The double standard is almost as old as hip-hop itself. A decorated filmmaker gets laurels for his or her latest bullet-laden gangster movie. A rock or country star is proclaimed a songwriting genius for violent tales of man’s inhumanity to man. But rappers are held to a different standard, their every line held up as some kind of documentary evidence of an artist’s criminal intent. Sometimes, those lyrics are even used in courtrooms by prosecutors eager to take advantage of the public’s built-in prejudices and ignorance of what has long been a vital American-made art form. Prosecutors in the ongoing trial of rapper Young Thug on racketeering charges have already made liberal use of rap lyrics. If you don’t think race is a factor in any of this, I’d love to visit the world you live in.
This is the jumping-off point for As We Speak, a new documentary that premiered Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. Long on sociological acuity and immediacy, shorter on narrative thrust and specifics, the film manages to make its point loud and clear: In the year 2024, the American legal system still knows how to capitalize on what Public Enemy once described as Fear of a Black Planet.
As We Speak unfolds as a sort of travelogue, undertaken by the Bronx rapper Kemba, a soft-spoken wordsmith trying to get to the bottom of a phenomenon that he sees as a threat to his culture. Early in the film we see Kemba purchase a no-frills two-way pager – the store owner can’t believe Kemba doesn’t want something a little more modern – for the ostensible purpose of staying off the grid. It’s more an artistic conceit than anything – the possibility that the government is listening in on Kemba’s documentary coordination is rather slight – but Kemba’s two-way purchase also speaks to his old-school proclivities. He is of and from the culture and concerned for its well-being.
We travel with Kemba to New Orleans, where he huddles with Mac Phipps, who was convicted of manslaughter in 2001 after a trial that used his lyrics to incriminate him (he did 20 years, and maintains his innocence). Kemba heads west to consider the case of the late Drakeo the Ruler, a Los Angeles rapper whose lyrics were used against him in a 2019 murder case. The point is never that rappers don’t commit crimes, but that using their art as a means of persecution reflects a profound disrespect for that art, to say nothing of a willful distortion of art’s form and function. If you live in rural America, you’re likely to write songs about rural America. If you live in the middle of a crime-infested city, you will probably write songs about that. It doesn’t seem that complicated.
It’s a juicy subject, and it might be too big for this particular storytelling approach. While Kemba is a worthy guide, his travels often skim the surface, offering just enough of an artist’s story to make you want more. As We Speak could benefit from more details on the specific cases it considers, and a deeper dive into the bigger story. Gangsta rap pioneers Ice-T and N.W.A make archival cameos, and we briefly revisit the crucial obscenity trials of 2 Live Crew, which set the tone for the arguments that have ensued for the last 35 years. Director J.M. Harper zeroes in on some choice examples of beloved artists who have embraced violence in their lyrics, from Johnny Cash (“But I shot man in Reno just to watch him die”) to Queen (“Mama, just killed a man/Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead”). These moments of context are welcome, and As We Speak could use more of them.
But the film still manages to deliver its central point. Prosecutors who criminalize hip-hop artists’ stories are essentially writing off the reality and worthiness of those artists’ existence. Life often isn’t pretty, and among the artist’s jobs is to reflect this fact, and maybe relate it with verbal dexterity over a hard beat. To take away this right is like burning a painter’s brush.
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