Popular music and art-interpretive injustice

ABSTRACT

It has been over two decades since Miranda Fricker labeled epistemic injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The philosophical literature has proliferated with variants and related concepts. By considering cases in popular music, we argue that it is worth distinguishing a parallel phenomenon of art-interpretive injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their creative capacity as a possible artist. In section 1, we consider the prosecutorial use of rap lyrics in court as a central case of this injustice. In section 2, we distinguish art-interpretive injustice from other categories already discussed in the recent literature. In section 3, we discuss the relationship between genre discourse and identity prejudice. The case for recognizing the category of art-interpretive injustice is that it allows one to recognize a class of harms as being importantly related in ways that one would otherwise overlook.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic injustice
• popular music
• agency

Acknowledgement

This paper was fully collaborative, and authors are listed in an arbitrary order. We would like to thank Jon Mandle and anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The label is used by Nielson in earlier work with Charis Kubrin (Kubrin and Nielson 2014), where they cite earlier work in which Dennis discusses the phenomenon without using the ‘rap on trial’ label (Dennis 2007).

2 Nielsen himself has been an expert witness, arguing against the rap on trial mentality, in almost a hundred cases (Zaru 2022).

3 There is pending legislation in New York which would limit the practice in the state (Dillon 2021; Zaru 2022).

4 The phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ is introduced in Fricker (1998) and developed at greater length in Fricker (2007). For a review of ensuing literature, see McKinnon ( 2016).

5 The phrase was introduced in Fricker (1999).

6 Dalaqua’s discussion is independent of earlier discussions of so-called aesthetic justice and injustice. Beardsley (1973) and Mattila (2002) consider aesthetic justice to be the fair distribution of opportunities to experience art, so the question for them is focussed on the audience rather than on the artist.

7 One might argue that identity prejudice is at work here after all, because the intergenerational concerns were mediated by race and fears of white teenagers engaging in ‘race mixing’. Early rock’n’roll was a black-coded genre; see e.g. Martinez (2015).

8 For more discussion of genres as practices and of conceptual negotiation within genres, see Malone (2022a, 2022b).

9 Note that the word ‘moron’ here seems to be intended in its original sense of someone with a diagnosable mental defect.

10 This poor attunement to the aesthetics of country music can lead middle-class and upper-class listeners to fail to attribute art categories like satire to works that might qualify, on the basis of prejudicial beliefs about the relative sophistication of lower-class audiences and artists. This arguably happens with Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee.’ Sanneh describes it as a ‘teasing critique of hippies’ and notes that Richard Nixon requested that it be performed at the White House (2021, ch. 3). Tyler Mahan Coe acknowledges that it was taken up as a ‘conservative anthem’ but convincingly argues that the lyrics are most naturally read as satire, that the song is inconsistent and confused if read as sincere (Coe 2017).