Keywords race and courts, race and sentencing, bias in the criminal justice system, race and public opinion, rap music, hip-hop, lyric formulas
The work illustrates this through textual analyses of lyrics identifying common formulas and connecting them to relevant social factors, in order to demonstrate that fictionalized accounts of violence form the stock-in-trade of rap and should not be interpreted literally. In African American music, these formulas have a long history, from blues, through rock and roll, to contemporary rap music. The popularity of particular lyric formulas at particular times appears connected to con-temporaneous social conditions.
We highlight the usage of lyric formulas, stock lyrical topics understood by musicians and their audiences, many of which make sense only in the context of a given genre. The goal of the present work is translational, to demonstrate the relevance of music scholarship on this topic to criminologists and legal experts. There are at least two problems with this practice: One concerns the interpretation of art in a legalistic context and the second involves the targeting of rap over other genres and the role of racism therein. Prosecutors have interpreted defendants' rap lyrics as accurate descriptions of past behavior or in some cases as real threats of violence. Recent scholarship has shed light on the troubling use of rap lyrics in criminal trials.
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