Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2015
Abstract
This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and revenge, painted within a cosmic worldview that likens present conditions to the slave system that first brought African Muslims to America as slaves. The discursive war challenges the notion that the most radical voices in Muslim America are to be found in mosques or other Muslim gatherings. Such a position must contend with this sonic jihad and its aural assault against prisons. These artists arguably represent the most radical Islamic discourse in America today that undoubtedly ranks Muslim rappers among the most cutting-edge critics of mass incarceration.
Recommended Citation
SpearIt,
Sonic Jihad — Muslim Hip Hop in the Age of Mass Incarceration,
11
Florida International Law Review
201
(2015).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.pitt.edu/fac_articles/488
Included in
Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Ethnomusicology Commons, Evidence Commons, Hip Hop Studies Commons, Islamic Studies Commons, Law and Race Commons, Musicology Commons, Political Economy Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Religion Law Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons