There’s something deeply unsettling about watching art become evidence. A federal judge ruled Monday that some of Lil Durk’s rap lyrics can’t be used against him at his upcoming murder-for-hire trial, but prosecutors are still pushing to introduce material from 12 different songs. This isn’t just about one rapper facing serious charges. It’s about how we treat creative expression when it gets uncomfortable.
Durk’s defense team isn’t wrong when they call this hyperbolic poetry. The Chicago rapper, whose legal name is Durk Banks, is facing allegations that he hired hit men to carry out a 2022 killing in Los Angeles. Prosecutors claim he was targeting Quando Rondo in retaliation for the death of King Von. It’s a grim story, but the question isn’t whether the charges are serious. It’s whether his lyrics should be treated as a confession booth.
When Poetry Becomes Prosecution
Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald did throw out one specific example. The line “I’m the type to hop on a flight with a warrant, you gotta catch me” from “Hanging with Wolves” won’t see the courtroom. Prosecutors wanted to use it to prove Durk was fleeing when he was arrested near a Miami airport in October 2024. The defense says he was traveling for business and spiritual reasons in the Middle East. The judge called it “sheer propensity” evidence, the kind of material that suggests someone would act according to alleged character traits.
That’s a small victory, but the battle is far from over. Prosecutors want to show jurors the video for “AHHH HA,” where Durk raps about revenge for King Von. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ian V. Yanniello argued that the visuals provide necessary context, that the lyrics alone might be ambiguous. It’s a clever argument, but it ignores what entertainment actually is.
Defense lawyer Marissa Goldberg pointed out the obvious double standard. She and her co-counsel Drew Findling have represented plenty of rap artists, and this case involves more lyrics than any they’ve seen before. The prosecution cherry-picked violent imagery while ignoring Durk’s Grammy-winning song “All My Life,” which shows him surrounded by children. That tells you everything about the narrative being constructed.
The Danger of Taking Art Literally
We don’t apply this standard to anyone else. Horror novelists don’t get investigated for murder. Action movie stars aren’t questioned about their firearm collections based on their roles. Nobody thinks Martin Scorsese runs a crime family because he made Goodfellas. But when it comes to rap, suddenly every lyric is treated like a diary entry.
Goldberg made this exact point in court. Performers deliver scripted lines that don’t reflect their real lives all the time. It’s part of the job, part of the audience demand, part of the cultural moment. But prosecutors want to treat Durk’s music as a confession, not as the commercial product it actually is.
The academic research backs this up. Studies have shown that rap lyrics create undue prejudice in criminal trials, that juries misunderstand them at alarming rates. This isn’t some abstract concern about artistic freedom. It’s about whether someone can get a fair trial when prosecutors weaponize their creative work.
What This Means for Hip-Hop
Only The Family, Durk’s Chicago-based label and collective, goes by the initials OTF. Prosecutors claim it’s a gang. That conflation is doing a lot of heavy lifting in their case. It turns a business operation into a criminal enterprise, an artist roster into a conspiracy. The government wants to show the jury which individuals were part of a supposed subgroup engaged in criminal activity, all based on who appears in which videos and songs.
This sets a dangerous precedent. If your record label can be redefined as a gang, if your collaborative tracks become evidence of conspiracy, if your music videos are treated as criminal documentation, then every rapper is potentially building a case against themselves every time they step into a studio.
Durk’s trial is scheduled to start April 21, though delays are possible. He appeared in court Monday with a large group of supporters, including his father and his wife India Royale. He smiled at them before being led away in custody. He’s been locked up since his arrest, unable to make bail, his freedom contingent on whether a jury believes his lyrics or his lawyers.
The judge will rule soon on whether the rest of the lyrics and videos can be admitted. That decision will matter far beyond this one case. It will signal whether we’re willing to treat rap as art or whether we’ve decided that certain forms of expression are just too dangerous to be protected. And if prosecutors get their way, every ambitious young artist will have to wonder whether their biggest songs might someday become their biggest liability.
