The nonprofit organization Free Our Art is partnering with elected officials, educators, and music industry organizations to combat the criminalization of rap. Together, they’re advocating for the federal Restoring Artistic Protection Act (or R.A.P. Act) bill, which was reintroduced to the House today, and aims to “limit the admissibility of evidence of a defendant’s creative or artistic expression against the defendant in a federal criminal or civil case.”
Along with their federal bill, which is sponsored by Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson and California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (previously sponsored by former New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman), advocates are pushing for bipartisan House bills in Missouri, Georgia, New York, and Maryland. They have successfully passed bills in California and Louisiana.
Numerous elected officials have sponsored bills in their home states, including Rep. Phil Christofanelli (Missouri), Rep. Kasey Carpenter (Georgia), Rep. Tanner Magee (Louisiana), Delegate Marlon Amprey (Maryland), former Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (California), Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz, and Senator Jamaal Bailey (both of New York). Free Our Art also boasts a slew of industry alliances, including the RIAA, Recording Academy, BMAC, SONA, MAC, and Artists Rights Alliance.
Free Our Art was formally launched on March 13. The nonprofit’s Executive Director, Philip Walotsky, says he was called to advocacy through Kevin Liles, who started the #ProtectBlackArt petition in 2022 in the wake of the YSL indictment, which infamously included rap lyrics.
Their Creative Industry Advisory board boasts prominent industry figures such as co-chairs Willie “Prophet” Stiggers of the Black Music Action Coalition and Dina LaPolt of LaPolt Law and Songwriters of North America. And their Scholars and Legal Defense Advisory Board consists of co-chairs Lucius Outlaw, a Howard University Professor, and Erik Nielsen, a University of Richmond professor and author of Rap on Trial, as well as producer of the Emmy-nominated As We Speak documentary, which chronicled the criminalization of rap lyrics. The board also includes prominent defense attorneys Brian Steel and Drew Findling. Nielson tells Rolling Stone that his research team has tabulated “over 800” cases where rap lyrics were used as evidence in criminal cases.
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“We know that you probably need to add a zero or two to that number to get a realistic sense for how many cases we’re talking about,” he says. “There are virtually no examples of any other art form being used this way over the last 75 years. A handful at most, and all of them that I’m aware of were either dismissed or reversed. So it’s very clearly a practice that targets this one art form. And it’s not hard to understand why that is, but it definitely leads to miscarriages of Justice.”
They’ve had bills passed in California and Louisiana, while Nielson says he’s frustrated about the “stalls” of the New York and Maryland bills. In September 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom enacted the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act (AB 2799), which requires judges to probe prosecutors on the purpose of including lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. In August 2023, Louisiana passed the Restoring Artistic Protection Act (HB 475), which requires pre-evidentiary hearings in cases where lyrics are used as evidence. Walotsky notes that the bill is a step in the right direction for the Louisiana justice system.
“If you talk to defense attorneys in any other state, they will look at you sideways because pretrial evidentiary hearings are standard everywhere else,” he says. “It just [wasn’t] standard in the state of Louisiana. So while we didn’t necessarily get the bill that we wanted in Louisiana, it was ultimately something that was a considerable improvement based on where they already are.”
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Louisiana’s R.A.P. Act will prevent artists from facing the injustice that New Orleans artist McKinley “Mac” Phipps did. In 2021, the Louisiana artist was released on parole after being incarcerated for 20 years in a controversial manslaughter case. In 2000, he was a rising rapper on No Limit Records who featured on the 504 Boyz’ “Wobble Wobble,” which peaked at No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100. In February of that year, 19-year-old Barron C Victor, Jr. was fatally shot before one of Mac’s shows while trying to break up a fight.
St. Tammany Parish prosecutors nabbed Phipps as their gunman despite a security guard at the venue admitting to the shooting. In 2015, five prosecution witnesses told Huffington Post that they were “bullied” into implicating Phipps as the suspect. During the trial, prosecutors combined lyrics from two of Phipps’ songs to present the idea that he was a violent person: “Murder, murder, kill, kill / You mess with me, I’ll put a bullet in your brain.” The first half of the line is from a song of the same name, while the other half is from “Shellshocked,” where Mac rapped about his father, noting, “Ya fuck with me, he’ll give you a bullet in yo’ brain.” Despite the prosecution’s lack of evidence and improper attribution of his lyrics, Mac was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison; he notes that because he was granted clemency, he can’t sue the Parish for a wrongful conviction.
Since he’s received clemency, he and his wife Angelique Phipps have both advocated for legislation restricting the prejudicial use of lyrics (Angelique previously advocated for Mac to be freed while he was incarcerated). When the Phipps’ spoke to Rolling Stone, they were set to speak at the New York State Capitol in Albany the next day. “They want to use hip hop as literal when it’s convenient,” Mac says. “We have a Dr. Dre, we have a Grandmaster Flash. This is what we do in hip hop. We create identities for ourselves. We know this is not literal; this is metaphoric, it’s expressive. I think [prosecutors] know better. So if you know better, then it leads one to believe that there is an even more diabolical agenda.”
Since Mac’s conviction, rap lyrics have been used against many rappers, most prominently Young Thug and Gunna during the YSL trial. Fulton County DA Fani Willis accused Thug, real name Jeffery Williams, of being the head of a gang called Young Slime Life, using lyrics as evidence. Last October, Williams pled guilty to racketeering charges and was sentenced to 15 years of probation. Nielson says he doesn’t see the prosecution’s relative failure in the case deterring other DAs from using lyrics in their trials.
“That [case] was unique because of the sheer incompetence of the prosecution,” he says. “In many other cases, you are going to see prosecutors continue to do this.” He notes that after YNW Melly’s 2023 double murder case ended in a mistrial, the Broward County State Attorney’s office gathered “song after song” to introduce as evidence in a new trial.
Nielson says he’d love to see more artists speak up alongside Mac and other advocates such as Killer Mike, with whom he penned a 2015 op-ed condemning the prejudiced use of lyrics. “I’ve been disappointed by the fact that more [artists] aren’t speaking out about this,” he says. “I hope as we start to see more high-profile artists caught in this net, that people will speak out.”
Currently, Free Our Art is working closely with prominent music industry organizations like the Recording Academy, RIAA, and Artists Rights Alliance. Nielsen says he’s impressed by Free Our Art and the Recording Academy’s bipartisan approach to the bills. “This is a speech issue,” he says. “We see this as something that people of a variety of political backgrounds can rally around.” The bills have several Republican sponsors, including Georgia State Rep. Kasey Carpenter. “People have got to be able to express themselves, artistically, without fear of retribution in court,” Carpenter told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in February.
New York Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz, a sponsor for the “Rap Music on Trial” bill (S7527) in New York, says that signing it into law is a matter of free speech that transcends music. The Brooklyn native says she grew up listening to hip-hop and appreciates rappers for lyrics that spoke to “what ‘s happening in the world.” But after Trump’s re-election, Cruz says anyone with a dissenting opinion is subject to consequences.
“Fast forward to now, look at everything that’s happening, the organizations that are being defunded because someone in leadership said X, Y, or Z, and it was not in line with what the President wanted,” she says. “I see this as more important than ever, not just to protect Black and brown hip hop artists that are being targeted for their thoughts around the country, but it’s now become a matter of protecting people’s ability to express their thoughts about politics.”
Walotsky says they’re optimistic about the bills being passed into law. In New York, they’re hopeful that bill S7527 will pass through the Assembly, which would then leave it up to Governor Kathy Hochul to sign it into law. In Missouri, the Restoring Artistic Protection Act (HB 353) passed the House. In Georgia, HB 237 didn’t pass the 2025 General Assembly session, but it will be alive for the 2026 session.
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“The point is not here to say that every single one of these dudes is innocent or guilty, it’s simply saying that the same set of rules should apply to everyone,” Walotstky says. “The words that sit above the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, are ‘equal justice under law.’ That is the promise of America’s criminal justice system. And that’s all you’re asking for, [is] fair trials. That’s why you’re seeing this broad coalition come together, because it’s not only about our constitution, but also at the core of who we are as Americans.”