![]() A year-and-a-half before the rapper was allegedly involved in the shooting death of two of his associates, he spent 20 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 with the hit song “Murder on My Mind.”ĭespite this, there is precedent that fights the use of lyrics in court proceedings. Many expect that YNW Melly’s lyrics will come back to haunt him in his upcoming first-degree murder trial. The court used lyrics from his 2016 song “Flex Freestyle” to illustrate a rap beef and convince the jury that Drakeo was targeting another artist named RJ. Drakeo the Ruler spent three years in prison before he was released and found not guilty on all murder and attempted murder charges. Young Thug isn’t the only prominent rapper to have his lyrics used against him in court in recent years. LaPolt frames the issue in more colloquial terms: “Most judges are white men in their 70s, so they completely don’t even get rap music.” One of the songs, by Zach Bryan, goes: “I killed a man in Birmingham / I hit him with a tire iron / He did not move and I do not give a damn.”Īfter all, why is it considered a threat when Young Thug raps about murder, but Johnny Cash’s famous “Folsom Prison Blues” confession - “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” - is considered a masterwork of fiction? Indeed, the “murder ballad,” a mainstay of country and Americana music, is practically exalted as an art form, and even recently inspired its own true crime podcast, “Songs in the Key of Death.”Īccording to legal expert Jack Lerner, “You can draw a direct line between the use of rap lyrics in criminal proceedings and discrimination in the criminal justice system.” Lerner, a professor at UC Irvine and director of UC Irvine’s IP, Arts and Tech Clinic, is the co-author of “Rap on Trial: A Legal Guide for Attorneys,” a comprehensive manual for defense lawyers dealing with rap lyrics introduced at any stage of criminal proceedings. (She’s written about the subject before in Variety.) In demonstrating this discrimination, LaPolt references over a dozen country songs containing lyrics about murder from artists ranging from Carrie Underwood to the Chicks. LaPolt, who started LaPolt Law and co-founded advocacy group Songwriters of North America, brings up that scrutiny on violent lyrics is almost exclusively targeted at rap music. Veteran music lawyer Dina LaPolt puts it simply: “This is unprecedented racism.” The goal of prosecutors is to use these lyrics, sung or rapped in an artistic context, as legal evidence against Williams - a trend that has become increasingly popular, as well as controversial. 45 put a hole in his heart / Better not play with me, killers they stay with me,” and, “I shot at his mommy, now he no longer mention me.” “I just think and try, think and try.The indictment cites lyrics from nine Young Thug songs, including “Ski” and “Slime Shit.” Several lyrics from the 2019 song “Just How It Is” are listed, including “I done did the robbin’, I done did the jackin’, now I’m full rappin’” and “It’s all mob business, we know to kill the biggest cats of all kittens,” which the court deems in the indictment “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” Also noted by the court is the 2021 song “Bad Boy,” which includes lyrics like, “Smith & Wesson. Genuinely experimental, he frames his process in modest terms: “I’m in the studio so much, I’ll just try stuff,” he told The FADER in 2013. In other words, Thug hasn’t adjusted to convention but brought convention to him. But the weirdest thing about what he does is that it works: Nearly every project Thug’s released since 2015-from the reggae-inflected JEFFREY to the country-ish sides of Beautiful Thugger Girls-has cracked the mainstream, laying the groundwork for a new crop of fellow eccentrics like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. ![]() ![]() ![]() Starting with a prolific run of mixtapes in the early 2010s, Thug rose by pioneering a weird, ever-shifting flow somewhere between singing, rapping, mumbling, and squawking-pushing rap forward by pulling it apart. From his warped delivery to his radical, gender-fluid fashion sense, the Atlanta rapper (born Jeffery Lamar Williams in 1991) flies in the face of every unspoken rule for what hip-hop is, should, and could be. You don’t get a lot of warning for an artist like Young Thug. ![]()
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