“Gotta Eat”, by “Grippa”, begins with a silent tribute to his friend “Boogz”. 

“Boogz”, 15-year-old Daejaun Campbell, was stabbed to death in Woolwich in 2024. “I’m only 15,” he said as he was dying, “Don’t let me die.” Three teenagers have been charged with his murder.

“#Longliveboogz,” reads the tribute in “Gotta Eat”, below a picture of Campbell, “I can’t belive it’s you man rest in peace.”

“Gotta Eat”, though, is not the touching tribute one might have expected. “I was hitting the t every day of the week,” raps Grippa, in a reference to a “trap house”, from which illegal drugs are sold. “In school I’ll take man’s phone,” he continues, “Or I’ll shave man down for ps” (“shave” is a reference to stabbing and “ps” is a reference to pounds).

“If I told you my age,” says Grippa, “Then bro you’ll think it’s insane … RIP Boogz, man. I miss my friend.”

Grippa, 14-year-old Kelyan Bokassa, was stabbed to death this week. He was murdered on a bus in Woolwich.

“Aspiring rapper” is how the papers are describing Bokassa. Many gang members are “aspiring rappers”, because the drill rap subgenre is, among other things, effectively a means of documenting gang violence. 

“I’m the shortest yute on my block,” Grippa rapped on “Bangers & Mash”, “But I still roll with the longest thing.” This is a reference to knives. 

Bokassa was, of course, 14 — nowhere near maturity. According to his mother, he had fallen under the spell of older gang members. “My son and others were taken advantage by gangs,” she told the Mail, “They were groomed.”

“’He was missing for a year,” Mrs Bokassa continued: 

… and was living on the street. He finally turned up at my doorstep, he was sick, underweight and tattooed … He was exposed to drugs. He probably experienced something because I could sense it.

As Eleanor Hancock wrote for The Critic, younger members (“ygs”) are encouraged or pressured to sell drugs outside of London as part of “county lines” drug operations. They also take part in violence. Isaac “Young Dizz” Donkoh, who was recently released from prison after serving time for kidnapping and torturing a 16-year-old, was notorious for grooming young gang members. He would take them out for food before encouraging them to participate in his crimes. “Isaac had access to a lot of money,” said Detective Sergeant Joe McClenaghan:

… and could offer the here and now to entice and trap them until they paid him back. Donkoh was able to move them from being young men attending school, football clubs, doing what normal kids do, to very quickly being willing to commit the type of crime they did.

But Donkoh was hardly alone. This is an established feature of gang life. Some adolescent gang members, like “DS” from “3×3”, have gained attention in the rap scene. “They say I’m grooming,” brags the older 3×3 rapper E1 in his “Mad About Bars” freestyle, “I say I scout. All my little bros gotta make it out.” 

The senseless killing of two teenage friends … should be a moment for reflection

“My lil bro’s scored,” E1 raps elsewhere in the song, motioning to DS as the young man mimes a stabbing, “We really made a big man scream.” That something is said does not mean it necessarily happened, of course. That grown men should be ashamed of making even empty boasts of violence on behalf of young teenagers, on the other hand, is beyond question.

The senseless killing of two teenage friends, both of whom appear to have been led into a world where senseless killing had itself been glorified, should be a moment for reflection — and a moment for anger. It shouldn’t pass through the discourse without touching the sides.

Gang violence is a problem that demands both the carceral and the caring — the carceral, to break up existing gangs, and the caring, and to stop young men from being attracted to them. But perhaps it also demands the cultural. It would be preposterous to behave as if gang culture — that is, the image that is projected to the world — is the leading cause of gang violence, which of course predates it, but it is not difficult to think that young men such as Campbell and Bokassa might have been deluded by promises of fast money, local glamour and perhaps even fame. 

In promotional images for “Bangers & Mash”, Bokassa is wearing a mask but his eyes look excited — even proud. Young men who have been attracted to the gang life but are still in touch with normalcy should be aware that “the roads” have less to do with money and music than with being cornered on a bus and stabbed to death. A lot more teenagers have been murdered on London’s streets than have ever “made it out” through crime.