Was a Grammy-winning rapper singing about crimes he committed or simply expressing himself as an artist?
Under the alias Young Thug, Jeffery Lamar Williams, 31, has sold more than 2.5 million albums and been hailed as “”the 21st century’s most influential rapper”.
But prosecutors in his native Atlanta are not impressed. In May of 2022, Mr Williams was arrested on racketeering and gang-related charges and has been in jail since. This month, he was denied bond for a third time.
Prosecutors allege that Young Stoner Life (YSL) Records, the rap label Mr Williams founded, is the front for an organised crime syndicate responsible for “75 to 80% of violent crime” in the city.
Part of their evidence to make that case? The lyrics that have garnered Mr Williams legions of fans.
“I never killed anybody but I got something to do with that body,” he proclaims on the 2018 song Anybody, for example. “I told them to shoot a hundred rounds.”
Listeners of rap music rarely flinch at the genre’s predilection for violent references – but rap artists in courtrooms around the country have been finding out for years that judges and juries might.
Rap lyrics have been used in more than 500 criminal cases around the US over the past two decades as evidence.
Now, a new bill in US Congress aims to stop the practice, raising questions about free speech, artistic expression and race.
The Restoring Artistic Protections or Rap Act was introduced last month by Congressman Hank Johnson, a black Democrat from Georgia, who argues that the use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence is racist.
“Bringing rap lyrics into the fact-finding process oftentimes is just another way of creating prejudice and bias in the minds of jurors and judges, and that’s wrong,” he said.
Advocates for the rap industry agree, and say that the art form is routinely under assault.
“We’ve looked at this for decades and no other fictional form, musical or otherwise, is being targeted this way,” said Erik Nielson, a professor at the University of Richmond who studies the relationship between black artistic expression and US law.
And according to his 2019 book, Rap on Trial, co-authored with former public defender Andrea Dennis, the practice of using rap as criminal evidence is growing.
“By and large, it is amateur rappers, those without any real name recognition, who generally lack the resources they would need to mount a vigorous defence,” he said.
“But we’re starting to see that police and prosecutors have become more emboldened.”
Of the more than one hundred cases Mr Nielson has consulted on, he argues that none were obvious cases of a rapper chronicling criminal activity or mapping out crimes they’d like to commit.
“They are stock lyrics that have been uttered many times by platinum-selling artists, but prosecutors do not characterise them that way,” he said.
By cherry-picking lyrics that are threatening and prejudicial, prosecutors can “play upon, but also perpetuate, the stereotypes that many jurors [and judges] hold about the criminality of young black men”, even if there is no physical evidence they’ve committed a crime, said Mr Nielson.
In the case of Mr Williams, prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia have argued that YSL, despite producing Grammy-winning talent, is not a straightforward business, but a street gang affiliated with the national Bloods gang enterprise.
In an indictment in May, the district attorney’s office charged 28 YSL artists with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act – famously used in mafia prosecutions – and tied the men to a series of felony offences, including murder, armed robbery and carjacking.
Cited throughout the charging document “in furtherance of the conspiracy” are the rappers’ lyrics in dozens of songs.
Many of the accused have vehemently denied the charges, with Mr Williams’s long-time attorney Brian Steel repeatedly saying his client has “committed no crime whatsoever”. Fulton County prosecutors did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.
Mr Williams complained to fans in June in a message from jail, saying: “You know, this isn’t about me or YSL. I always use my music as a form of artistic expression, and I see now that Black artists and rappers don’t have that freedom.”