Rap music has long been subjected to heavy policing and censorship, and not just in the United States. In the UK, Form 696 was regarded as the London Metropolitan Police’s way of shutting down grime gigs in the ’00s, and more recently, drill artists have been slapped with injunctions, banning them from performing and making drill music. But the phenomenon is becoming more sinister. Increasingly, rap videos and lyrics are being used as evidence in criminal trials: presented by prosecutors as autobiographical confessions to crimes, threats of violence or proof of gang affiliation.
So far, researchers at University of Manchester have identified over 60 cases where “rap evidence” has been used in this way, dating from the mid ’00s till 2020. On what basis is a musical genre being used as proof of criminality? And what’s being done to challenge it?
Eithne Quinn is an author, Senior Lecturer at University of Manchester and the head of a research project called Prosecuting Rap: Criminal Justice and UK Black Youth Expressive Culture, which highlights the use of rap evidence in UK criminal trials. Quinn sees the rise in rap evidence use coinciding with the popularity of drill music, which has been accused of exacerbating an epidemic of knife crime in the UK.
“There are sometimes loose links between drill and youth violence; and sometimes incidents of violence can authenticate the music in concerning ways, which has been greatly amplified by the media,” she says. But she stresses, “what absolutely must not happen is that the heightened moral panic about drill and violence, with all its power and baggage, is pulled into the courtroom — and that’s exactly what’s happening at the moment.”
Prosecuting Rap is networked with other academics and legal professionals. One of them is Abenaa Owusu-Bempah, an Assistant Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. She explains that violence and weapons “are common subject matter in rap music, so it becomes easy to make that link,” but argues that “when it comes to assessing the relevance of the evidence to the case, the courts often do so without considering that rap is an art form or the conventions of the music.”
Quinn puts it this way: “Adopting a violent or criminal persona, as drill rappers do, can easily be misconstrued by prosecutors. Rap is a complex and coded but very provocative kind of language, which has been proven to be extremely popular with youth audiences.”