Rap Lyrics and Murder Trials

Prosecutors are attempting to show that rap lyrics constitute a confession in the trial of Ronell Wilson for the murder of officers James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews over three years ago. It is not a novel argument, as this article from the New York Times shows. For more about rap lyrics, see this extremely selected bibliography.

Babb, Tracie Nicole, Rap Music’s Transformation in a Postmodern World (Dissertation, Howard University, 2005).

Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner, Rap, Black Rage, and Racial Difference, 2 Enculturation (no pagination) (Spring 1999).

Fischoff, Stuart P., Gangsta Rap and a Murder in Bakersfield. Previously published as 29 Journal of Applied Social Psychology 795 (1999).

Hendershott, Heidi A., School of Rap: The Politics and Pedagogies of Rap Music (Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2004).

Koloze, Jeff, Abortion and Rap Music: A Literary Study of the Lyrics of Representative Rap Songs, in Life and Learning, XIII: Proceedings of the Thirteenth University Faculty for Life Conference (Washington, DC, 2004).

Krohn, Franklin B., and Frances L. Suazo, Contemporary Urban Music: Controversial Messages in Hip-Hop and Rap Lyrics, 52 ETC: A Review of General Semantics 139 (1995).

Lanier, Douglas, Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap: Shakespeare, African-American Music, and Cultural Legitimation, 1 Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (no pagination) (Spring 2005).

Loza, Steven, Milo Alvarez, Josefina Santiago and Charles Moore, Los Angeles Gangsta Rap and the Aesthetics of Violence, 10 Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 149 (1994).

Peterson, Jerry, The Police in the Blues, Freedom Songs, and Rap, 3 The Mid-Atlantic Almanac 109 (1994).

Quinn, Eithne, “Who’s the Mack?” The Perfomativity and Politics of the Pimp Figure in Gangsta Rap, 34 Journal of American Studies 115 (2000).

Quinn, Michael, “Never Shoulda Been Let Out of the Penitentiary”: Gangsta Rap and the Struggle Over Racial Identity, 34 Cultural Critique 65 (1996).

Rose, Patricia Lorraine, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Cultural Resistance in Contemporary American Popular Culture (Dissertation, Brown University, 1993).

Rose-Robinson, Sia, A Qualitative Analysis of Hardcore and Gangsta Rap Lyrics: 1985-1995 (Dissertation, Howard University, 1995)

Rosen, Ralph M. and Donald R. Marks, Comedies of Transgression in Gangsta Rap and Ancient Classical Poetry, 30 New Literary History 897 (1999).

Rosenthal, Debra J., ‘Hoods and the Woods: Rap Music as Environmental Literature, 39 Journal of Popular Culture 661 (2006).