Earlier this month, the rapper Bobby Shmurda was arrested in New York in a drug trafficking sting, and prosecutors wanted the lyrics of his rap music to be introduced into evidence. (The courts just ruled that that won’t be allowed.) In San Diego, Rapper Tiny Doo was recently charged with conspiracy in connection with gang shootings in which he took no part because his rap album, No Safety – as the prosecutor pointed out – has a revolver with bullets on the cover. In another case in Pittsburgh in 2013, Jamal Knox and Rashee Beasley were convicted for making “terroristic threats” in their rap video “Fuck the Police”. (Knox’s case is currently on appeal. )

In these cases and others, the prosecution assumes (as many people do) that the rap music in question is sincere – a literal communication or direct reflection of biography. But the popular perception that rap songs are non-fictional, first-person, straightforward accountings of the actions of their mostly-black performers is not only an erasure of the artistry and complexity of the art form (with its roots in the erasure of black people’s artistry and intellectual complexity). It’s now also being used to actually criminalize artists.

But even beyond the racial undertones inherent in most dismissals of rap music, prosecution of rappers for their music seems to work because the real or multiple meanings of rap beyond individual lyrics is rarely entered into evidence. Even in Knox and Beasley’s case, when “Fuck the Police” was played in court (rather than the lyrics being introduced as written evidence), testimony focused on the lyrics as a non-fiction text, not a layered piece of music. There was only a single mention of the music in pre-trial or trial transcripts by a defense attorney – “The beat had a nice rhyme.”

Rap is a musical art form – not sentences simply set to a backing track. Rappers, like poets and other musicians, choose words for their sound, as part of rhythmic schemes, to hit syllabic counts, for assonance, alliteration or consonance, and any of a number of other reasons beyond just dictionary definitions. Some also use those words with other layers of voice or looped tracks – even contradictory ones or humorous ones. A backing track might conjure a different mood than the lyrical voice (like in Lil Boosie’s hit “Fuck the Police”) or the verse and chorus could introduce more than one character or a new alter ego, like in Snoop Dogg’s “Murder was the Case”.

And even then, though commercial rap music is marketed as “authentic”, rap – like all pop music – is actually often a response to commercial demands. Rap music, for instance, is built on a tradition of boasting and on the perception that it comes out of urban, minority communities where crime is prevalent. Its artists, as the multi-millionaire Jay-Z once rapped, are supposed to be “hood forever”.

But rappers, like any other musical artist, are often playing characters, either in their music or their performances or both – deliberately blurring the lines between the first-person protagonists of their songs and their real identities. Nicki Minaj is well-known for such role-playing, often switching between her alter-egos Cookie, Roman Zolanski, Martha Zolanski, Rosa, Nicki Teresa, Harajuku Barbie and the female Weezy during songs. Some artists seem to clarify the distance between rap and rapper by wearing masks – such as Doom (formerly MF Doom or Metal Face Doom) – further playing with the popular perception of the one-to-one relationship between music and musician.

As the music sociologist Simon Frith wrote, “as speakers we create meaning through stress; music creates stress; therefore music creates meaning”. But even beyond that, we expect – even demand – a deeper textual analysis of traditional poetry and other musical forms (beyond, sometimes, even what the author might have consciously meant). And we look to connect to fictional protagonists in the music of white artists – characters who are rather obviously not the singer. (Does anyone believe that Taylor Swift is really “a careless man’s careful daughter” – or Juliet?)

We don’t accord rap music, for the most part, the same respect – and that disrespect has a lot to do with who is usually up there performing it. But the First Amendment doesn’t play favorites, and neither should the courts.