Analysis Of Rap Lyrics By Anthony Elonis

When Anthony Elonis’s wife divorced him and left with their kids, he began to write and produce songs to express how he felt about what he was going through. He wrote,“There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you…I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.” Elonis was doing what many people do when they are going through a tough time, finding a safe outlet such as writing. However, prosecutors are now specifically searching out lyrics from rap songs to match them with crimes and use them as motives. The courts are allowing admission of rap lyrics as evidence and by doing so, allowing juries to judge a person’s moral character by his art.
If it becomes the norm to convict a suspect of a crime based on …show more content…
These environments for rappers are normally poor communities, high rates of violent crime, drugs, weapons, and the highest rates of murder in the cities these communities are. It does not mean these artists are the ones committing these acts. As shown in many cases these rap artists have admitted to exaggerating for sales and to keep their “street credit.” Many jurors don’t understand rap, and meanings get lost in translation and taken out of context. Rather than treating rap as a form of artistic expression, prosecutors like to say that the music is autobiographical, that rappers are just sharing their stories. The problem with portraying rap as autobiographical is that the characters portrayed in the songs are often nothing like the rappers themselves. If these rap lyrics continue to be used against artists in courts you could take any murder, rape, drug deal, or violent act committed and charge them to anyone who put out a song raping about it or even a similar violent act. Justice is not served then and starts to scare others out of showing their artistic