Part I: Overview and history of hip hop
In the case that I worked on, the jury comprised six men and six women, all white, and all probably over the age of 40. Given the makeup of the group, and the general culture of West Texas (Lubbock regularly ranks among the most conservative cities in the country), it was important to provide a context for the music. I asked students to read and summarize chapter 2 of Tricia Rose’s Black Noise.[1] I recommended that they read a section of chapter 5 in Listening to Rap, or watch the first few episodes of Netflix’s Hip Hop Evolution. I also recommended Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic “The Message” as a way of looking at how rap music addressed the social, political, and economic conditions of the South Bronx in the early days of hip hop.
To connect more directly to the present day, and the topic at hand, I asked students to read and reflect on three recent articles from more mainstream sources and to listen to Thank You For Using GTL by Drakeo the Ruler, an album that was recorded over the phone while he is detained in the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles.[2] In their reflections, I asked students to consider how surveillance, mass incarceration, and other elements of structural racism intersected with hip hop. The last reading in this opening unit was the introduction to Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis’ book Rap on Trial, which set the stage for what was to come.
Part II: Analyzing lyrics and music
Prosecutors present lyrics as fact--as autobiography--and rarely as art. The lyrics are often excerpts, stripped of their original context. As an expert witness, it was my job to convince the jurors of two things: 1) that the lyrics were poetry; and 2) that there was distance between the artist and the art. For this class, I had four modules that asked students to engage closely with the lyrics. In the first module, I asked the students to transcribe thirty seconds of a contemporary rap song by an artist that I assumed would be unfamiliar to many of them (“Street Luv” by Lil Jairmy). The students posted their work to the discussion board so they could compare transcriptions, and I asked them to write about the challenges they faced. As expected, there were some students who were big hip hop fans and found this to be an easy task; others did not fare so well. Many cited difficulties with trying to understand the “mumble” rap flow; with listening through the electronic effects added to the voice; and with unfamiliar accents and regional slang terms. Some students highlighted the importance of grouping (i.e., where the line breaks fall) and homonyms. The underlying point of the assignment is that many of these cases rely on transcribed lyrics, and that the process of transcription is subject to considerable variation: if we can’t agree on what the lyrics are, how can they hold up as evidence?
For the second part, students read chapter 2 of my textbook, which covers poetic techniques. I asked them to explain Ice-T’s song “I’m Your Pusher” using the vocabulary they learned in the book. They were asked to explain the poetic content to the jury and to select lines from the song to illustrate the techniques, all in order to persuade the jury to believe that rap lyrics are indeed poetry, just like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Whitman.[3] Students wrote not only about end rhyme and alliteration, but also about genre, narrativity, and persona: Ice-T is the stage name of someone who is telling a story that uses drugs as a metaphor for the music industry (the song is in fact anti-drug). This part of the assignment also highlights the importance of knowing the overall context of the lyrics as well as the broader cultural and economic circumstances from which the music emerged in the first place.
The third part of this assignment explored authorship. Prosecutors pay little attention to questions of authorship, but it is an important consideration given rap’s collaborative nature. I asked students to select a popular rap song and to search for it in the BMI and ASCAP repertoire databases to see who was really involved in writing and producing the song. Most students were surprised to find out how many people were involved in creating popular songs, and immediately recognized how this information could be used to defend a rapper on the stand. A few students chose songs that raised some challenging questions: for instance, of the nine artists involved in Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage (remix),” five of them are men. Another student looked up “Crazy Story” by King Von, which credits an “unknown writer.” One of the writers involved in “Rockstar” by Roddy Rich and Dababy is a white man by the name of Ross Joseph Portaro.
The final part of the assignment looked at the impact that mainstream rap music has on up-and-coming artists. The students learned about how the music industry began changing in the 1990s, starting with Billboard magazine’s adoption of SoundScan; the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the rise of ClearChannel; and the eventual consolidation of major record labels.[4] In the case that I was involved in, the prosecution tried to make the case that Parkway Tee must have known about lean, and about cooking crack (or “trapping”) and that’s why he rapped about it in his songs. I countered, indicating that many of the most popular songs on the radio over the last ten years or so talked about lean and trapping; that Mr. Stokes was just emulating artists that were already successful in order to find success himself. I asked students to use genius.com to find five songs whose lyrics directly referenced lean, and five songs that directly referenced trapping, and to do additional research to find the peak Billboard chart position of those songs.

[1] Tricia Rose, Black Noise. Middletown [CT]: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1994.
[2] The three articles were: Joseph Goldstein and J. David Goodman, "Seeking clues to gangs and crimes, detectives monitor internet rap videos" The New York Times 7 January 2014; Craig Jenkins, "We're losing another rap generation right before our eyes," Vulture 10 December 2019; Chris Richards, "The most urgent rap album of 2020? Drakeo the Ruler just phoned it in," The Washington Post 10 June 2020.
[3] I realize that this approach is somewhat problematic in that it involves using tools designed for poetry written by white, European people (mostly men) to analyze a Black verbal art form. In the context of lyrics on trial, I do believe that this is a necessary tactic in the scope of the defense in order to convince a jury--particularly a jury of older white people--that the lyrics are indeed art: fiction, not fact.
[4] The reading assignment for this unit included Kemi Adeyemi's "Straight Leanin': Sounding Black Life at the Intersection of Hip-Hop and Big Pharma," and a portion of chapter 6 from Listening to Rap. Tricia Rose’s The Hip Hop Wars covers much of the same ground, as does S. Craig Watkins’ Hip Hop Matters.