Content Analysis of How Courts Use and Misuse Rap Lyrics in Criminal Cases

In no US jurisdiction are you allowed to cut out someone's heart and store it under your floor. You're also not allowed to threaten someone that you'll do this to them, or incite others to do the same. You're not allowed to get on a street corner and say "The time has come to find Bob Jones, drag him out of his house, and cut his heart out of his chest."

You are, however, allowed in all jurisdictions to write a story like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" where the narrator does the same.

The question that arises in rap music is, when the rapper says, "Imma kill Bob Jones and cut his heart out his chest," is it more like the former or the latter? Is the "I" the rapper, or like Poe's narrator? It's a hard question for the law, because yes, the distinction between a novelist and a rapper is deeply tied into structural discrimination along lines of race and class, but also there are many more rappers than novelists who become the perpetrators and victims of violent deaths.

FTA: “Using qualitative content analysis, we found that rap evidence was proffered in these cases in one or more of five distinct ways: (1) to prove gang affiliation for sentencing enhancement purposes; (2) as circumstantial evidence of the commission of a crime; (3) as direct evidence of having communicated a threat; (4) to prove motive, knowledge, intent, identity, or character; or (5) to establish what incited the commission of a crime.”

Later in the paper, the authors posit that a feature of the rap genre is to “blur” the distinction between fictional exploits (e.g. of committing crimes) and reality, and that defendants seem to not get the benefit of the doubt.

> In spite of the creative license that many rappers take when crafting their songs, scholars have noted that the legal system has increasingly used rap lyrics as evidence as if the words were “truthful and autobiographical.”

> ...While nobody believes that Bob Marley shot the sheriff or Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno, neither artist tried to convince the public that the crimes were real. There was no question about the distinction between artist and performer. Rappers, however, blur that distinction all the time.

It's funny, and appropriate, that Johnny Cash is used as an example of how non-rap music is obviously meant to be fictional. While I never thought he "shot a man in Reno", I had always assumed he had some kind of less serious prison record. But Wikipedia says "he never served a prison sentence", though he did go to jail several times for misdemeanors. Country music has plenty of songs about lawlessness and debauchery; as prominent as the genre has been, it would be surprising, statistically speaking, if country lyrics were never used against the artist, in criminal or civil cases (e.g. divorce suits and songs about adultery).

edit: added second excerpt

Where in the definition of a song/lyrics does it say it has to be "made up"?

drakeo the ruler was in court because of his lyrics

Another song related to this is "Rap Snitch Knishes" by MF DOOM.