Gunna Is Fed Up

In 2022, a grand jury in Fulton County indicted Young Thug and 27 other members of his YSL collective in a 56-count RICO case. The investigation, part of a growing trend of prosecutors accusing rap groups of being criminal gangs rather than musical acts, spans grave allegations of murder and armed robbery, but also the suggestion that wearing a sweatshirt with the word slime on it or rapping “red just like Elmo” is “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” In almost every instance where the video or audio of a song is shared online, it’s referred to by prosecutors as a social-media post rather than a creative work. The racial (and possibly First Amendment–violating) underpinnings of this are obvious: Black artists in historically Black art forms have their every utterance cast as literal and incriminating, stripped of poetic license and divorced from genre convention.