In September 2001, McKinley Phipps Jr, also known as the rapper Mac, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It had been a year and a half since gunfire erupted outside a club where he was slated to perform in Slidell, Louisiana, resulting in the death of 19-year-old Barron Victor Jr. Phipps, then 22, maintained his innocence, and the case against him was weak – there was no gun linking him to the crime, several witnesses recanted their testimony and another person confessed to pulling the trigger. And yet, prosecutors had their trump card: Mac, a former New Orleans rap prodigy who began releasing music at the age of 13, had rapped about murder.
“Murder, murder, kill, kill”, Phipps recites in As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a new documentary on the criminalization of rap lyrics. Prosecutors spliced that line with one from a different song – “Pull the trigger, put a bullet in your head” – to create the portrait of a killer; Mac’s art was the evidence that DNA, solid confessions, or a missing weapon couldn’t provide. An all-white jury bought it. Phipps served over 21 years in prison before being granted clemency in 2021.
Phipps is one of the more high-profile examples of at least 700 cases of rap lyrics used to secure convictions, a controversial legal practice that, as explored in As We Speak, is rooted in the criminalization of Blackness in the US. For the space between lyric and confession, imagination and fact, has always been implicit for most artists; no one mistook Romeo and Juliet, however convincingly performed, for autobiography. From westerns to mafia gangster flicks to prestige TV’s many anti-heroes, “we’ve always been obsessed with murder, and specifically from the side of people who kill,” the film’s director, JM Harper told the Guardian. But “when it comes to Black art, when it comes to Black music, all of a sudden it’s like something switches, and in a courtroom it can’t be understood as entertainment, or art, or expression. It turns into autobiography and evidence. The double standard is insane.”
You don’t have to look far to find popular lyrics about murder from white musicians: “Mama, I just killed a man / Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead,” Freddie Mercury sings in Bohemian Rhapsody, footage of which is included in the film. There’s Johnny Cash (“I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”), The Chicks’ summarily disposed of abusive husband in Goodbye Earl, Taylor Swift’s No Body, No Crime, in which the narrator kills her friend’s cheating spouse. All are easily assumed as fiction, in the eyes of pop culture and the law.
But change the artist and the beat, and the lyrics are conflated with threat. Lyrics cited as evidence of “gang affiliation”, proof of crimes and intent or demonstrate a rapper’s “violent” character, was used against artists like Snoop Dogg in the 1990s, Drakeo the Ruler in 2018, Tekashi 6ix9ine in 2019, and Young Thug in 2023. It’s an evergreen issue of race; As We Speak, a Sundance breakout now streaming on Paramount+, traces the lineage of panics over Black music from slave spirituals through jazz and rock music; the film cites South Carolina’s Negro Act in 1740, which banned the use of African drums thought to incite violence (or, more accurately, community and revolt) among the enslaved. “The criminalization of hip-hop is not new. It’s an old tactic,” says the rapper Killer Mike in the film. “It’s just about the criminalization of Blackness. It’s nothing more than a sleight of hand.”
As We Speak is based on Andrea L Dennis and Erik Nielson’s academic book Rap on Trial, yet structured as a road film. The Bronx-based rapper Kemba literally travels from rap hotspot to hotspot, visiting with those ensnared by their art, and figuratively falls through a criminal justice system that incentivizes prosecutorial misconduct, botched convictions and unfair plea deals. It’s a blend of history, personal testimony and speculation – a simulation of Kemba on trial, a performance of Romeo and Juliet by Chicago drill arists – that “uses the same type of tools that hip-hop uses to tell stories”, said Harper, “which is to mix fact and fiction, memory, and hopes and dreams, combine all those ingredients into a final product that can’t be reduced to any individual ingredients”.
Kemba, born Matthew Jefferson, was no more expert on the subject than the next person. “If you’re in hip-hop, you know it’s happening, but you don’t know how much it’s happening, you just don’t know the details about it,” he told the Guardian. “And the details are the main story.” Such details include Killer Mike’s reminiscence on how rap was the only genre that captured his reality of the crack epidemic in Atlanta; Phipps’s rebuilding of his life and art post-incarceration, in New Orleans; the prosecution of the LA underground star Drakeo the Ruler, twice via lyrics, before he was acquitted. With producer Axl Beats and rapper Lavida Loca in London, he explores the city’s surveillance and censorship of specifically drill artists. And in one of the standout scenes, Kemba speaks with original members of Chicago’s drill scene – Sharron, Fatz Mack, Stash P, Katie Got Bandz – on rap’s internet virality, poverty voyeurism, lyrics as authenticity, self-responsibility and the violence that has taken so many of its young stars.
The Chicago visit, in particular, gets into some of the tricky paradoxes as rap music as an outlet for the experience of systemic violence, the line between authenticity, culpability and the ability to submit as evidence in trial. Harper noted that some rappers were concerned that the film would “somehow remove the agency from the rappers, if you say that nothing means anything. That was a concern – that us, by defending the right to freedom of speech, that we would somehow be saying that the speech meant nothing, which is the exact opposite of what we’re doing. We knew that we needed to … give the conversation more nuance.”
“I think without knowing the details, without knowing the nuances, it’s easy to see, ‘OK, people rapping about violence, violence happening, obviously one plus one equals two,’” said Kemba. “But hopefully the film pulls the veil back, and allows the conversation to spread.”
As We Speak premieres as change is under way on the state level – California has passed a measure restricting the use of lyrics in court. Similar efforts are under way in New York, Maryland and Louisiana, where such measures could have protected Phipps from incarceration. “The positive thing is that it has reached those upper echelons of politics, which is where the real change will happen,” said Harper. “Because I think the last 300-400 years have proven that when it comes to juries and judges, the prejudices that we knowingly or unknowingly have in our minds are baked into the culture. It’s not going to change without there being some outside pressure or force that’s keeping the lyrics out.”
The 700 known cases of prosecution via lyrics is only a drop in the bucket – according to the film, only 1% of cases actually make it to trial, where such practices would be seen in public. “We should add a few more zeroes to the 700,” said Kemba. “They’re not all going to be Young Thug or famous rappers … They’re people that have nine-to-fives, people that drive Ubers. What constitutes a rapper? These are just young Black and brown people that write.
“This term ‘rapper’ is such a packed word, that it already sparks the preconceived notions and the biases of people and it has really become a sort of silver bullet in these cases,” he added. “I think that’s the importance of the film, and people will only really understand that if they listen and let go of their preconceived notions.”
As We Speak is now available on Paramount+
