This week, NPR Music reporter and critic Rodney Carmichael, sitting in for Ann Powers, reflects on the recent high-profile criminal proceedings of the rappers Lil Durk and Young Thug, in the wake of Durk’s acquittal last week. In the aftermath of their trials, a meme of the two rappers takes on new meaning, and the situation stirs up lingering questions about creative license. (You can find Rodney’s column reviewing the week in hip-hop culture at NPR Music.)
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One of rap's most baffling memes of the decade took on near-prophetic meaning with the conclusion of Lil Durk’s murder-for-hire trial last week.
The once-viral photo of Young Thug and Lil Durk inspired more jokes than serious speculation when it first circulated in 2018. The irony was disarming. Literally. It stripped two of America's most-wanted rappers of their street-coded context. A bespectacled Thug looked to be imparting some hidden wisdom, his hand hovering over a mouse while a wide-eyed Durk stared into the monitor's digital abyss. The reason was probably quite boring but the imagined possibilities felt endless. Was Thug a moonlighting Geek Squad tech, making house calls to resolve Durk's wonky WiFi connection? Or was he playing the frustrated dad, drilling down on his son's sloppy algebra homework? Maybe they were both stuck in a virtual reality hellscape that one day would come to pass?
Turns out the truth may have set them both free.
After three days of deliberation, a jury acquitted Durk on all charges (though he remains in detention, awaiting the start of a second federal trial next month, in which he faces federal racketeering charges). Durk’s song lyrics and even an unreleased music video, which allegedly depict him seeking revenge on the murderer of his friend and former OTF label-signee King Von, were screened for the jury. But the rapper assembled a powerhouse team of criminal defense attorneys — including Brian Steel, who led Thug's defense team — while prosecutors in both cases used similar legal strategies to paint both defendants as premeditated killers. With high-stakes criminal trials behind them for now, it's not hard to reimagine that iconic meme as something truer to life: A portrait of Thug giving Durk hypothetical game on how to juug the system.
Thug and Durk may have won these cases, but it still leaves a segment of rap to grapple with an open-ended question: How will street artists deal with the increased legal scrutiny of their creative bread and butter?
It’s a question centered on authenticity. And it brings me back to two things. One is that photo of Thug and Durk and all the creative interpretations it stirred up, because lyrical interpretation also sits at the center of the ongoing debate on the use of lyrics as prosecutorial evidence in criminal trials. The other is separate conversations I had with scholar Erik Nielson and podcaster Wallo267 in November 2024 — just after Thug's YSL/RICO trial ended in a guilty plea and probation, and Durk was arrested by the Feds.
Nielson, the preferred expert witness for defense attorneys seeking to add cultural nuance to their clients’ lyrical oeuvre, told me his biggest worry is, “the more you start using people’s artistic expression against them, the more you are likely to chill that expression. People are going to become wary of state intervention and they're going to self-censor.”
What might that reduce certain subgenres of rap to? Nielson likened it to a professional wrestler announcing to the crowd that, in real life, he’s actually bosom buddies with his opponent before the start of a death-defying match. “I’m already concerned that rappers feel the need to call attention to the fictional nature of their songs,” said Nielson, who co-authored the book Rap On Trial: Race, Lyrics and Guilt in America. “It would absolutely ruin the experience.”
But the WWE analogy can also be flipped on its head. Especially when the portrayal of authenticity keeps dragging rappers in too deep, whether it jibes with reality or not. “When I grew up, hip-hop didn't have a target on its back,” Wallo told me. “Hip-hop artists wasn’t getting the money that these dudes are getting now. And some of the things that they talk about is — sometimes it’s like — it could be incriminating. Because the music has changed to, ‘Oh, no, I’m really about this. No, I'm really real.’ ”
As rap has migrated from coded language to the white-hot center of pop culture, it would be naive to think it hasn't become more legible to the law, too. But just like memes and murder trials both have a way of revealing how perception colors our read of culture, everything is open for interpretation. And sometimes when the game changes, players learn to mutate or mute up.
While Thug has seemingly enlisted a whole new generation of Young Stoner Life proxies, as heard on the recently released double-LP compilation Slime Life 3, Durk has flirted with taking a different route. In one of the revised indictments before the trial, prosecutors claimed Durk attempted to “commercialize” his beef with rival rapper Quando Rondo by “rapping about his revenge.” On Deep Thoughts, the 2025 album Durk released from prison while awaiting trial, you could hear him measuring his words. “He said some in public / I got in his DM and made him apologize / I can’t tell you what I had told him for real / My s*** be monetized,” he raps on “Monitoring Me,” throwing shots at an opp while attempting to hide his hand.
In an industry that rewards artists for blurring the lines or straight up crossing them, truth will always be up for interpretation. But the underlying tension lies somewhere between the scholarly defense of hip-hop's First Amendment rights and the struggle OGs like Wallo have undertaken to show artists the menu of options they have beyond dry snitching on records and doing football numbers in the federal pen.
“Everything is about being accountable for your actions,” said Wallo. “You have structural inequality. You have systematic racism. You have a lot of stuff, right? The blame game is the easiest game in America: ‘Let me blame somebody else. Oh, it's this person or the white man.’ You only could blame yourself for your actions.”
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