Resisting the criminalisation of rap

Rap has been a part of my life from very young; I personally attest to its therapeutic and artistic value. My first exposure was through my older sister, Cella. In addition to the R&B or UK garage kept on heavy rotation, hip hop albums like Nas’s God’s Son could also be heard blaring through my house via Cella’s CD player at any time. I particularly enjoyed ‘Book of Rhymes’, a song on which a young Nasir Jones recites verses from his old lyric books. With a cool cadence and calming tone, Nas meanders through topics ranging from the imperialism of the US army to social issues like drug addiction in local communities. Contrary to its caricaturing as ceaselessly confrontational and crass, rap is often conscious at least in its subtext, and has long offered insightful social commentary. My zealous appreciation for rap soon led me to try to write my own book of rhymes. I would find writing lyrics an avenue through which I could explore the fullness of my teenage sensibilities outside of the conservatism of my West African home. Similarly to how I’d first fallen in love with reading books and writing fiction, rap felt like a fresh, cathartic approach to storytelling. Rap has always helped me to process the things I’ve seen and experienced or even just heard about, and enabled a kind of escapism. Somewhere between a diary and an anthology of fantasy, I wrote some of my earliest verses by hand in a notebook intended to be kept strictly private. My verses explored everything from my wildly swinging emotions to my aspirations to eventually be able to buy everything I ever wanted from the Argos catalogue and my local JD Sports store. On one page I’d scribe a romantic ode to a crush, on the next I’d scribble quite specifically about desires to enact revenge against anyone who might have recently upset me. Perhaps as a form of adolescent rebellion against the arbitrary rules of respectability I felt were being thrust upon me by society, the verses I wrote were saturated with expletives to an almost comical extent. When my parents inevitably stumbled across my top-secret handiwork, they appreciated my talents for neither poetry nor humour. Their immediate disapproval was non-negotiable. They were shocked not only that the topics I engaged with seemed inappropriate for my age but also by my use of profanity and graphic lyricism. Although their reasoning that I must have been emulating the existing conventions of rap was correct, they could not reconcile with the possibility that I may also have been genuinely trying to address complex personal thoughts and grappling