Feds Watching

Jack Lubin considers state censorship and New Orleans rapper B.G.’s album “Freedom of Speech,” in a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 45: “Submission.”

By Jack LubinJuly 1, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Music

• Law

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN 1992, AFTER HIS FATHER WAS KILLED in an armed robbery, Christopher Dorsey rhymed his way into a record deal in an Uptown New Orleans barbershop. He was 12 years old. The prepubescent Dorsey rapped first as Lil Doogie, then Gangsta D, alongside the even younger running mate with whom he had been teamed by his Cash Money Records bosses Baby and Slim, a 12-year-old boy who rapped first as Shrimp Daddy, then Baby D. The two middle schoolers were christened as a group—the B.G.’z—and released their first record, True Story, in 1995. Before you hear Lil Doogie on the opening, title track, you are braced with a warning: “The rhymes you are about to hear are true—this some true shit.” Let’s say Doogie flexed his seniority: his gruff, weary-beyond-his-years couplets dominate the record so thoroughly that Baby and Slim feared listeners would think of the B.G.’z as a one-man show. Presto chango: Dorsey, from here on out, would rap as B.G. himself.

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On March 14, 2025, B.G. released Freedom of Speech, which bears the unwelcome distinction of being the first-ever record to require explicit preapproval from federal prosecutors before its release. Of course, there are no shortage of rap albums that I suspect were written by the federal government, but that’s a story for another day.

Rewind: On November 3, 2009, B.G., like countless Black New Orleanians before and since, was stopped in his car by NOPD officers. Lax laws governing the warrantless search of automobiles gave these officers the authority to search B.G.’s car, in which they found three guns—one for each of the car’s occupants. Because B.G. had prior felony convictions—all drug-related—he was prosecuted for two counts of possessing a firearm as a person convicted of certain felonies; after one of his two passengers signed an affidavit claiming sole responsibility for the guns, B.G. was also charged with conspiring to obstruct justice. Though B.G. could have been prosecuted by local authorities, federal prosecutors stepped in to take over the case. From the outside looking in, it is difficult to tell exactly why that might be; one suspects a race between authorities to see who could prosecute the man whose 1999 single introduced the phrase “bling bling” both to the public and to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. It is instructive that the press release announcing B.G.’s guilty plea and verdict begins, “Local Rap Artist, Christopher Dorsey, Sentenced to 14 Years in Federal Prison.” B.G.’s case, per that Department of Justice release, was prosecuted by the son of legendary New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu; B.G., at the time of his plea, was just 28 years old.

After serving 12-and-a-half of his 14-year sentence in a combination of federal prison and halfway houses, B.G. was released to life on supervision—which, after commutation of his sentence, meant two years of federal probation. Per the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of 2022 roughly 3.7 million adults were under some form of supervised release, meaning that more than one in every 100 adults in the United States was either on parole or on probation. The number of American adults being supervised by their government effectively doubles the number currently incarcerated; mass incarceration, then, accounts for only one-third of the phenomenon we might understand as mass criminalization.

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Freedom of Speech, while far more serviceable as a rap album qua rap album than anybody might reasonably have expected a 12-years-delayed comeback from the former Hot Boy to be, is more compellingly understood as a primary document of the byzantine surveillance state of criminal supervision in the 21st century. As alluded to in the record’s title and addressed explicitly throughout the album, Freedom of Speech serves first and foremost as a dispatch from the frontiers of supervised release. Like the millions of (overwhelmingly Black) Americans similarly navigating life on probation or parole, B.G. struggles in real time to negotiate both the contours of his apparent freedom and the reality that he is not, in fact, free. The record begins, in a touch that shows its creator’s age but is altogether forgivable under the circumstances, with a series of pertinent news hits: B.G., recently home from prison, has been accused of violating the terms of his probation. While the record wisely pursues narrative and thematic convenience by making the alleged violation a question of B.G.’s freedom of speech, it’s simultaneously implicating his freedom of association and freedom to seek employment.

Supervision, whether in the form of probation or parole, is a facsimile of freedom conditioned upon intense surveillance and the forfeiting of certain rights. To serve either a paroled or probated sentence is to live life with the threat of incarceration hanging over one’s head; supervised individuals are, in effect, asked to repeatedly prove to the authorities, who are given complete power over them, that they are worthy of freedom. Insofar as there exists a real maximum on the number of people that the criminal punishment system can incarcerate at a time—there are only so many courtrooms and so many cells—it is the mass apparatus of supervised release that most effectively furthers the criminal punishment system’s control over poor and Black America.

Roughly two months into his release, B.G. was arrested after his probation officer issued a warrant alleging he had failed to comply with the terms of that release. Per the warrant, B.G. was required to obtain prior written approval before entering “self-employment” and refrain from associating with people with felony convictions. As he had performed with Lil Boosie and Gucci Mane, two rappers with felony convictions, and released a collaborative album with the latter, B.G. was supposedly in violation of his probation conditions. Once B.G. and his attorneys were able to establish that supervisors at his halfway house had provided advance approval for his performed shows, federal prosecutors moved to prohibit him from recording or performing lyrics that promoted and glorified gun violence and murder, maligned snitches, or were “inconsistent with the goals of rehabilitation.” A federal judge, determining that such a prohibition could run afoul of the Constitution, made a compromise: B.G. would have to provide the federal government with all songs he recorded while on supervision in order for supervising authorities to determine whether or not his lyrics were inconsistent with what they deemed “rehabilitation.” Kanye rapped it through the wire; now, B.G. had to rap into one. If you’re wondering whether or not such a preapproval process is censorious, consider the way in which B.G. bites his tongue when, on “Saved My Life,” he deems it “unconstitutional—and borderline racist!”

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At the risk of overlooking the actual album commemorating this saga: Freedom of Speech is at its strongest a surprisingly, life-affirmingly robust record. On the twangy title track, B.G. convincingly sets the record’s stakes and stokes your outrage, even if later in the album he stumbles over smoothly incorporating the phrase “fighting for my first amendment right” into a bar. The bouncy standout “Live from the Gutta” features both B.G. and the not-unwelcome E-40 each rapping like they are half their ages; when B.G. reflects on his friend facing charges after he “caught a body on the second line,” you get the sense of just how capably B.G. will continue his artistic renaissance when he is no longer looking over his shoulder. Both “Know Your Worth,” tethered by Reese Youngn’s Rod-Wave-as-billy-goat chorus that needs to be heard to be believed, and album closer “When You Come Home” are genuinely cathartic crests. Even the record’s requisite duds, like the Juvenile and Boosie–assisted clunker “Go Live,” are charming in their own right; the same way that a free speech absolutist might support someone’s right to spew hate, I am heartened that B.G. assumed the legal risk of associating with a convicted felon in the name of Boosie Badazz mailing in a verse about wet pussy.

On a purely musical level, then, Freedom of Speech is best understood as a post- incarceration comeback album forced, by the terms and conditions of its production, into being a concept album about the criminalization of rap itself. And yet it is what is left unsaid on the record as much as what is said that makes it so instructive as an articulation as the contradictions of life under supervision. Throughout Freedom of Speech, B.G. is less indignant and self-righteous than he is plain flabbergasted. There’s a version of this record somewhere that casts B.G. as an indignant defense attorney stumping on behalf of not just his clients but every artist in the United States; with extremely limited exceptions, Freedom of Speech avoids such grandstanding. Where B.G. does acknowledge the legal constraints surrounding the album’s recording, he speaks simultaneously as a rapper being surveilled and as one of the 3.6 million Americans whose liberty is in some meaningful way restricted despite their notionally being free. B.G., like countless probationers and parolees, is implored both to work and rehabilitate himself while the apparatus of his surveillance renders maintaining such work—and effectuating, to the extent you’re amenable to that line of thinking, that rehabilitation—anywhere from Kafkaesque to Sisyphean.

The result is a piece of art rife with contradictions and uncannily of its time. B.G., at the risk of forfeiting claims to any subtlety, casts himself as a crusader for the constitutional right to unfettered free speech. And yet, the legal restraints hovering above this record render its actual content relatively tame. Whether or not federal authorities offered line edits on B.G.’s lyrics does not change the fact that his mandated submission of these records in and of itself marked an egregious form of censorship. In a self-made, self-styled documentary that B.G.’s label uploaded to YouTube to accompany the record, B.G. lets on as much—as he details his struggles on supervision, interspersed with talking head appearances from a solemn Birdman and the requisite showy, celebrity lawyer, B.G. begins to express a sincere, unabated frustration with the absurdity of his predicament. “I would go further about the situation, but I don’t want to ruffle no feathers or make it seem like I don’t get it,” he offers, before his words trail off. The shot lingers on a man who, briefly, exasperatedly, has nothing to say. Later, in a moment that suggests that the documentary, unlike its accompanying album, was not prescreened by a probation officer, he takes the restriction back up, wondering how it is he cannot publicly criticize the practice of snitching. At this point, though, he appears reminded to censor himself, dropping the pet issue as quickly as he had raised it. If you’d rather hear him rap it: “This life after the sentence, this life after the trenches / They locked up all my henchmen, that’s that shit I cannot mention.” In a historical moment during which United States residents are being abducted, transported to cages in Louisiana, and deported for speech deemed to undermine US interests, listening to such an evidently precensored record can feel a bit like a gut punch.

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August 1, 1989: Gui Manganiello, the national promotions director at Priority Records, receives a signed letter from Milt Ahlerich, assistant director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Office of Public Affairs, indicating that 78 law enforcement officers were “feloniously slain in the line of duty during 1988, four more than in 1987.” The four additional dead police officers, the letter implies, can be traced to “a song recorded by the rap group N.W.A. on their album entitled Straight Outta Compton,” which song’s name Ahlerich decides to leave unprinted. The letter closes: “Music plays a significant role in society, and I wanted you to be aware of the FBI’s position relative to this song and its message. I believe my views reflect the opinion of the entire law enforcement community.”

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Effectively kicked out of his first rap group, the overshadowed, prepubescent other half of the original B.G.’z remained hungry. He began rapping as Lil Wayne, and was drafted into the nascent Cash Money teenybopper rap group the Hot Boys alongside B.G., Turk, Lil Derrick, and an older kid who rapped under the name Juvenile. Lil Wayne’s voice dropped, his rhyme schemes and spasmodic vocal patterns grew more schizoaffective, and he went on to permanently reshape both the sound and distribution model of rap music. Get this: among the vast cohort of rappers we might call his stylistic children—a young man born Jeffery Williams who, in his rapping as Young Thug, paid so close an homage to Lil Wayne that he effectively recreated for his generational cohort a similar sonic revolution to the one Wayne precipitated in his own.

October 31, 2024: Young Thug pleads some combination of guilty and no contest to an indictment in which he is charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations for a wide range of criminal conduct. During the two-and-a-half-year trial, Young Thug’s rap lyrics are ruled preliminarily admissible as evidence against him, nominally to prove that he consciously operated a criminal gang and should therefore be deemed responsible for the alleged criminal acts of others. One such alleged criminal act: the 2015 shooting of Lil Wayne’s tour bus, which the prosecution theorizes stems from a beef surrounding the release of Young Thug’s 2015 masterpiece Barter 6. For his part, Young Thug’s attorney Brian Steel points the sentencing judge to lyrics in which Young Thug deems Lil Wayne “his idol.” On the first track of Barter 6, Cash Money Records boss Birdman—this saga’s Forrest Gump, who in a previous life as “Baby” signed a 13-year-old boy from Uptown New Orleans to a record deal—proclaims, amid a meandering deluge of non sequiturs, aimless flexes, and throwaway bars: “Free B.G.”

Get this: in exchange for his guilty/no contest plea, Young Thug is sentenced to 15 years of supervised release, which probation includes, alongside the standard prohibitions on drug use, restrictions on gun ownership, association with people with felony convictions, and a few more bespoke conditions. Namely, Young Thug is for the next 10 years both banned from his Metro Atlanta area (outside of a yearly court-ordered anti-violence benefit concert) and from “promoting gang activity.” Insofar as the trial preceding this sentence relied upon Young Thug’s lyrics, hand symbols that verge on tics, and emoji use on social media as evidence that he was running a street gang, the court-ordered ban on promoting gang activity can beyond any question be understood as an order censoring what, exactly, Young Thug is permitted to rap about. Thus far, the de facto ban on Young Thug’s lyrical speech has not been tested; Georgia prosecutors have already unsuccessfully moved once to terminate the rapper’s probation and send him to jail for tweeting that a local gang investigator who had testified against him at trial was the “biggest liar in the DA office.” On the same day that B.G.’s Freedom of Speech was released, Young Thug released the first song of his probation term. “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES,” which interrupts the otherwise strongest stretch of Playboi Carti’s massive 2015 album MUSIC, is anodyne and toothless to the point of proving what exactly rap loses when censored by the government. Ironically enough, the track is little more than a repurposed 2018 leak, to which the only major change comes in the shape of replacing verses from Gunna, one of his criminal codefendants and one of only two “known gang members” with whom Young Thug is not prohibited from associating during his probation.

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If rap, in other words, has been on trial for the better part of the last 35 years, Freedom of Speech marks the age of rap on probation. The contours of the sordid history of—and arguments against—the use of rap lyrics in criminal prosecutions are by now well drawn: nobody believes that Johnny Cash actually shot and killed a man in Reno; treating rap lyrics as evidence of criminality denies young Black men the ability to freely fictionalize events in their own art; the whole practice is a massive, racist infringement upon the whole First Amendment right to free speech. But if the introduction of rap lyrics into trials—trials that often stem from prosecutions pursued largely as a way of disciplining Black rappers for the success of rap writ large—weaponizes an art form against its practitioners, the censoring of rap from artists on supervision speaks to an even more sinister governmental prerogative. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literally inconceivable that the government would dictate to the practitioners of any other art form what they can or cannot make; as B.G. offers in disbelief, “you might as well go tell Robert De Niro he can’t make no more mob movies, man.” And yet, you’re reminded while listening to this record, they can. It’s a distinction worth taking seriously: where the history of rap’s criminalization has been, up until this point, retroactive—lyrics offered as confessions rather than art—Freedom of Speech represents a sort of sea change after which the criminalization of rap is proactive. Is rap a legitimate art form? Are rap lyrics protected speech? Buddy, those are the questions you ask during trial. The question to ask yourself after trial is, Do you want to go back to jail?

Such is life on supervision, perhaps the most coercive tool in a criminal punishment apparatus lubricated and fueled by coercion at every turn. For all its civil libertarian styling, then, Freedom of Speech might better be understood as B.G.’s pained negotiations with the loss of his fundamental rights, rather than his triumphant assertion of them. They can’t take rap away, announces a man who had to submit his raps to the federal government before releasing them. B.G. is free, proclaims the listener who can hear that he is anything but. For the millions of Americans currently being supervised by their government, the sentiment—both free and deeply not—might resonate uncannily. For rap, both as an artistic and political project, the record is an ominous sign of things to come. Freedom, reminds Freedom of Speech’s ghost editor, is a privilege; if you don’t like it, you can always go to prison.

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Featured image: dimitrisvetsikas1969. Censorship Oppression Silence. Neepix, CC0, needpix.com. Accessed June 23, 2025. Image has been cropped.