapping “ALLEGEDLY” in front of blatant libel stops it from being libellous.

One of Kay-O’s co-defendants was a fellow rapper named Jeffrey “Hitman” Gyimah. In a statement to police, he argued that he was just a musician. “There is more interest for an artist if they are affiliated to a street gang,” he wrote, “As it is a way to promote credibility.” This neatly obscures the fact that the affiliation tends to precede the music. Still, there is a point here about the incentives of the genre. As much as the rappers could be accused of fuelling violence, the fans certainly do their best. Before the killing of Kacey Boothe, the more despicable of them were mocking the 98s mercilessly for their losses — hacking into their social media accounts to post messages like “my gang is shit”.

Certainly, being a gang member involves a fantastic amount of stupidity and selfishness (so-called “civilians” often end up being caught in the middle, such as when a young woman was paralysed after being caught in the middle of a shootout in London Fields). But the manner in which listeners both demand criminal authenticity and react with disapproval when the crimes have consequences helps ensure that rappers hardly ever escape the street life even if they want to. Stop the crimes and people will make fun of them for being “fake”. Go to jail for them and people will make fun of them for being stupid. Add this to the trauma of losing friends and I have a bit of sympathy. But just a bit. Because they are inflicting fresh trauma themselves.