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Let’s Give It Up for These Two Heroes Trying to Explain Rap Music to the United States Supreme Court

The discussion of whether or not you can use rap lyrics as evidence in the court of law continues, thanks to these two rap scholars.

The question of whether rap lyrics should be used in court as evidence has been getting discussed in earnest this year. Back in March, the New York Times reported a story about a Virginia local rapper using his lyrics to boast about a murder—and whether or not it was okay for the court to use these specific lyrics in a case, since rap music is considered art. Earlier this month, the state Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled that “gangster-rap lyrics cannot be used as evidence of guilt unless they include a ‘strong nexus’ to the underlying crime being charged.”

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Now, there’s a U.S. Supreme Court case coming up that continues this discussion. Earlier this summer, SCOTUS agreed to hear arguments for a 2010 case involving a man (28 at the time) named Anthony Elonis who wrote a violent rant on Facebook directed at his wife.

“There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you,” he wrote. “I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.”

This is a pretty fucked up Facebook status (can’t we just know what sort of shit you bought from the grocery store?), but during the trial, Elonis testified that he was influenced by Eminem’s songs “Guilty Conscious,” “Kill You,” “Criminal,” and “97 Bonnie and Clyde.” Elonis’s petition to the court stated that, “Although the language was—as with popular rap songs addressing the same themes—sometimes violent, petitioner posted explicit disclaimers in his profile explaining that his posts were ‘fictitious lyrics,’ and he was ‘only exercising [his] constitutional right to freedom of speech.’ ” Elonis was then sentenced to a four-year term in prison, which is now under appeal.

The short of this is that dude says he wasn’t actually going to cut up his wife and believes it was okay to threaten his wife via Facebook because of, in his eyes, the First Amendment protected the right to free speech. The court said the opposite, because this status was considered a “threat,” and “true threats”—even in jest—are not protected by the Constitution. This trial then went on to be the catalyst for a bunch of opinion pieces about whether or not the stuff you say on social media was protected by the First Amendment.

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Given the nature of what this guy wrote on Facebook, the case is arguably more about whether online hate speech is okay (and for the record, Noisey would like to make it very clear that we don’t agree with what this guy wrote). We can all agree that quoting these types of Eminem lyrics as a thing to say to your wife is insane and probably abusive. But there's also a significant possibility, especially given the topic's recent legal footprint, that the court’s decision could determine whether or not rap music should be taken in a literal sense. So, for example, when Kendrick Lamar raps on his “Control” verse that he’s “tryna murder” J. Cole, Big KRIT, Wale, Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake, Big Sean, Jay Electronic, Tyler the Creator, and Mac Miller, would that get him in trouble with the law? Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but legally it could be possible.

Last week, during this appeal process, some rap music scholars decided to get involved to prevent something like this from happening. Erik Nielson of the University of Richmond and Charis E. Kubrin of the University of California at Irvine filed an amicus brief to SCOTUS. (An amicus brief is filed with the court by someone who is not a party to the case—or in layman’s terms, imagine a guy watching a football game from the stands and then writing a letter to the officials about the way he called the game).

In the brief (which you can read in full here), they call rap “a powerful new poetry.” They write:

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Underlying this tradition is the practice of signifying, or the obscuring of apparent meaning; in the process of signifying, ambiguity is prized, meaning is destabilized, and gaps between the literal and the figurative are intentionally exploited. This practice, along with rap’s dense slang and penchant for imbuing words with new meaning(s), makes it especially susceptible to misreading and misinterpretation.

…these stereotypes ignore the importance of rap music, which not only is a global, multibillion-dollar industry, but also an influential and recognized form of artistic expression. With audiences dwarfing their traditional literary counterparts, rappers have introduced the world to a powerful new poetry – one memorized and recited by millions of people – that has given voice to communities of marginalized people and, at its best, has served as an anthem of resistance in the face of injustice.

For as long as rap music has been around, there have been people confused by rap music. So even though these circumstances—a man threatening to maybe or maybe not kill his wife because Eminem made it okay—are quite unfortunate and the guy is a massive dickhead, it’s encouraging to have a couple scholars going to bat for the craft of rap music. When I was profiling A$AP Rocky a couple years ago, I have a very specific memory of trying to justify to my mother why “PMW” is a dope song and how she shouldn’t be worried about me, even though the refrain is “Pussy, Money, Weed” over and over and over again.

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Ignorance of what rap actually is continues to be detrimental to appreciating it as a form of art, like when people argue Chief Keef is the reason to blame for violence in Chicago rather than the socioeconomic struggles and city’s hypersegregation, or the inability to look at Nicki Minaj as feminist icon because you’re uncomfortable with her butt. Rap music needs to stop being looked at as a scapegoat for all things that are wrong in this world—and now, hopefully, we can make it literally illegal to do so.

Eric Sundermann would like to thank his lawyer roommates for explaining this to him so he can explain it to you. He’s on Twitter@ericsundy

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