Unsilent Witness (part two)
Using rap lyrics as criminal evidence is inefficient, prejudicial and wrong
I recently stood on a raised platform in court to be cross-examined by a room of barristers. The jury was seated on one side, a small audience in the public gallery on the other. I was there to contribute as an ‘expert witness’, a role I explained in last week’s newsletter, to the case on trial. A group of young Black men from a small English city were being charged with conspiracy to possess a firearm. Their rap lyrics formed a core chunk of the evidence being used against them.
Local police officers had transcribed, translated and interpreted songs and YouTube music videos, many of which had been recorded and released more than five years prior to the alleged crime, to make their case. The file I’d been asked to securely download weeks before was so big, with pages numbering in the thousands, that my computer kept freezing.
Looking out over the black robes and curly blonde wigs, aware of the co-defendants sitting behind a glass panel, I answered questions fired at me from the defence and the prosecution about the witness statement I’d written. In it, I’d maintained that the vast number of lyrics under consideration were not proof of any wrongdoing. They were violent and perhaps not to everyone’s taste, full of bravado and threats, for sure. But they were also outdated, clearly performative and not to be taken literally.
This experience is one of many during my time over the last two years as a witness in criminal trials where social media and music content has been mined for evidence. It’s a growing trend – alongside Telegram messages, music videos and lyrics were also used in the landmark Manchester Ten case last year, for example. If should ring alarm bells about the direction that British civil society is headed in.
As a youth worker and writer, one of the most consistent strands of my professional life over the last decade has been forging a dialogue with young men who rap. I’ve held check-ins with boys to dissect the lyrics scribbled in the back of their exercise books, funded students to set up recording equipment at home during lockdown and delivered workshops about music culture at PRUs, secondary schools and youth clubs across the UK. Meanwhile, I’ve interviewed some of the UK’s most successful rappers, including Nines, Dave, J Hus, Digga D and Ghetts.
I’ve therefore gained a vantage point from which to view the landscape of UK rap and drill music. On one hand, these genres have become a world-beating micro-economy while churning out award-winning, chart-topping releases. They’ve paved a path for a whole generation of marginalised young people to follow. On the other hand, concern about the perceived glorification of violence in lyrics and videos persists.
“Since its original conception, hip-hop and its descendant genres have been the topic of a chicken-and-egg debate,” I wrote in my first piece about drill, six years ago. “Do violent lyrics reflect an honest social reality and therefore serve the purpose of empowering its artists? Or do they reinforce and exacerbate the issues they describe?”
The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. Searching for it is a challenge for those of us who are committed both to equitable freedom-of-expression and keeping young people safe. But blaming artists for the violent crime they narrate distracts us from underlying injustice. Taking aim at the art is a surface-level endeavour, ignoring deeper structures.
As serious youth violence soared across 2018, in the media frenzy that ensued there were calls to apply terrorism legislation to drill rappers. The Metropolitan Police started issuing Criminal Behaviour Orders (CBOs) – the modern version of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) – and ‘gang injunctions’ – applied without a need for evidence to anyone over 14 who is suspected of being in a gang – to young, disproportionately Black musicians. They banned artists from performing and recording songs without permission.
The Met also began requesting the removal of music videos from YouTube. There is no proof that doing so had a positive effect on stemming violence. It was the PR stunt of a Tory government tapping into parental fears and seeking to give the impression of tackling crime firmly. But it was lazy alarmism; a pointless plaster laid over austerity’s gaping, self-inflicted wounds.
As the pandemic focused public attention elsewhere, these hardline attitudes have trickled deeper into the criminal justice system. Enveloped by a divested, crumbling public sector and cost-of-living crisis that forces more families into poverty every day, pulling and pushing vulnerable young people further towards the temptations of illicit drug-dealing and gang protectionism, a new, insidious censorship has coalesced behind closed courtroom doors.
Police and prosecutors now prolifically mine rap lyrics and videos for criminal evidence. This phenomenon isn’t totally new, but the normalised scale of it is. And it’s not just high profile artists whose lyrics are fair game. Any teenager charged with a crime who might have typed some apparently criminal lyrics on their smartphone can get got.
Lyrics are commonly relied upon to demonstrate a defendant’s guilt, even when there is a lack of other forensic proof. In our digital age, just like you or I no longer need to call for and pick up our takeaway food, police officers no longer need to investigate particular crimes IRL. When it’s a certain demographic of young men who make music standing in the dock, investigators can sit in front of YouTube, listen to lyrics and grab screenshots of videos until an argument about the defendants’ bad character or gang membership crystallises. It is a prejudicial, inefficient and dangerously wrongheaded approach.
Firstly, rap lyrics are not unequivocally literal. “Consistent with supremacist rhetoric suggesting the intellectual inferiority of Black people, it is not supposed by critics that Black culture can be sophisticated enough to transcend literalism,” writes the youth worker, rapper and writer, Franklyn Addo.
From the pioneering sounds of New York hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s to the pirate radio clashes of UK grime throughout the 2000s, MCs have long laid lyricism over beats for performance and entertainment. Even when they are ostensibly violent, their words are generally, like literature, mythology or paintings, artful expressions; simulacra of lived experience.
Like all storytellers, rappers speak truth, but they also fictionalise, exaggerate, tease and claim the actions of others. Distinguishing between these semantic poles is extremely difficult, even for the most involved, gossiping fan.
UK rap and drill music is no different. But because these subgenres have developed in the influencer-driven social media economy, their lyrics blur the line between reality and virtual reality even more. Succeeding can require playing the dirty game of grabbing audiences’ shortening attention spans with deceptive, shock-and-horror tactics. Treating videos and lyrics as if they are automatically confessional signals a rushed lack of humility, nuance or cultural sensitivity.
Yet I’ve seen police officers translate a rapper’s taunts about an “opp” (enemy) getting stabbed into a first-person admission of having committed the stabbing. A hyperbolic brag about firing a gun can be turned into an admission of physically owning and using one.
On the very rare occasion that violent lyrics are demonstrably literal and specific – referring to particular individuals, geographies and incidents related to the crime in question, for example – it’s still practically impossible to prove the author’s involvement to a criminal standard without convincing forensic evidence.
Secondly, rap lyrics are meant to be heard by the listener, performed live or via recording, not read off a sheet of paper. Rappers invent slang, ad-lib, switch between flows, hit different time pockets, raise and lower their voices, cry and whisper, sing and state, dominate and soften. They carefully choose and ride instrumentals to elevate the emotional weight of their words. They work with a sound engineer to achieve the right texture and clarity.
When they step in the padded booth, performers of violent lyrics may seek catharsis, a rare moment of reflective pause. Each recording can be a purgation of negative emotions. It can also be an immature moment of adolescent fun. I’ve seen both firsthand on my trips to music studios with teenagers I’ve worked with.
“I felt like his therapist,” said BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ Kenny Allstar, when I asked him about holding studio space for drill artist Abra Cadabra to feature on his debut album, Block Diaries. “I’m thinking, ‘Rah, my first session, for a record on my album, has allowed someone to vent.’”
As soon as raps are transcribed by someone else and converted from their spoken-word form – a tradition that stretches back through Black and other minoritised histories as a means of coded protest, communication and camaraderie in the face of systemic oppression – their original purity is diluted. Having a police officer, of all people, translating and interpreting them from the standpoint of state authority and punitive surveillance not only cuts them off from their roots. It reinvents them to serve a pernicious purpose. Something deeply fundamental is lost along the way.
Thirdly, when I read through ‘gangs evidence’ documents written by police officers, I’m always left wondering: surely the process of scanning the internet for music content, before typing up pages of lyrics and providing specific commentary about every single couplet, must be mind-numbingly time-consuming?
Austerity has hacked away at the Met’s infrastructural presence over the last 12 years in London. There are less police stations to retreat to and canteens to socialise in, fewer support staff to gather intelligence or make cups of tea. Using what reduced capacity remains to spend days sitting at computers overloading cases with vague musical evidence strikes me as a mammoth waste of precious taxpayer-funded resources.
And finally, there are repercussions of criminalising music for wider society. News is filtering back into communities about the lengths police are willing to go to secure a guilty verdict. It’s no bad thing for young musicians to be aware of the law, careful of the lyrics they write and mindful of the way they communicate over social media. But forcing them to suppress feelings of exclusion and hide experiences of violence by demonising what is, for many, their only expressive and creative outlet, will make things worse in the long term.
Police wonder how they can build trust amongst young people of colour after decades of institutional failures. How about not locking them up for writing bars as a first step?
Lyrics should be banned as criminal evidence. This is not about letting people off the hook, being soft on crime or permitting horrific social media content to circulate. It’s possible to be strict and critical about these things without being authoritarian. We should just expect better from our justice system – and protect young people who don’t otherwise have a voice.
By Ciaran Thapar
If you’re interested in learning more about the issues explored in this story, I am co-delivering a ‘Music, Justice and Youth Work’ training with Franklyn Addo and Power The Fight on 21st February 2023.
Book your place here.
