In a report by the New York Times, in 2014, Jamal Knox, a rapper also known as Mayhem Mal, was charged with “issuing terroristic threats and intimidating witnesses” in a rap song. Jamal Knox was sentenced to two to six years in prison. He was 19 years old at the time.
When Knox was arrested in 2012 in Pittsburgh on gun and drug charges, Knox and a friend recorded a song titled “F**k The Police,” which was later posted on YouTube and Facebook by the friend.
According to the New York Times, “the song named the officers who conducted the arrest and were scheduled to testify against Mr. Knox. It included lyrics like “let’s kill these cops ’cause they don’t do us no good,” and featured sounds of sirens and gunfire.”
The case made it to the Supreme Court and Knox’s lawyers explained that the song’s lyrics, “were never meant to be read as bare text on a page. Rather, the lyrics were meant to be heard, with music, melody, rhythm, and emotion.”
Chance The Rapper, Killer Mike, Meek Mill, and other rappers including 21 Savage, Styles P, Fat Joe, and Yo Gotti, have filed a legal brief in Supreme Court about rap music.
The rappers have united to seek justice for Jamal Knox and have offered a “primer on rap music and hip hop,” insisting that Knox’s song is “a work of poetry.”
“A person unfamiliar with what today is the nation’s most dominant musical genre or one who hears music through the auditory lens of older genres such as jazz, country or symphony,” they wrote, “may mistakenly interpret a rap song as a true threat of violence.”
In an interview by Killer Mike, the rapper and activist stated,
“Outlaw country music is given much more poetic license than gangster rap, and I listen to both. And I can tell you that the lyrics are dark and brutal when Johnny Cash describes shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die and when Ice Cube rapped about a drive-by shooting early in his career.”
He continued, “it’s no different from stop and frisk,” he said. “It’s another form of racial profiling.”
View the entire brief here.
