By Kelsey Brown / Photo courtesy of Paramount+

May 14, 2024 – Link to article

Though rap music is the most listened to genre in the United States, it is still the only creative medium consistently being used to prosecute and incarcerate people. The ongoing criminal trial of Grammy-winning artist Young Thug exposed this prosecutorial tactic to many people for the first time, but it’s in no way a new practice, with nearly 700 documented cases of lyrics being used to criminalize artists, predominantly young Black and Latino men.

As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a documentary by J.M. Harper, Emmy-nominated director of jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, intricately examines the evolution of racist attitudes and actions toward Black music genres that spans centuries, connecting the current legal weaponization of rap music to a long-standing history of Black musical genres being deemed immoral and illegal.

“At every stage of a new Black [musical] genre being made, it was stifled,” Harper says. “It was bringing white and Black people together. It was erasing these fabricated racial boundaries that allowed one people to oppress another. That was, and still is today, a very contentious thing to do. So why are lyrics used in this way? There’s 400 years of history to go through to answer that question.”

Read the full article here.