{"id":122629,"date":"2025-10-15T01:48:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T01:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/122629\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T01:48:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T01:48:07","slug":"this-ruling-just-protected-hip-hops-right-to-exaggerate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/122629\/","title":{"rendered":"This Ruling Just Protected Hip-Hop\u2019s Right to Exaggerate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDrake<\/a> lost, but artistic freedom won last week when a federal court in New York dismissed the rapper\u2019s case against UMG Recordings. The decision did more than end one of rap\u2019s most publicized legal dramas. It drew a bright line between artistic expression and literal accusation \u2014 a distinction hip-hop artists have spent decades fighting to protect.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case stemmed from Kendrick Lamar<\/a>\u2019s \u201cNot Like Us,\u201d the diss track heard \u2018round the world, where Lamar called Drake a \u201ccertified pedophile.\u201d Drake sued Universal Music Group, claiming the company promoted and profited from defamatory lyrics it knew were false. The court disagreed. In dismissing the case<\/a>, Judge Jeannette Vargas ruled that the lyrics are protected under both the First Amendment and New York\u2019s strong constitutional shield for creative expression.<\/p>\n

\n\tTranslation: diss tracks are performance, not confessions.<\/p>\n

\n\tJudge Vargas understood something too many prosecutors and critics still miss \u2014 context matters. \u201cStatements must first be viewed in their context,\u201d she wrote, meaning no reasonable listener would treat a rap lyric like the 5 o\u2019clock news.\u00a0 Hip-hop is built on exaggeration, metaphor, and competition \u2014 the art of saying too much to make a point. To treat that as factual truth isn\u2019t just tone-deaf, it\u2019s unconstitutional.\u00a0 Yet prosecutors have been doing just that for years. Instead of proving their case with solid evidence, prosecutors try to take shortcuts by weaponizing rap lyrics, leveraging over forty years of hostile media treatment of rap\u2014and rap\u2019s own rugged artistic tradition \u2014 to confuse juries and introduce racial bias.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe court also rejected a dangerous idea that\u2019s become all too common: that viral outrage can somehow rewrite legal reality. As Judge Vargas put it, in a world where billions of people are online, \u201csupport for almost any proposition, no matter how far-fetched,\u201d can be found in seconds. Just because fans or trolls take a lyric literally doesn\u2019t make it defamatory. The internet doesn\u2019t decide what\u2019s true \u2014 the law does.<\/p>\n

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\n\tThis decision isn\u2019t just about Drake and Kendrick. Hip-hop has always been the voice of the streets \u2014 raw, fearless, and unfiltered. Rappers have used their music to document racism, inequality, and resilience \u2014 to tell the stories America doesn\u2019t want to hear. To confuse that creative expression with criminal intent is to weaponize culture against the very people who created it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThankfully, the tide is turning. In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act, the first law in the nation to limit the use of rap lyrics and other creative works as evidence in court. That landmark legislation sent a message across the country: art is not a crime.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow Congress needs to take that protection nationwide by passing the Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act of 2025. This bipartisan bill would amend evidentiary rules to prevent creative expression from being admitted except under specific circumstances. If prosecutors want to use creative expression as evidence\u2014whether lyrics, poems, scripts, or a novel\u2014 they would need to prove by clear and convincing evidence that an artist intended their work to be interpreted literally and that it directly references the specific crime being alleged.<\/p>\n

\n\tPut simply, the RAP Act protects metaphor from being mistaken for motive.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis would codify what Judge Vargas\u2019s opinion already affirms: artistic speech is essential to a functioning democracy, not an accessory to crime. It would also ensure that artists don\u2019t have to rely on the luck of a culturally fluent judge to protect their rights. The RAP Act would create national consistency where bias currently reigns \u2014 stopping prosecutors from using art to inflame jurors\u2019 fears instead of proving facts.<\/p>\n

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\n\tDrake\u2019s lawsuit was never about whether Lamar\u2019s lyric was true. It was about whether the law can still tell the difference between storytelling and statement, persona and personhood. The court answered yes \u2014 decisively. But until Congress enshrines that distinction into federal law, artists will remain at risk of seeing their imagination turned against them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Graham v. UMG Recordings decision is more than a legal victory. It\u2019s a cultural reset \u2014 a reminder that art exists to provoke, question, exaggerate, and, yes, even offend. If we allow prosecutors, juries, or online mobs to collapse metaphor into confession, we\u2019ll silence the very voices that challenge power most effectively.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tProtecting that freedom isn\u2019t indulgence \u2014 it\u2019s the foundation of creative democracy. The RAP Act is how we make sure the law keeps the beat.<\/p>\n

\n\tDina LaPolt is an entertainment attorney, activist, and author of Street Smart: Succeeding in a Man\u2019s World<\/a>; Willie \u201cProphet\u201d Stiggers is the Chairman and CEO of the Black Music Action Coalition<\/a>; Jack Lerner is Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and is the co-author of Rap on Trial: A Legal Guide for Attorneys<\/a> (Second Edition, 2024). Special thanks to University of Texas School of Law student Chandler Lawn.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Drake lost, but artistic freedom won last week when a federal court in New York dismissed the rapper\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122630,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[1447,18,117,19,17,1448,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-122629","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-drake","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-kendrick-lamar","14":"tag-music"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122629\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}