NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — The case had gone cold. Four years after the 2007 murders of Christopher Horton, 16, and Brian Dean, 20, detectives here had little to go on. No suspects. No sign of the gun used to shoot the men. No witnesses to the shooting outside a house where officers found Mr. Horton sprawled next to a trash can and Mr. Dean on the front porch. But in 2011, the case was reassigned to a detective who later came across what he considered a compelling piece of evidence: a YouTube video of Antwain Steward, a local rapper with the stage name Twain Gotti, performing his song “Ride Out.” “But nobody saw when I [expletive] smoked him,” Mr. Steward sang on the video. “Roped him, sharpened up the shank, then I poked him, 357 Smith & Wesson beam scoped him.” Mr. Steward denies any role in the killings, but the authorities took the lyrics to be a boast that he was responsible and, based largely on the song, charged him last July with the crimes.
Today, his case is one of more than three dozen prosecutions in the past two years in which rap lyrics have played prominent roles. The proliferation of cases has alarmed many scholars and defense lawyers, who say that independent of a defendant’s guilt or innocence, the lyrics are being unfairly used to prejudice judges and juries who have little understanding that, for all its glorification of violence, gangsta rappers are often people who have assumed over-the-top and fictional personas. In some of the cases, the police say the lyrics represent confessions. More often, the lyrics are used to paint an unsavory picture of a defendant to help establish motive and intent. And, increasingly, the act of writing the lyrics themselves is being prosecuted — not because they are viewed as corroborating an incident, but because prosecutors contend that the words themselves amount to a criminal threat.
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I'm not a big rap music fan and haven't really been since the early to mid nineties or so. The music no longer speaks to me. That said, in today's pop music and certainly among the past there have been all sorts of lyrics that may or may not be disturbing, challenging, stupid, boastful, sexist, racist, simple, complex and every other adjective good or bad that applies to art that human beings created. These lyrics are usually understood by most people who do not exclusively breathe through their mouth as not to be taken literally. For example, consider the following:
Dangerous song lyrics that were really criminal confessions.
Well I stand up next to a mountain and chop it down with the edge of my hand
Voodoo Child (Slight Return)- Jimi Hendrix
I'm your doctor when in need/Want some coke have some weed
You know me I'm your friend/Your main boy, thick and thin
I'm your pusherman
Pusherman- Curtis Mayfield
I hear the click clack on your feet on the stairs/I know you're no scare eyed honey
There'll be a feast if you just come upstairs/But it's no hanging matter/it's no capital crime
I can see that you're just fifteen years old/No I don't want your id
Stray Cat Blues- The Rolling Stones
Freedom came my way one day/And I started out of town
All of a sudden I saw sheriff John Brown
Aiming to shoot me down
So I shot -- I shot --- I shot him down and I say:
If I am guilty I will pay
I Shot the Sheriff- Bob Marley
You let me violate you/You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you/You let me complicate you
Help me I broke apart my insides/Help me I've got no soul to sell
Help me the only thing that works for me/Help me get away from myself
I want to f*** you like an animal
Closer- Nine Inch Nails
Your world was made for you by someone above
But you chose evil ways instead of love
You made me master of the world where you exist
The soul I took from you was not even missed
Lord of This World- Black Sabbath
I've got something to say/I raped your mother today
And it doesn't matter much to me/As long as she spread
Last Caress- The Misfits
Seriously.
To me this is very simple. If a prosecutor has serious evidence that someone committed a crime then of course they should pursue a case against that person. But using a piece of music as such evidence and actually convicting a person of charges based on nothing else than their music is ridiculous, unless you also believe that Robert DeNiro is a dangerous hit man/mob boss/serial killer; The Shining really was Stephen King's confession of child abuse; or that based on his characters' descriptions and internal thoughts in A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin is a man with an unhealthy interest in teen girls who should be locked up before he harms one. I mean how stupid is this? Using a rap video as evidence in a criminal trial of a rapper seems like using the infamous eyeball scene in Casino to prove that Joe Pesci is really a dangerous killer for the Chicago Outfit.
This appears like nothing so much as (1) a way for lazy prosecutors to avoid doing serious work of finding real evidence of criminal behavior and (2) for authoritarian types to shut down black identified music that they don't like. It's the same of story of assuming that whatever black people are doing, in this case rap music, is pathological. And race aside, I think the actions of these police and prosecutors show a serious and quite problematic hostility to free speech. But I could be wrong of course...
