Folks at HipHopLaw.com brought my attention to two pertinent academic events that happened recently:
- At this year’s LatCrit Theory conference, a panel of law professors (a legal academic cypher, if you will) presented on “The Hip Hop Movement at the Intersection of Race, Class and Culture: Hip Hop Music’s Effect on the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness.” Papers produced for the panel include:
“From Habermas to ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’: Hip Hop, The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Black Public Sphere.”
“Thug Life: Hip Hop’s Tricky Impact on Criminal Punishment and Corporate Exploitation.” - There was also this crazy Swiss conference on the “Intersections of Law and Culture” that included a panel entitled “Law and Pop Culture.” Papers rolled:
“Thug Life: Hip Hop’s Curious Relationship with Criminal Justice.”
“The Legal and Social Concept of ‘Color Blindness’ in the United States and France.”
I’m not trying to hate on my honorable brethren, who far succeed me in qualifications, but I’d like to respectfully dissent from the approach they take on hip hop law: focusing on what the law has to say about hiphop and hiphop’s effects on society.
First off, the law’s got too much to say about hiphop, communities of color, and artistic expression as it is, imho. Second off, there’s nothing particularly new or challenging about viewing hiphop from the lens of the establishment. It’s overdone even for the purpose of disapproving of the law’s approach, but it’s especially annoying when the law is brandished as a demonstration of “mainstream norms” to be compared to “hiphop norms.” Which brings me to point three: approaching the subject from this POV has a dangerous tendency to turn into this inane nonsense:
Ok, with a little distance, the absurdity is kind of awesome. But seriously, 1+ clips, and I want to gouge my eyes out.
(sidebar: see 0:48 for a reference pertinent to my previous post, re: Snoop’s female lawyer “riding for her pimp”)
To be fair, between the awful America-hurting-screaming (“Why should Snoop Doggy Dogg be in prison?” “Because he’s a wise guy!” “You’ve obviously never met him.”), there are a few interesting legal bones to pick: Possession vs. distribution laws; the Second Amendment; civil consequences of felony convictions. But if I’m to give a soundbyte, it will be simply this: it is a far more interesting exercise, at least for me, to examine what hiphop has to say about the law and the law’s effects on society than the other way around.
