The state's coercive engagement with Black youth expressive culture, and rap music in particular, is a topic of mounting public and scholarly concern. Rap lyrics and videos made by defendants and codefendants are regularly used as evidence in court cases in ways that incite bias against young people in the dock. At the same time, the performance and circulation of rap music are increasingly monitored and constrained by the police and other bodies. Thus, as this special issue explores, the prosecuting and policing of rap music serves as a double-punch against Black youth: the state both showcases rap music as criminal evidence in the courtroom to lock down prosecutions and, at the same time, surveils rappers and suppresses the music's creation and dissemination and, in so doing, the income streams of those who make it.

These racialising and criminalising state practices are most fully fledged in countries including the US, the UK and Australia.Footnote ¹ ‘Rap on Trial’, as US scholars call it, is common practice in the American criminal legal system and has been met with substantial scrutiny and challenge by researchers, musicians, civil liberties groups and legislators (Nielson and Dennis Reference Nielson and Dennis2019; Lerner and Kubrin Reference Lerner and Kubrin2021; Kubrin and Nielson Reference Kubrin and Nielson2014; Dennis Reference Dennis2007). Indeed, in 2022, a new bill called the Restoring Artistic Protection Act was introduced in the US House of Representatives (Halperin and Shanfeld Reference Halperin and Shanfeld2022). It seeks to protect artists from the use of their music as legal evidence in criminal and civil cases, following similar legislative moves at the state level in New York and California. This special issue includes several new perspectives from leading US scholars involved in this struggle, while turning its principal gaze towards the UK, where there is mounting scrutiny and concern, before finally shifting to a largely contrastive perspective from Colombia.

When researchers try to explain to people that music is routinely adduced by prosecution in serious crime cases, they are often met with bafflement. How can music lyrics and videos be treated as hard evidence? To bring the practice into focus, it is worth quoting at length from one of the most compelling portraits of rap's courtroom use from the UK. When several of the teenagers she worked with were among 10 young people drawn into a charge of conspiracy to commit murder in Manchester in 2022, Roxy Legane, director of the youth organisation Kids of Colour, attended the trial. She chronicled proceedings via Twitter and found a heavy reliance on rap:

It bears repeating some of Legane's points, which typify cases more broadly. Many of the rap lyrics admitted to trial weren't attributed to specific defendants; the rap ‘evidence’ given by the police officer was vague and prejudicial; and the guilt was inferred against some defendants simply by having downloaded a track (among countless others) on a digital device – the bar was set so low that merely ‘liking the music’ supposedly served as incriminating evidence of ‘gang’ conspiracy. Thanks to Legane, Kids of Colour and others, this case, in which all 10 were convicted, has led to public protest and legal objection (Pidd Reference Pidd2022). However, in too many cases in England, such trial tactics are simply justified and reinforced by sensational media reports that pave the way for mass guilty verdicts in the name of public safety and so-called ‘gang’ violence suppression (Clarke and Williams Reference Clarke and Williams2020; Fatsis et al. Reference Fatsis, Ilan, Kadiri, Owusu-Bempah, Quinn, Shiner and Squires2021; Gunter Reference Gunter2017).

UK cases involving rap evidence extend back at least to the mid-2000s, with the number of cases vastly expanding from around 2017 onwards (Swann Reference Swann2021).Footnote ² The overwhelmingly Black defendants tend to be very young. One audit of cases found that the majority of defendants in trials involving rap were teenagers at the time of the incident they were indicted for and, as in the Manchester one above, group prosecutions were the norm (Swann Reference Swann2021). Rap videos and lyrics are typically being admitted to build group prosecutions against Black children and young men, often tried under ‘joint enterprise’ laws that enable ‘secondaries’ (not suspected of having committed the substantive offence) to be tried for the same crime as the ‘principal’ (the person suspected of the substantive offence). The state seizes on stereotype-inciting violent lyrics and criminal imagery that are in-vogue in drill and other gangsta-inflected rap subgenres to help solidify ‘gang’ narratives that draw those from the periphery of incidents and friendship groups into charges (Owusu-Bempah Reference Owusu-Bempah2022; Conn Reference Conn2021; Paul Reference Paul2021; Clarke and Williams Reference Clarke and Williams2020; Williams and Clarke Reference Williams and Clarke2016; Ilan Reference Ilan2020). Indeed, this racist application of rap music helps to explain how the state has continued to convict so many young Black people under joint enterprise even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the law had taken a ‘wrong turn’ by over-charging and over-convicting secondary suspects (Mills et al. Reference Mills, Ford and Grimshaw2022; Waller Reference Waller2022).

The state repression and social-policy failures that impact on young musicians and their peers also, inevitably, influence trends in the musical content itself. Black-diasporic music subcultures have long absorbed and refracted currents of state control and neglect for the purposes of political voicing, creative expression and income generation. In the face of complex inequalities, Black youth – whose music is enabled and amplified by new cheap digitised recording and dissemination technologies – have become highly adept at monetising pain and narrativising precarity. This is facilitated by the profit-driven music and platform industries. In Why Music Matters, David Hesmondhalgh (Reference Hesmondhalgh2013) conceptualises the problem of self-realisation in modern life in relation to music, warning against an over-romanticisation of music's capabilities-enhancing potential within a social context of inequality, exploitation and suffering. Violence-themed rap lyrics are an apt illustration of his point that, in a society marked by social adversity, young people's musical engagements as producers and consumers will necessarily be substantially determined by these realities (p. 41). If young men's music has long been animated by exciting performances of rebellion and alienation, the current social context makes drill music's hyper-defiant adoption of ‘bad values’ only more salient, and of course this can be attended by risk (Quinn Reference Quinn2018; Lynes et al. Reference Lynes, Kelly and Kelly2020). However, while there can sometimes be links between music and street violence, such risk is notoriously hard to ascertain (as any media-effects scholar will know; see Johnson and Cloonan Reference Johnson and Cloonan2009) and, moreover, as above, it is greatly overplayed by the state and the media. Therefore, the risk at the heart of this special issue is not the well-worn and often suspect narrative of music as incitement to street violence but instead music's incitement by the criminal legal system to overly and wrongfully criminalise. Underdocumented and ill-understood state violence is our focus: the racist targeting of rappers and rap culture by police, prosecutors and other regulating entities.

In this special issue, Owusu-Bempah, who has emerged as the leading law scholar of the UK prosecuting rap phenomenon, offers a legal exploration of the terms on which rap evidence is routinely deemed admissible in English and Welsh criminal trials, uncovering how the music's risky image is exploited and exaggerated by prosecutors. Looking at appeal cases of trials that have included rap evidence as her corpus, she exposes the strong link forged by prosecutors between rap, race and gangs that Legane chronicles above. Owusu-Bempah rightly challenges the legal categorisation of rap as ‘bad character evidence’, critiquing the premises of rap music's evidentiary use that tend to vastly overplay its probative value while underplaying prejudicial effects. She exposes wholesale neglect of cultural contexts, musical conventions and social influences of rap in courtroom contexts – and persuasively argues that a full acknowledgement of these, and of the way that rap evidence incites racial bias, would render the evidence unreliable and, mostly, inadmissible in criminal trials (see also Owusu-Bempah Reference Owusu-Bempah2022).

The contribution by criminal defence barrister, Keir Monteith KC, offers a compelling courtroom argument in support of banning rap music in legal cases. Monteith is the leading lawyer in the fight against the overuse of rap in English and Welsh courtrooms, spearheading two widely attended legal-seminar series at Garden Court Chambers (2020–2021) on this and related subjects. He presents a practitioner-account of the way that stereotype-laced rap evidence is leveraged in everyday courtroom contexts. He explains how the value of rap music artistry – from music self-recorded in bedrooms, streets and parks to prize-winning artists like Kendrick Lamar (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music) and Brits winners like J-Hus and Stormzy – gets forgotten in cases that use the music to trade in loose racist tropes about violence and gangs. If the Crown Courts are getting this wrong at first trial, paving the way for unsafe and unfair convictions, how has the Court of Appeal responded? Both Monteith and Owusu-Bempah examine Court of Appeal decisions, and, chillingly, lawyer and legal scholar find that the higher court – so far – has almost always upheld convictions. This must change urgently. Indeed, the uninformed and complacent stance of the Court of Appeal with regard to evidence from Black youth expressive culture is indicative of a non-representative and ethnocentric senior judiciary in England and Wales in pressing need of reform (Monteith et al. Reference Monteith, Quinn, Dennis, Joseph-Salisbury, Kane, Addo and McGourlay2022).

Hardly any of the cases involving rap that went to appeal in Owusu-Bempah's research had benefited from the instruction of an independent rap expert. This leaves a frightening overreliance on the courtroom interpretation of rap lyrics by police officers (Ward and Fouladvand Reference Ward and Fouladvand2021). In its report, ‘Tackling Racial Injustice: Children and the Youth Justice System’ (Paul Reference Paul2021), the legal-reform organisation JUSTICE provocatively describes this use of police as rap experts as little more than the prosecution calling itself to give evidence. Unsurprisingly, more often than not, the police claim that the rap offers proof of so-called ‘gang’ affiliation (a hugely nebulous and heavily racialised term) and guilt. It is imperative for there to be an independent expert instructed to scrutinise state claims in each and every case. Such experts play a crucial role in explaining the meaning of particular rap lyrics on which the state is placing significance and the context of and motivation for making rap music, as well as offering research evidence that points to the unreliability, prejudice and racialisation of using rap music to prove serious crime. In an attempt to meet this need, the majority of the contributors to this special issue have served as rap experts in court proceedings, loading their findings with in-field insight.

The expert who has been instructed in more cases than any other in the world is Erik Nielson from Richmond University in the US. In his contribution, he offers a fascinating exploration of this role, taking the reader through the process from pre-trial to conviction/acquittal and on to sentencing. A pivotal tension in Nielson's account is between his role as advocate and neutral scholar-expert. This opens critical questions that inform the praxis of many of those contributing to this collection. Seeing deep systemic injustice in prosecuting rap practices and wanting to throw a wrench into racist proceedings, scholar-experts often have a strong advocacy imperative. Sociologists Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly (Reference Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly2021), in their important book on antiracist scholar activism, explore the relationship between activism and objectivity, arguing that, in the face of widely ignored institutional racism, not only is there ‘too much at stake to engage in pretensions of neutrality’, but also ‘such pretensions are ignorant (in the racial epistemological sense) to the unequal nature of the status quo’. Openly anti-racist scholarly approaches in such a context, they continue, tend to have ‘a higher level of integrity and honesty’ than those that profess neutrality (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly Reference Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly2021, pp. 12–13). Nielson agrees, concluding that ‘whatever the risks or challenges associated with [the] balancing act’ between objective observer and courtroom advocate, pro-active intervention remains crucial for facing down ‘the racially-motivated and unjust practice of “rap on trial”’. The starkness of state violence towards young Black people exposed in this special issue pushes, in many ways, beyond (supposedly) disengaged scholarly enquiry and even beyond reformism into a need for transformative and decarcerative thinking captured in burgeoning international freedom movements as chronicled in civil rights legal scholar Derecka Purnell's influential book Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (Reference Purnell2021).

Indeed the urgent abolitionist call to dismantle punishment bureaucracies and decolonise state institutions takes us beyond the courts and into wider questions of social policy, including in education. In her contribution ‘Schoolhouse Rap’, US legal scholar Andrea Dennis ably exposes the policing and punishing of rap compositions in and around American schools and colleges. Unearthing a wealth of examples, Dennis – who authored the first highly influential article on the use of rap as criminal evidence, titled ‘Poetic (In)justice’, back in 2007 – details the legal issues raised, identifying the central paradox of an education system that both encourages and stigmatises rap creativity among the young. Rap production is sometimes fostered in schools, colleges and youth centres because of its pedagogic, creative, social and therapeutic dimensions; yet, at the same time, young people's rap outputs are subject to surveillance and reprimand. Dennis exposes little-known stories of amateur rappers having their rights infringed – profiled, sanctioned and excluded by schools in ways that are even less accountable than the criminal courts. This leads to deep curtailments of children's rights that are strongly demarcated by race and class. More scholarly work like that of Dennis is needed, working in tandem with educators and campaigners, to reduce state harms in relation to children's musical and expressive practices.

Exposing how rap is used to criminalise young Black people in courtrooms and classrooms (prosecuting rap) is a central focus of this special issue. At the same time, the contributors consider the ways in which the state and market work to monitor, gatekeep and censor sound, lyrics and performance to suppress rap creativity (policing rap). The censuring of often-racialised youth leisure pursuits because they arouse unease is an ongoing tradition – in the UK, it runs from police raids on clubs and social venues that played reggae in the 1970s and 1980s, to the criminalisation of acid house raves in the 1990s, to unrest about the wearing of ‘hoodies’ in the early 2000s, and on to the current moral panic about drill (Bradley Reference Bradley2000; Gilroy Reference Gilroy2013). Risk Assessment Form 696 allowed the Metropolitan police to conduct data trawls of young people's activities while controlling and curtailing live grime music events for at least a decade, which continues with the heavy policing of contemporary Black music events.Footnote ³ Inner city gentrification and ‘public safety’ discourses bring the musical tastes and choices of Black youth into sharp focus, rendering them as risky, troublesome and in need of control (Fatsis Reference Fatsis2019; White Reference White2016). Music videos posted on digital platforms are a central way to disseminate rap music to a wider audience. Perhaps at its inception, YouTube operated as an emancipatory space; however, in the context of rap videos, it has become a principal domain for often dubious intelligence gathering by the state.

In their contribution, sociologists Tilman Schwarze and Lambros Fatsis shine a much-needed light on platforms such as YouTube that facilitate and curate content, and at the same time become conduits for digital policing and state surveillance. Music videos are analysed by the regulating authorities examining lyrics and behaviour for evidence of perceived criminality. Changes in technology as well as in the music industry mean that not only is music constantly available on a multitude of online platforms, but also fans are able to comment on and share content at a rapid pace. Schwarze and Fatsis explore UK drill as a predominantly online phenomenon, relying on a wide circulation of music videos to build a fan base and open up the possibility for recognition and income. However, they show how participating in, sharing and commenting on drill music videos make rappers and their associates vulnerable to coming up against the police, who seize on a music mode that hypes up lyrical expressions of violence. Ultimately, Schwarze and Fatsis stress the racist nature of how these creative expressions are viewed and utilised by the state.

The police and other regulating institutions use legislation, policies and codes to ensure that rap operates and is performed within certain parameters (Street Reference Street2012). This includes public broadcasters that draw on guidelines to intervene in how rap lyrics are shared over the airwaves, and in his ethnographic article, academic and grime DJ Alex de Lacey considers the linguistic policing of grime and drill by BBC Radio. He sheds illuminating light on how the institution upholds a form of racialised censorship via its radio broadcasts. Sanctions and restrictions imposed on particular genres mean that musicians tread a fine line between what is permitted and what is not, often censoring themselves in the process. MCs and DJs quoted in this piece eloquently speak to the limits that censorship places on their creativity and also how they strive to circumvent such constraints.

In ‘The 0161 Rap Gap’, music researchers and industry creatives Latoya Reisner and Kamila Rymajdo, like de Lacey, connect with people ‘on the ground’, speaking with DJs and event promoters at the sharp end of neoliberal and racially discriminatory policing and urban-economic policies. With a focus on Manchester, Reisner and Rymajdo consider the marginalisation of the Black rap music live-performance scene, taking into account the intersecting factors of how venues are policed, wider processes of market-driven gentrification that push out Black and other independent music scenes, and the racist and class-stigmatising assumptions of owners and promoters that impede local rappers. This article takes us beyond the UK's capital into the regions to offer rich evidence of how state surveillance strategies similar to London's Form 696 are deployed, activating disciplinary techniques that control how space is used and by whom. Reisner and Rymajdo discuss in-depth how institutions in Manchester operate to render rap out of place, highlighting critical discrepancies between the way that rap and other music genres in live performance spaces are policed.

As above, then, the state's rush to criminalise and exclude rap music leads to scholarly responses that critique and reject such interpretations. Yet, such a discursive/counterdiscursive logic risks leading to a narrowing of the terms of debate and a masking of the music's restorative, creative and capabilities-enhancing aspects, apparent in even the most aggressive and nihilistic subgenres. In rap's most heightened conversations it is always still possible to hear attempts to make sense of how institutions and systems impact on individual behaviour and how that relates to life in ‘ends’ (White and Ilan Reference White and Ilan2021; see also Bramwell Reference Bramwell2015). As Franklyn Addo insists in his eloquent contribution, rap opens space for explorations of identity, belonging and an expression of lived material conditions. Through personal, political and professional reflection, he examines the capabilities-enhancing and respectability-rejecting role of rap artistry for young people. Writing lyrics in his notebook growing up, Addo, who is a youth worker, rap creative and expert witness, found it ‘a fresh, cathartic approach to storytelling. Rap has always helped me to process the things I've seen and experienced or even just heard about, and enabled a kind of escapism.’ As he insists, rap, in all its forms, offers a form of flourishing, and provides mechanisms for musicians, recording artists, performers and their audiences to hold out against a representation of young Black lives that implies they have no value (see also White Reference White2020). As youth-studies sociologist Anthony Gunter summarises following years of fieldwork: ‘My findings indicate that urban youth culture – including rap – plays a largely positive role in young people's lives’ (quoted in Futurum Careers 2022).

The contribution of legal and music scholars Rafael Quishpe, Samuel Escobar and Juan Soto, like Addo's, emphasises productive contributions of rap, in this case moving even further beyond a focus on state misuses and suppressions. Indeed, they take an about-turn to consider how rap can come to be aligned with and even instrumentalised by progressive state forces in times of fundamental transition. They look at a very different legal–musical interface where rap is requisitioned to help forge a restorative path towards peace. Following a period of war, what role can rap play in coming to terms with legacies of mass human rights violations and in forging a peace-building future? In Colombia, rappers, who were in some cases chroniclers of war-stories in times of combat, have become powerful if ambivalent bards of reconciliation during an extraordinary period that has seen the rise to power of the country's first ever leftist government (Safi Reference Safi2022). The rich interviews that animate the article by Quishpe, Escobar and Soto uncover rap's complex contributions to processes of reconfiguration, constituting but also questioning new state narratives in an evolving settlement. The reconstitutive properties these scholars foreground in Colombian rap also inhere, to lesser and greater degrees, in all rap subgenres, as Addo and the other authors insist. Collectively, our contributors explore vital battles of survivalist and restorative justice in relation to the musical modes of Black and oppressed communities that together amount to a powerful call for change.