I wrote this piece last week for Salon.com on felony disenfranchisement laws, which now keep nearly 6 million Americans from voting.  Virginia is one of the worst states in the U.S. on this…

Disclaimer: All views are my own and don’t necessarily reflect those of other U of Richmond faculty and staff.

I just wrote this article for The Root on the use of rap lyrics in criminal trials.  I am hopeful that it will help shine a spotlight on the (mis)use of art to put people in jail…

Note:  This cites Lil Wayne lyrics, so it’s a tad raunchy. 

A couple of weeks ago, Young Money boss Lil Wayne made news when, at the last second, he pulled Nicki Minaj from Hot 97’s Summer Jam 2012.  It turns out one of the station’s personalities, Peter Rosenberg, had disparaging comments about Minaj’s song “Starship,” which he (rightly) described as “bullshit.”  Lil Wayne didn’t appreciate the dis, so he pulled Minaj from the concert to show how much he respects women.

That’s right, the rapper who routinely drops some of the most repulsive, misogynistic lyrics in the business has apparently had some kind of epiphany.  “Nicki Minaj is a female,” he said, quickly scoring a point with his correct gender identification.  “I don’t know what anyone else believe, but I believe females deserve the ultimate respect at all times, no matter what, where, when, or how.”  When I read this, there was something about his repetition of “female” here and elsewhere in the interview that felt a little off, but I was probably reading into things too closely, I decided.  Good for Wayne.  Good for rap.

This morning, I decided to give Tech N9Ne’s new-ish album (from 2011) a listen–it got pretty good reviews when it came out, and even though I’m not a huge fan of his twisted tales, I admire his dedication to the industry.  He’s been around for decades.  In any case, I saw that Wayne was featured in a very respectful-sounding song called “F**k Food,” and I was excited to hear evidence of his transformation.

Having heard Wayne’s part in the song, I can now confirm that his respect for women does indeed run deep.  Right out of the gate, his opening line–“put that p**sy on my lip and dip”–puts his listeners on notice that this ain’t the same old Wayne, and a few lines later when he says, “I beat that p**sy like brass knuckles,” I almost start to feel guilty for doubting his sincerity.  I wouldn’t be surprised to read that brass knuckles line on a Hallmark wedding anniversary card. And the lucky lady on whom he’s lavishing all of this respect (surprisingly not given a name or a voice) must feel kind of embarrassed that this famous rapper puts her on such a pedestal.  Somehow it gets even better; by the end of Wayne’s verse, she’s just about achieved God-like status.  In rapid fire rhymes, he elevates her thus:  “I’m makin’ her talk, I’m makin’ her beg / I’m makin’ her crawl, I’m makin’ her run.”

Forget the sublime poetry for a moment–this recognition that women should be treated with dignity and, yes, respect is most welcome.  I’ve been worried that rappers like Wayne were beyond help, but here, I’ll say it, I was wrong.  As if compelled to make his point one last time, Wayne’s last line–“I got that f**k food, baby, come taste it”–removes any lingering suspicions.  Haters step off–Wayne means what he says.  This is the “ultimate respect at all times” that he was talking about.

WARNING:  This is the literature side coming through.  Some may find this tedious and boring.  But it’s my blog, so…

One of the arguments I’ve been making in my classes and (sometimes indirectly) in my published work is that rap deserves the same kind of serious attention that we readily accord literature.  Sure, a lot of rap doesn’t stand up well to close reading, but the same is definitely true for fiction and other literary forms.  Pick up a supermarket romance novel with a Fabio-looking guy on the cover and you’ll see my point.

Anyway, one person who’s making my argument easier is Killer Mike.  His rhymes sound good, especially over EL-P’s production, but they are often literary as well.  I’m not just talking about his use of devices like metaphor, symbolism, etc., which most rappers employ, but his frequent references to literary works.  On more than one track in R.A.P. Music, he emphasizes his love of books—at one point saying he’s “addicted to literature”—and it shows.  One of the songs I’ve listened to several times is “Anywhere But Here,” which surveys the violence against black bodies that has become a universal fact of American urban life.  He opens with “Moving through New York City in a black seven fifty / like Batman moving through Gotham,” a setting that not only matches the dark, heavily synthed backdrop (it actually sounds like it could be a Batman soundtrack) but also sets up his description of the Gotham-like violence he describes—first in New York and then in Atlanta.  It also sets him up to be the “hero” who, from the space of his black cars, is going to “peel away” the façade of these cities to reveal their gritty and disturbing undersides.  His choice of expensive cars (in the next verse it’s a Mercedes SL) is not just his bowing to rap convention; it’s establishing his wealth and power, allowing him to serve as a counterweight to New York’s “billionaire” Mayor who presides over New York’s inequality and violence.  (The blackness of the cars speaks, I think, to the dark deeds in the song, but also the black bodies always seem to be the victims of them—including, as in the case of Atlanta, at the hands of other black men.)

His rhyme scheme throughout is noticeably constant—plenty of internal rhymes, but with particular emphasis on the trailing end-rhyme.  The rhyming pattern and cadence stay smooth and even throughout the entire song, a delivery style that lends support to his early claims that he’s moving “gently” and “dodging potholes”–in juxtaposition with the harsh, rough world that “Gotham” and those potholes are setting us up for.  In addition, I think Mike’s constant repetition works to reinforce the idea that the violence and self-destructive behavior depicted in the song keep repeating as well.  Setting the song in two different cities–and recalling the murder of Martin Luther King–makes this point, too: across time and space, the outcome has been the same.

But the repetition also relates, I think, to the song’s debt to Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem.”  (Harlem is the first neighborhood Mike mentions, just a few lines in, obviously foreshadowing this eventual move to Hughes.)  The last verse of the song concludes with “So you ask what happens to a dream deferred / Langston, well it kills itself.”  Hughes’s poem—which opens with “What happens to a dream deferred?”—also emphasizes repetition by answering the question with a series of more unanswered questions.  It concludes with a final, italicized “Or does it explode?”—a thinly-veiled threat that if people’s dreams are deferred for too long (just as Hughes perpetually defers answering his own question in the poem) there could be explosive violence.  I have always read Hughes’s final line as a warning to the people who force those dreams to be forever deferred, but Killer Mike—calling and responding to Hughes—offers a very different reading.  For him, the result of deferred dreams is that “young black boys / seem to self-sabotage they selves.”  The alliteration in this line is yet another use of repetition that speaks to the ongoing self-destructive consequences of deferred dreams.  The dreams don’t explode; they implode.

There’s a lot more that could be done with the song.  I haven’t even touched the Emily Panic chorus or the use of a well-known BDP line.  But the point here is that Killer Mike is doing a hell of a lot more than making catchy songs over great beats—he’s calling and responding to a wide range of artistic predecessors, in the process making his songs treasure troves of poetic expression.  This is what rappers should be doing more of!

Killer Mike’s new album, R.A.P. Music, is getting a whole lot of positive press these days. Most reviews have been out-of-the-ballpark good (have a look at Popmatters, Spin, and Allhiphop for examples), with just about everybody marveling at the unlikely–and surprisingly successful–combination of Killer Mike and EL-P, the album’s underground producer whose sound does, admittedly, seem ill-suited to Killer Mike’s.  But I agree that it works on R.A.P. Music, though I’m not sure I’d give it a 9/10, as many people have. Maybe an 8. (Update:  I’ve been listening to this all morning and I’m moving it up to an 8.5.  Plus, since Killa Kill himself responded to my post, it’s the least I could do!)

What I like about Killer Mike, a lot, is that he’s a talented MC who is a lyrical throwback to rap’s politically conscious rappers–just add a southern drawl.  He engages politics and makes no attempt to straddle the fence.  Perhaps not surprisingly, my interest was piqued after I listened to the track “Reagan,” which not only attacks the legacy of our 40th president, but also draws uncomfortable–though not entirely misplaced–parallels between him and Obama.  At one point, he raps, “Ronald Reagan was an actor / Not at all a factor / Just an employee of the country’s real masters / Just like the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama / Just another talking head telling lies on Teleprompters.”

First off, you’ve got to give credit to anyone who can make “Obama” rhyme with “Teleprompters.”  Lyrical dexterity aside, here we have yet another rapper who is not feeling Obama–at all.  He goes on to note that both Reagan and Obama went after Gaddafi and in doing so suggests that there’s no real daylight between Obama and his Republican predecessor.  This may play into Obama’s strategy of winning the white independent vote–everyone loves the Gipper, right? (even though his record on a wide range of issues was absolutely horrible)–but it’s got to be encouraging to the Romney folks as well.  Obama does need a strong African American vote to win in some of his key states, yet hip hop artists are on the verge of abandoning him en masse. And who doubts that hip hop could help energize black voters, not to mention young voters of all races/ethnicities?

I don’t think Killer Mike gets it right on Libya–for me, that’s an example of multilateral military intervention done right, something Bush II never would’ve been able to pull off.  But I do confess that I sometimes  have trouble distinguishing Obama from Republicans, and that surprises (and disappoints) me.  As Fredrick Harris’s spot-on piece in the Washington Post argues, Obama’s agenda has all but left African Americans in the dust, and weren’t America’s blatant and growing inequalities something he said he would address?  Didn’t he single out African Americans as a group he planned to listen to?

Now I’m concerned about the upcoming election.  If Mitt Romney were even moderately compelling as an opponent, I’d be downright worried…

Has Obama made hip-hop rethink masculinity?  This is the question raised in a recent Washington Post blog article.  Noting that well-known rappers like Jay Z, T.I., and Ice Cube have recently supported Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage, the author asks whether hip hop is ever-so-slowly moving toward a “post-homophobic”era.  Mark Anthony Neal, well-known scholar of African American culture, thinks Obama has indeed helped signal a shift, while equally well-known rap aficionado, Bakari Kitwana, argues that “Hip-hop culture doesn’t take its social cues from Obama,” saying instead that it’s these artists’ growing maturity–and their lack of vulnerability to industry opinion now that they’re established–that is causing a shift.

I actually think both are right, though it’s probably beside the point to ask whether Obama is the cause of this shift.  The point is that the shift is occurring.  And it was an easy one to predict.  As public attitudes toward gay marriage change dramatically, including among African Americans, it’s only logical that rappers’ publicly-expressed attitudes will too–especially if they’re business savvy.  Rappers, like all entertainers, do take their social cues from the public.

It’s also an increasingly tough sell for rappers to talk about discrimination and then go on to deride homosexuality.  Ice Cube gets it right when he points this out: “I’ve had people in my family, myself and a lot of my ancestors have been victims of discrimination. So I don’t want to discriminate on nobody.” And so whether Obama is responsible, in part, for this shift, is tough to determine.  What’s way more important is that, while far from a “post-homophobic” era, rap is slowly moving out of the dark ages on this issue.

Now if we can just curb the bitches, money, and cocaine rhetoric, we might find ourselves on the cusp of a new era of rap lyrics.  How many true rap fans wouldn’t love another golden age?

It took jurors all of one hour to find Lil Boosie not guilty of first degree murder–in a unanimous decision.  He still has to finish his 8-year sentence on drug charges, but that sentence must seem fairly insignificant compared to life in prison.

Given the lack of evidence, it’s surprising that the prosecution would bring the case at all. And although the outcome appears to be a just one, it’s worth noting that the practice of using rappers’ lyrics against them continues with approval from the court system.  It might not have proved successful here, but it has in the past, and no doubt it will again in the future.  That’s an ongoing miscarriage of justice that might not affect Boosie, but who knows which rapper is next.  So a big win for Boosie, but another loss for the First Amendment…

It looks like prosecutors in the Lil Boosie trial are going to have a tough time getting a conviction.  Without any DNA evidence or witnesses that can tie Boosie to the murder of Terry Boyd on October 21, 2009, they are instead resting their case on the confession of Michael “Marlo Mike” Louding that he was paid by Boosie to commit the murder.  The problem is that Marlo Mike has since recanted, insisting that his confession was essentially coerced.  Based on the coverage I’ve read of the case, Louding’s explanation does at least seem plausible.

And so without any real evidence, prosecutors have decided to introduce the lyrics to the songs “187” and “Body Bag.”  Their approach here is interesting–they brought in a forensics expert to testify that Boosie actually recorded lines for the songs just before and after the murder was taking place, which I guess is supposed to show that Boosie was sitting in the studio, writing and recording his lyrics in real time as he learned of events related to the murder. That’s a pretty unlikely scenario, and in fact Boosie’s lawyers have claimed that some of those lyrics were recorded long before the night of the murder and that Boosie was simply reusing (or “resampling”) them.  That sounds a lot more like it.  I suppose it’s possible that a rapper could use studio time to take visits or phone calls that would, in the moment, be turned into lyrics that would, the next moment, get recorded, but that’s a pretty interesting compositional process.

Perhaps that’s why Kenneth M. Willis, a Louisiana attorney, told the Los Angeles Times, “Right now, rap is on trial, Boosie’s rap music is on trial, and to me, it looks like a long shot that he’ll be convicted.”  Apparently the defense team agrees–they just rested their case without calling a single witness.  Closing arguments are scheduled for tomorrow.

Just a quick update here.  It looks like Judge Mike Erwin has decided to allow prosecutors to introduce some of Boosie’s lyrics in his upcoming murder trial.  This was as predictable as it is unfortunate.  As I’ve written before, this is a very common prosecutorial practice but in my view it amounts to dirty pool.  People who know rap music recognize that violent or sexually graphic lyrics are almost always exaggerated–it’s an expectation, especially from gangsta-inspired acts–and that they are rarely intended to depict pure reality. When I watch the movie Scarface, I don’t believe that Al Pacino, the actor playing Tony Montana, actually mowed people down with a machine gun.  It’s fiction; Montana is a character.  Rappers are also providing a kind of fiction.  Yes, this fiction often comments on, or reflects, the environment they know well, but it’s not to be taken at face value.  Indeed, nearly all rappers adopt a stage name (or an alias) that should signal to us that they are in character and free to embellish.  In fact, exaggeration is one of the hallmarks of rap music, not to mention the oral traditions on which rap is based.  Lil Boosie may have more in common with Torrence Hatch than Tony Montana does with Al Pacino, but he is still a construct.  This is not a tough concept to grasp…

And prosecutors generally do grasp it, which is why bringing in lyrics anyway is kind of cheating.  The articles I’ve read (and referenced elsewhere) on this tactic all agree that introducing rap lyrics is very likely to sway a jury, especially a jury that doesn’t understand or appreciate the conventions of the genre.  And of course that’s the idea–bring in some rap lyrics and forget about the troublesome task of gathering real evidence.  Let’s hope Boosie’s lawyers are fully prepared for this now because if they appeal down the road on the grounds that the lyrics shouldn’t have been admitted, they will probably lose.  That’s how out of touch the justice system is.