Rap Is on Trial in Didactic Documentary As We Speak

Spike Lee once remembered that, in 1989, “those motherfuckers in the press were saying that Do the Right Thing was going to incite Black people to riot.” This is usually the set-up for us to remember Roger Ebert’s review of the movie, which reminded us that “Those articles say more about their authors than about the movie.” Of course, these fears—these premature, racist condemnations—were unfounded. But even if they weren’t, if authentic expressions of the experience of Black people in America were filled with enough pain to inspire protests in the street…well, what does that say about those trying to suppress those expressions? This is the question transposed to rap lyrics in J.M. Harper’s debut doc As We Speak, a didactic discussion of the legal war waged against a single kind of (conspicuously Black) writing.

Harper, editor of another Sundance rap doc, jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, brings on musician Kemba as our travel guide through the wide world of hip-hop lyricism—and the legal struggles breathing down its neck. When Paste wrote about Kemba in 2017 as the “best of what’s next,” writer Shawn Setaro pulled a run from a song that represented “a typical head-spinning passage” from the artist. Though we get some insight into Kemba’s writing style and thematic focus, our host is less a subject himself and more of a stilted proxy interviewer, speaking to fellow rappers and legal experts alike about an issue gaining traction in the courtroom: Lyrics presented as evidence. As Kemba takes us from the Bronx to Atlanta to L.A. to Chicago to London—meeting up with rappers like Killer Mike who speak to the current environment—we learn just how pervasive the expectation is in the scene that, if you’re facing charges, anything you rap can and will be used against you.

While Tipper Gore’s anger at the exquisite horniness of Prince led to America’s biggest public outcry around policing lyrics, the war on Black words has only gotten more targeted since we started branding “explicit” music. The prominent contemporary example is Young Thug’s RICO indictment. A judge ruled last November that 17 sets of lyrics by Young Thug and some of his co-defendants can be used as evidence in a trial dealing with gang-related charges. The inclusion of these verses as anything indicating criminal activity or state of mind implies that rap lyrics are nothing but written confessions—that rappers are not musicians participating in artistic creation (let alone free speech), but professional self-incriminators just waiting for a cop or DA to put in some earbuds.

As We Speak explains this clearly and cleanly, with candid legal experts holding our hands through a system already stacked against Black people. As prosecutors look for anything and everything to throw at (young, Black) defendants, constitutional protections of expression melt away under the excruciating heat of racism. Alongside this are timelines drawn of rap’s popular progression and a history of Black music pissing off white lawmakers; Black music has been blamed for everything from revolting against overseers to riling up white girls. When not explicitly in conversation with subjects who’ve been affected by the legal execution of this racist prejudice—like Mac Phipps, whose writing helped send him to prison for 20 years—the doc’s vitality is lost in its multi-pronged educational approach.

This isn’t helped by the overt artifice of Harper’s nonfiction, which sets up stagey scenes of everything from Kemba talking to someone in a record store to buying a two-way pager in a pawn shop. These obvious, stiff sequences give As We Speak the tone of a PSA, one rolled into your Civics classroom on a bulky tube TV when your regular teacher is out sick. When the film makes the claim that, actually, you could consider William Shakespeare to be a rapper of sorts, the vibe is complete: Yep, I’m in a “cool” English class now. Or, I’m in Romeo + Juliet, but at least that would have a sense of style to it.