Some of Atlanta’s biggest names in hip-hop are helping push a First Amendment case in the U.S. Supreme Court testing the line for violent rap songs.
A Mississippi high school student's rap could get a full, vulgar hearing in the marble-columned chamber if the court votes to take up Taylor Bell's appeal, at the behest of artists and academics who signed a brief in the case.
“If you understand Shakespeare and classical opera, you understand hip-hop,” Killer Mike, aka Michael Render, told Channel 2 Action News, in reference to art the Supreme Court justices (average age: 69) consume more often.
“I want people to get that your rights are precious and they are to be protected and for them to see this court as a protector of those precious rights,” Render said.
The other big Atlanta names on the brief are Big Boi, of the enormously popular duo Outkast, and T.I., whose hits include "Live Your Life."
Bell recorded a rap song in 2011 taking on coaches at his high school in Fulton, Miss., who had been accused of sexually harassing female students. Bell rapped that they were: “Going to get a pistol down your mouth.”
The school suspended Bell for threatening the teachers. He sued, and a New Orleans-based appellate court upheld the punishment. No criminal charges were ever filed against the coaches and the allegations were never substantiated, according to The Associated Press. Bell, now 22, told The New York Times that he is still pursuing a career in music.
The rappers' brief cites artists from Eminem (who murdered his wife in "Kim") to Johnny Cash (who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die) to Eric Clapton (who shot the sheriff, but not the deputy) as examples of violent imagery in music protected by the First Amendment. There are racial issues at play, the brief argues.
“The visceral response that many people have to rap music stems in large part from broader racial stereotypes, especially about young men of color,” the brief states.
But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the school's discipline against Bell as reasonable because he named the two coaches in the song, and his raps "constitute threats, harassment, and intimidation."
The court goes on: “A reasonable understanding of Bell’s statements satisfies these definitions; they: threatened violence against the two coaches, describing the injury to be inflicted (putting the pistol down their mouths and pulling the trigger, and ‘capping’ them), described the specific weapon (a ‘rueger’ [sic], which, as discussed supra, is a type of firearm), and encouraged others to engage in this action; and harassed and intimidated the coaches by forecasting the aforementioned violence, warning them to ‘watch [their] back[s]’ and that they would ‘get no mercy’ when such actions were taken.”
Even though Bell recorded the song outside of school, he meant for his fellow students to see it, so he was subject to school discipline, the court found.
The academics and rappers’ brief — led by Erik Nielson of the University of Richmond, Charis E. Kubrin of the University of California-Irvine and Travis L. Gosa of Cornell University, along with Render — countered that the ruling was more about rap than about Bell’s choice of words: “The Government punished a young man for his art — and, more disturbing, for the musical genre by which he chose to express himself.”
Aside from free speech issues, there are politics at play. Render has stoked talk of his political ambitions as he stumps with Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.
And the brief takes care to remind the Supreme Court justices of the metaphorical nature of Render’s art. It states: “He performs as Killer Mike — but for this brief, in particular, it probably is worth noting that he has never actually killed anyone.”
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