As campaigners urged the UK government this week to restrict the use of music lyrics in criminal trials, courts began confronting the boundary between artistic expression and legal evidence.
A proposed amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill, tabled by Labour peer Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, was debated in the House of Lords on Wednesday, backed by more than 60 senior legal and cultural figures demanding clearer statutory safeguards around when creative material can be admitted as evidence.
The campaign centres on a stark reality: as of June 2023, over 240 people in the UK have been jailed after court decisions based in part on their involvement with rap music. Dr Abenaa Owusu-Bempah, an associate professor of law at the London School of Economics and leading authority in this area, shared research data with The Guardian showing that court of appeal cases involving rap and drill used as prosecution evidence between 2005 and 2025 reveal systematic patterns of criminalising creative expression.
When Art Becomes Testimony
In recent years, prosecutors have increasingly introduced lyrics as evidence in criminal cases. Drill music, a genre that emerged in Chicago and developed distinct forms in London, has been particularly affected. According to Eithne Quinn, senior lecturer at University of Manchester and head of the “Prosecuting Rap” research project, over 60 cases have been identified where “rap evidence” was used from the mid-2000s until 2020, with the practice accelerating alongside drill’s popularity.
Campaigners argue that lyrics are being treated as literal statements rather than creative expression. References to violence, common across many musical traditions, are presented as admissions of intent. This practice alters the role of artistic language, with metaphor becoming testimony and narrative voice becoming personal declaration. Courts move from analysing actions to analysing expression, transferring interpretive authority from cultural space to institutional power.
One notable case involves Digga D (Rhys Herbert), convicted in 2018 of conspiring to commit violent disorder. He was sentenced to a year behind bars and given a criminal behaviour order requiring him to notify police within 24 hours of uploading music or videos online. His lyrics had to be verified and authorised by police to ensure they did not incite violence. These restrictions, lasting until 2025, meant police essentially had control over his creative work.
Selective Attention and Racial Disparity
The Art Not Evidence campaign, founded by Elli Brazzill (who previously worked at a major record label and currently serves as Music Editor at Napster), argues that certain genres face disproportionate scrutiny. Drill music, associated with urban youth culture and young Black men, appears far more frequently in prosecutions than rock, metal, or country music, despite those genres containing similar violent imagery. Brazzill recounts how police literally called XL Records’ label manager when the company tried to sign Giggs in 2009, saying “Don’t sign this guy.” Despite the warning, XL proceeded with the signing.
The disparity is stark when combined with joint enterprise laws, which allow prosecution of “secondary parties” who may not have physically committed an offence. According to campaign group JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association), 80 per cent of people seeking help regarding joint enterprise convictions are Black or from minority ethnic backgrounds, and almost all are working class. Following a judicial review, the Crown Prosecution Service was forced to collect data showing that young Black men and boys continue to be disproportionately targeted.
Fiction Misread as Confession
Music often uses fictional perspectives, with artists adopting personas, exaggerating experiences, or describing events symbolically across genres and historical periods. Quinn argues that “adopting a violent or criminal persona, as drill rappers do, can easily be misconstrued by prosecutors. Rap is complex and coded but very provocative language.” Studies in the US suggest that the use of rap evidence is highly prejudicial because people view rap more negatively than other music genres.
According to Legal Cheek, the risk is acute when jurors unfamiliar with rap’s genre codes, such as braggadocio and fictional first-person narratives, conflate the menacing musical persona with the defendant in the dock. Quinn recounts a murder case involving a drive-by shooting where police presented two references to drive-bys from over 100 pages of handwritten verses, omitting crucial opening and closing lines reading “This is rider music, get you hyper music” and “this is a club banger,” which clearly established the fictional context.
Owusu-Bempah warns that juries attach far more weight to lyrics than warranted, creating serious risk of wrongful convictions. Police officers often present themselves as rap experts based on working a few cases, despite having no formal credentials in musicology or cultural studies. “Being an expert on gangs does not make you an expert on rap,” she emphasises. In one case, police mistakenly identified music videos as drill when they were from a different rap sub-genre entirely.
Creative Freedom Under Legal Constraint
The possibility that lyrics may be used as evidence fundamentally affects artistic behaviour. Musicians become aware that creative expression may carry legal consequences, shaping their decision-making about subject matter and language. Some artists limit topics or alter wording to avoid misinterpretation, adjusting creative freedom to legal risk. Brazzill notes that criminalisation of drill can affect artists’ chances of being signed to labels, with police interference extending beyond the courtroom into the music industry itself.
The proposed legislative amendment would not amount to a blanket ban. Genuinely incriminating creative material could still be used, but only where it has a clear and direct link to the alleged offence. Supporters say the change would introduce statutory guardrails ensuring creative material is used only where genuinely relevant, reliable, and probative. In an open letter to the Justice Secretary, campaigners urged him not to “conflate art with evidence.”
The Legal and Cultural Stakes
The debate now facing British lawmakers concerns more than procedure. It concerns the relationship between creativity and authority, between courts that exist to determine responsibility for actions and art that exists to explore experience, imagination, and emotion. If lyrics are treated as evidence, artistic expression enters legal territory where meaning becomes subject to institutional interpretation rather than cultural negotiation.
Despite growing pressure, the Crown Prosecution Service maintains that no one has ever faced conviction solely based on their involvement in the rap or drill scene. Yet the data from Owusu-Bempah’s research, combined with the tripling of case appeals in recent years, particularly in London and Manchester, tells a different story.
Campaigners argue that protecting artistic freedom requires maintaining the distinction between creative work and factual confession, a distinction that has historically allowed art to function independently from legal judgement. Its future depends on how courts and lawmakers define the role of language itself.
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