aspiring young rappers serving lengthy prison sentences in the united states including the rapper mack who was convicted in 2001 of manslaughter after the prosecutor liberally quoted passages from his album shellshocked joining me to discuss what in essence is the criminalization of an art form is eric nielsen. the author of the rap on trial with andrea denise race lyrics and guilt in america so what you make a distinction in the book but tween the high profile rap artists that we know to bach and you know it who are pretty much left alone not completely right but but the the judicial system has really gone after amateur or local explained what's happened well that's right i mean there are some isolated digs examples of more high profile well known artists who have been caught in the

crosshairs of this as well but as a general rule this is something that amateur rappers are facing and there are a number of reasons for that but one of them is i mean above and beyond the fact that they lack the name recognition that well known artists like tupac or have it's that they'll select the resources to mount anything like a vigorous defense and so they become more vulnerable it's easy for prosecutors to use rap lyrics against these young amateurs either to get convictions or more often to scare them into taking a plea bargain when we don't have the help in the pony you say we don't really know the extent. to which people have been incarcerated for in essence rob because most of our forces are a lot of them are forced to play out that's exactly it we don't have a sense of the true numbers the truce scale of any of this i mean we know that the 5 or so 100 cases that we've identified are just scratching the surface but that's

exactly right we're certain that the majority of these cases will never make it to a legal database because they've they've resorted in a plea bargain that is a very common tactic that prosecutors use because defendants know if those lyrics show up in court they're in big trouble what do you think is has generated this this assault on rap. that that's a that's a short question that has a lot of answers i mean i would say that this this phenomenon what we call rap on trial is a variation on a centuries old dynamic of punishing speech punishing expression particularly among marginalized groups particularly black americans you see that from the very beginning from in the antebellum south their. slave singing was banned drumming was banned they have what are the call slave hollows of places

which harbor yes that's one name for them but exactly be idea that when you when you read sort of the testimonials of slaves and obviously the work of a number of historians right there are these hush arbors were places often in the wilderness often where people would stand the slaves would stand in a circle and they would they would compose often accept brainiest lee but they had to do it out of the view of the slave owners who would often punish them severely if they were caught even singing and so if you begin with that sort of premise that black speech and expression is punished then we have lots of examples in the ensuing centuries i mean obviously the f.b.i. cointelpro with j. edgar hoover is a great example but this resides in a much longer tradition of viewing black expression and black art as a threat and something to be. even with jazz artists like billie holiday terrorized

by the f.b.i. absolutely i mean j. edgar hoover and the f.b.i. were some of the biggest consumers of black art and black literature partly because they saw any sort of black radicalism as as as a serious threat perhaps the most significant threat that american democracy faced and so right the jazz artist faced even cabaret laws in places like new york where they were often used as culture. to punish artists or keep them out of the city we actually see that today there is even now there is widespread often police driven venue resistance when it comes to rap artists it's very difficult in many cities across the country to even book a show because of police pressure and then insurance companies who charge premiums that are just affordable so it seems of the 2 major institutions that have gone after rap artists are the police and the dish area correct government process absolutely and we have contemporary examples i mean if you think of and w.a.

and when they released their iconic song the police and i love to say that the bleep with. the police when they release their iconic protest on f. the police the f.b.i. started writing letters to their label their shows were often sort of in detroit they were arrested for performing the song we have many examples of rappers being punished for obscenity luther campbell in 2 live crew would be the most sort of obvious example but the judiciary and police have yes worked in tandem for as long as there has been hip hop for as long as there has been rap music there has been this antagonism and those are the 2 institutions that are primarily response from the book it's been quite an effective technique in the court it's absolutely effective it's frighteningly effective and it's effective not only in securing convictions but as the practice gains momentum and as judges continue to not

do their jobs as gate keepers in the courtroom and as appeals are continually unsuccessful we see that there is no reason to believe that this is going to slow down at all prosecutors have realized that if you can get these inflammatory lyrics in front of a jury they can be highly prejudicial and secure convictions even when evidence is weak otherwise although as you point out i think there was a study somebody did with country. western lyrics of. johnny cash talks about shooting i'm a woman writer and or folsom prison or something or she shot a man in reno just where i die in the shot delia the murder ballad is actually it really is a prominent feature in country music so it's a great example of another genre that does include violence in this in this. study they gave just the lyrics to a group of people and some of them are rap and some of them are country music i mean can explain what i guess so the 1st study and i say the 1st because it's been

replicated in the last couple of years the 1st study was in 1909 a social psychologist named cary freed basically took some stock lyrics that was from a folk song actually and violent lyrics and just put them on a page stripped away any indication of who the artist was or what the john wrote was then she divided people into 2 groups and she gave one group those lyrics and said these lyrics came from a country song took the exact same lyrics and gave them to the other group and said these came from a rap song and measured their responses and what she found is that the group that believed that these were rap lyrics found them to be significantly more threatening and in need of regulation than those who believed it was a country song and that was in 1909 that study was replicated i think 2016 to see if maybe raps mainstream appeal has changed these dynamics it has not those those differences still exist and persists you talk about various scenarios that are used by prosecutors let's run them the diary. right the diary is. essentially

when prosecutors argue that the lyrics are confessions so if the lyrics were written after the whatever a crime is being alleged if they were written afterwards then what police will say is if you read these lyrics these are autobiographical journals that's how one prosecutor in a case i testified and characterized them and they start reading them and representing them as literal truth and facts and so if there is a shooting they look for a lot you know if there was a shooting they look for a line where he talks about shooting even though those are stock lyrics from and a number of rap songs and they'll say that those were a confessional that you actually quote in trials where they will take bits and pieces of lyrics they're not even contiguous no i think there was a rapper was talking about his father was a vietnam vet and they just twisted it that's the case you opened with the case of mack phipps who from no limit records right what what the prosecutor did was he not

only altered the lyrics but he took not only did he represent the lyrics themselves in correctly in each song he then took bits and pieces from 2 different songs put them together and represented those as max words they were essentially about max vietnam veteran father but the prosecutor of course omitted that detail and attributed the words to mack just really just to make it seem like he was the violent person that he needed him to be to get a get a can i just serving a 30 or 30 years sentence he was he was found guilty $10.00 to $2.00 because louisiana was one of the states where you were none unanimous jury verdicts could still result in a conviction so right he was convicted tended to at the lesser charge of manslaughter he has been reluctant to accept any kind of parole because that would require him to essentially admit to a crime that he's not going to admit 30 years. motive and intent essential e.

it's the it all boils down to the same misreading of rap essentially reading the lyrics literally in this case it's often when the lyrics were written before any crime right so now it can't be a confession if it was written beforehand and so all of a sudden what prosecutors will do is they'll use these lyrics to establish a number of things that could be somebodies motive or their intent it could be their knowledge of say drug trafficking they'll say oh see this person is aware of this violence that type of thing that's often how prosecutors will represent the lyrics if they were written beforehand and there are a number of cases that i've worked on and studied were lyrics written years before the crime that make no mention of the details of the crime are are used this way effectively for prosecutors threats that is a smaller but growing subset of cases and that's unlike the 1st 2 scenarios that you that you mentioned in which rap lyrics are being used as evidence of somebodies

guilt in an underlying crime with threats the lyrics themselves are the crime because the 1st amendment according to the courts does not protect what are called true threats these lyrics are read as direct threats to another person and prosecuted as such and that the those cases are the minority but they are definitely growing and why do you think this is so effective with juries. i think it's. i think it's effective because the rap lyrics i mean i should say that rap itself is very diverse lots of different types of rap music but the kinds of pop as a song about his mother yeah absolutely and we don't even these amateur cases when i go through all their lyrics before a trial say and they're talking about their girlfriends 'd their cars but prosecutors cherry pick the lyrics that unfortunately map to many enduring

stereotypes that people have about young black and hispanic men because that's that's who these defendants are almost no white defendants almost no female defendants and so i believe that these lyrics are effective for prosecutors because they reinforce these stereotypes about criminality hypersexuality that make it easy for jurors to see this young man as a predator somebody deserving of punishment even if the evidence doesn't bear that out but when we come back we'll continue our conversation about criminalizing rap with eric nelson 'd. over the past 5 or 6 years very aggressively people have sold dollars to buy these

emerging market currencies because they can get a better yield on those currencies suddenly when all liquidity disappears during during the heisenberg uncertainty for x. market schrodinger's cat of markets everyone is then short dollars and they have to buy those dollars back because they're losing catastrophic way and all their non dollar plays on the market and this is causing a runaway freight train of the u.s. dollar going higher. a little bit messy bio d.n.a. and somewhere over the complete i'm not sure that isn't such a great thing you know i'm sure you look better now than when you had. well that's nice of you to say so but i do i went when i was 25 i knew it wasn't so great.

welcome back to on contact we continue our conversation about criminalizing rap with eric. so now in the age of social media. police are quite. intrusive in terms of following social media. to a den of fire and arrest suspects and charge suspects based on what they put up explained that it what we've seen is that the use of rap lyrics as evidence really started to explode around say 20072008 that that corresponds almost perfectly with the rise in increase of social media over those early years usage was doubling and so what you saw was that

a no aspiring artists had new and powerful tools i mean you don't need record labels anymore you don't need radio play you don't need m.t.v. you can use these social media platforms like you tube or sound cloud and market yourself directly to your audience that's really good and that's helped a number of rappers who otherwise would not have been successful make it but what it also does is it gives police a tool and they have been using it obsessive lee in some cases i worked in one in virginia and the head of a gang unit i believe it was in newport news said that his detectives were spending about 50 percent of their time behind the computer doing just this sort of thing not going out into the community not gathering real real intelligence or not doing what you would think of as typical police work but really just using the videos and looking for evidence of crimes that they can then prosecute that in that particular case they actually used a video to charge somebody with a case that had gone cold for 5 or 6 years at that point they found

a video decided it was a confession write the diary and they went after him for it so that's that is playing out all across the you know the people who are in a rap video and they didn't write the song no and they're charged yes oh the the due diligence just doesn't exist when it comes to rap music in many of the. these cases nobody has a stablished that the person performing the song even wrote it they have not taken any efforts to determine when it was written which is important if you're just characterizing it for example as a diary and in many cases just being in the video not performing that not having written it but standing in the back and bobbing your head and showing support that's used regularly often to show that you are often to create connections that they will say are gang related because often especially in places like california a charge that carries just a few years if you can say it was gang related if you can get a gang enhancement it can be $10.00 to $15.00 and so oftentimes they're using those

videos to suggest a gang affiliation in many of those those are often the cases that put to a plea bargain because the threat of a gang enhanced mint is so significant that people don't want to take their chances at trying to what extent is this an effort by the state to quassia the very real police violence even terror that exists because it does give expression to these out of control police that are using lethal force against on armed primarily black men but anyone of color yeah i mean it is it's disturbing it i worked on one case where a young man had posted something to facebook and it was a threat towards a courthouse or something like that and he even said you know i'm just kidding you know but he was charged and he was found guilty and he was sent to jail for it at

the same time there was a police officer i believe in that department or a neighboring department who called somebody and left a ranting message on her machine that was overtly threatening he was not even disciplined i think it's partly that the state is complicit in silence and voices of dissent voices of resistance it has always done that but it's also that police. themselves are have very thin skin and a lot of these threats cases actually go to court when somebody is threatening a police officer it's usually when somebody is challenging an authority figure a teacher or a police officer that's a dynamic that's playing out over and over and it's absolutely true that this systematic attack on rap music is i think at some level intended to chill that kind of speech that kind of resistance will you talk about how when local or amateur rappers. incorporate into there are specific acts of police

abuse then they're really in for it you know and god forbid they name the police officer who did it that's right it has now not but that goes back to that distinction that we may have the very beginning between well known artists and amateurs because there are a well known artist i'll take ice cube for example from n.w.a. he has written songs where he has identified police officers the police officers actually responsible for the rodney king beating identified them by name and said that he was going to go kill them that made i think he that was one of his more successful albums actually that the song that that i'm referring to but if amateur artists do it and they get punished almost exclusively and now with the paranoia understandable paranoia around school shootings and things like that you're also seeing schools begin to discipline students for rap music even if they're writing down the lyrics that somebody else that a well known artist performs even writing down the lyrics of a well known artists can get you arrested you have cases of that they search

a car and they find something like that and you know i testified in a case where the gang investigator along with the prosecutor took this kid's lyrics notebook you know page after page and went through lyric by lyric and explained oh this is where he confesses to this and this is where he talks about his gang membership and this is it turns out that that that song that they spent all this time with. it wasn't his he even had the name of the real artist on the top in the title of the song and they had spent all this time characterizing something that this is just a kid writing the lyrics to artist he likes this that happens a lot and terrorism was since the patriot act. they've essentially twisted any terrorism laws to go after rappers they can yes and that's correct i mean after 911 you saw states start passing these anti terror was often broad and sweeping i'm not even sure if they they were not used that often i'm not sure if they would survive sort of constitutional scrutiny because they're so broad but that's correct

they've used anti terror laws to go after rappers and that's when they're charging these threats those true threats that we talked about are almost always charged as terroristic acts. what is this done to the art form i mean you and several cases especially talking about rappers who get out of prison after serving their sons they're very muted i mean it has a kind of chilling effect on their ability to express themselves i mean it's obviously difficult to quantify what a chilling effect would be because how can you really quantify something the negative right it's tartuffe to the absence of speech but there's no question not only do we have examples in the book of artists who after they've said serve their time say yeah i'm still into rap music but i'm going to stay away from the violent themes now what you'll see is that in videos now i see this regularly and it's smart but artists will say at the beginning of the video all of the things in here

are props right so that they don't that because now they're aware that people are watching them but that is still compromise in the art form i mean if you think about it some art forms professional wrestling is another one you're not supposed to see behind the curtain that's part of the allure of what we're doing this for forcing artists either to steer clear of all kinds of themes or requiring them to take steps that really are. contrary to the art form so there is clearly a chilling effect i think we're at the very beginning of what could be far more severe of a chilling effect you talk about training manuals that advise trial or lawyers of all sorts tell a coherent story that will resonate from jurors and. and and what you say that they have to have stories that are fully fleshed out complete with plots character settings and motive and rap becomes of very important tool in telling that story yeah and there's a certain irony to it because rap music is

a it is fiction that's not to say that there are things in rap songs that map to reality but that's true of all fiction what it what prosecutors do is they take this fiction they represent it as literal truth or fact but then they do it so selectively and they create their own version of us on which is basically they're creating their own fiction of a fiction and representing it as fact that's what they're doing time and time again in this case you make a distinction between the narco coty those these are the primarily mexican balance . big drug lord big pens i would too i found interesting but you make a distinction between that and rap right i mean those are essentially the example that somebody might use to sort of counter-argument say well what about north korea toes because unlike with rap music north korea does at least in their history were often represented as something that was in that was true they represented

themselves as actually cataloguing the real exploits of whoever their patron was that was sort of the beginning of the shot it has changed now it now has fused in fictional elements but the key distinction is that rap music has never presented itself as some sort of chronicle of real events the way that north korea dos have expert witnesses. you talk a lot about that when they so the prosecutors will bring up quote unquote which are usually from gang units yup they are and they have absolutely no understanding of rap music oftentimes in order to curry favor with the jurors they will be openly hostile to it off i don't ever listen to that i don't and it's clear that they don't they say some they say demonstrably false absurd things about the genre they have no training in literature many you know many don't even have you know college degrees and that i don't mean to disparage people for that but they don't have any real training and yet they represent themselves as experts in

a genre of a form that is highly sophisticated and very difficult to penetrate if you don't really know because in addition to all the poetic devices you'd expect it also has slept its rapid delivery all of these things and so they mangle it regularly in courtrooms and these experts who are all police. how are they used in the courtroom when they get up in trial what what are they are they are they essentially. attempting to tie the i mean what is their primary role in these cases in the cases where there is a police expert it's usually a gang expert and right what that person is doing is saying ok this is consistent with what the bloods or the crips or whatever and here he's talking about this and this reference is actually a real reference to a gang set in this neighborhood of the city and so what they're doing but but then

sometimes their testimony goes beyond that they actually start reading it the way you would a work of literature it's just comically bad when that happens but is it primarily about tying the rap artist to a gang is that the armor that all that is that is the most frequent use of a police expert that i have seen yes and that's because their son says once they're tied to a gang than their sons as exponential. worse yes or in some cases for example there's an artist out in los angeles named draco who was just tried for 9 or 10 counts was acquitted on almost all of them but one of the ones that the jury hung on and so they're going to retry this is again conspiracy charge and in california you basically if you are found guilty of that you carry the whole weight of a crime even if you didn't commit it so there was a shooting if they can show that you somehow benefited from that it was gang related you'll do 25 years to life even if you have we're nowhere near the gun that's what that's the kind of thing that they do so it's gang unhandsome and but there are entire charges that can put you away that are in an announcement there

conspiracy rico that's what they do and they do it constantly things that was eric nelsen co-author with andrea dennis about their new book rap on trial race lyrics and guilt in america. thank you. for.

5 or 6 years very aggressively people have sold dollars to. these emerging market currencies because they can get a better yield on those currencies suddenly when all liquidity disappears during heisenberg uncertainty for x. market schrodinger's cat of markets everyone is then short dollars and they have to buy those dollars back because they're losing catastrophic way in all their non dollar plays in the market and this is causing a runaway freight train of the u.s. dollar going higher. you know what i'm going to be out there so i don't think about it i don't mean. for. i kind of where i want it.

back and i think now i think it's higher than. members of the african mafia is always them safe and quick passage to europe but once they. leave they count speech util. will not some of them the be a mom and i couldn't you know if this unit can get out if i mean. they sold the. corn of the united. because the persona that a kid even. be the norm you lynn. hello

there and you're watching in question broadcasting live from r.t. american national headquarters in washington d.c. we want to welcome our viewers from all around the world here's what's making headlines today 1st some top corporate executives even lawmakers sold their stock shares right before markets crashed which was triggered by coronavirus fears is this the definition of insider trading we're going to discuss that next plus imagine a coronavirus quarantine center with a view.