The music filled the courtroom Wednesday, introduced by insistent beats and the wail of a siren. Sitting at the defense table, wearing baggy blue jail garb, the rapper Earl Simmons, known as DMX, nodded as a recording of his voice spit out lyrics he had written about his life.

I split

And said that I’ma be that seed

That doesn’t need much to succeed

Strapped with mad greed

And a heart that doesn’t bleed

The recording of “Slippin’,” was played by his defense team as Mr. Simmons’ faced sentencing for tax evasion in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The aim of the unusual audio presentation, according to a letter by Mr. Simmons’s lawyer, Murray Richman, was to give the court a sense of “raw Earl.”

In court, Mr. Richman compared his client to the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron and Keats.

“It’s spectacular and it’s meaningful,” he said of Mr. Simmons’s rapping. “It’s so catchy, it talks to you.”