A guilty pleasure: The legal, social scientific and feminist verdict against rap
| Author | Ummni Khan |
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806211028274 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211028274
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806211028274
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A guilty pleasure: The legal,
social scientific and feminist
verdict against rap
Ummni Khan
Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
This article draws on governance theory, critical theory and cultural criminology to
interrogate how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge to construct rap
music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own preoccupations,
ideologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a
potential source of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. Suspicion is sometimes also
cast on musicians themselves. While I compare three overlapping fields, the ultimate
purpose is to problematize the supposedly progressive approach to interpreting and
mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. Significantly, I argue that much of the social
science scholarship and feminist activism that addresses hip hop music perpetuates anti-
Black stereotypes and dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things,
social science and feminist criticism of rap hermeneutically support the use of rap lyrics
as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive, racialized legal practice.
Keywords
Criminalization, feminist theory, governance theory, law, moral panic, racialization,
rape culture, rap music, social sciences
Introduction
While hip hop currently dominates the music industry (Leight, 2019), it is also highly
problematized. Rap in particular has been heavily scrutinized. Since its inception, moral
entrepreneurs have warned of its deleterious influence on listeners and on society as a
Corresponding author:
Ummni Khan, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada.
Email: ummni_khan@carleton.ca
1028274TCR0010.1177/13624806211028274Theoretical CriminologyKhan
research-article2021
Article
2022, Vol. 26(2) 245–263
whole. Rap’s critics span the political spectrum, from arch conservatives to ardent pro-
gressives. Politicians rail against its references to murder, guns and anti-police senti-
ments, while feminists decry its perceived sexism and misogyny. Social scientists seek to
understand its fans and creators, parse its lyrical content or determine its attitudinal
effects. Most troubling, legal actors criminalize rap songs directly, or use them as evi-
dence of a musician’s culpability.
This article interrogates the relationship between these different social forces, with a
focus on how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge in a moral panic to
construct rap music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own ide-
ologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a source
of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. While I compare three distinct fields, the
article’s ultimate purpose is to critique what others might consider to be a ‘progressive’
approach to mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. In that regard, I argue that much
of the social science scholarship and feminist activism that seeks to challenge misogyny
in music dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things, it hermeneuti-
cally supports the use of rap as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive,
racialized legal practice.
In my analysis, I draw on a blend of theoretical concepts and approaches. Governance
theory contextualizes the ways non-state actors interact with the criminal justice system
to define and govern ‘dangerous’ populations (Chhotray and Stoker, 2009; Foucault,
1991), which for the purposes of this article include both creators and fans of rap.
Theorization of governance and carceral feminism elucidates how certain renditions of
gender justice seize power through a ‘politics of injury and of traumatized sensibility’
(Halley, 2008: 210) to manifest social control strategies and punitive logics (Bernstein,
2010). Cultural criminology situates the criminal justice system within a broader cultural
context (in this case, in relation to social science and feminism) to produce ‘public epis-
temologies of crime’ (Dearey, 2018: 190). Moral panic theory will be referenced through-
out (Cohen, 2015), signifying a socio-legal overreaction to rap as a seemingly new threat
to society, grounded within the race–crime nexus (Hall et al., 2013). Building on Hall’s
work, critical race theory is the foundation to all of the theories mentioned, as the ulti-
mate goal is to challenge the deviantization of racialized men, and of music associated
with Black culture.
My methodology is rooted in a cultural studies framework and is based on a compara-
tive discourse analysis of social science, feminist and legal constructions of rap. Given
the qualitative nature of this more humanities-style methodology, the artefacts studied
constitute a ‘corpus’ of representative and exemplary texts rather than an empirical ‘sam-
ple’ (Barker, 2008). Much of the analysis deconstructs the truth-claims used to pass
judgement on rap, analysing their semiotic significance and racialized subtext. I also
compare the treatment of hip hop with non-hip hop genres, along with the treatment of
racialized and white musicians. In this way, I am aligned with empirical critical race
theory (eCRT), leveraging social scientific data and methodologies to substantiate my
theoretical claims (Paul-Emile, 2014).
Part one of this article (Moral entrepreneurs) is divided into three subsections that
review social science, feminist and criminal justice problematization of rap music and/
or musicians. As I will note, both social science and feminist discourses scrutinize and
246 Theoretical Criminology 26(2)
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