On November 8, 2025, Audrey Amsellem presented the co-authored paper “‘Tryna Strike A Chord’: Collaborative Reflections on Drake v. UMG” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. The paper was written collaboratively with her students Emil Bowman, Prince Bradley, Naquan Clarke, Adam Michaels, Jamel Harris, Nehemiah Terry-Petterson, and Hassan Winston, together with co-facilitator Ben Wasserburg. These students participated in the Music and Law workshop held in Summer 2025 at the OBCC (adult men) facility on Rikers Island.

The workshop was organized by Amsellem and Ben Wasserburg following the students’ completion of Columbia’s Core Curriculum course, Music Humanities, in the Spring. Two students received recognition from Columbia’s Core Scholars Award for essays reflecting on their experience taking the course while incarcerated: Emil Bowman received the award, and Prince Bradley received an honorable mention.

The students’ intellectual rigor inspired a collective inquiry into the intersections of music, law, and justice. Throughout the workshop, students and facilitators analyzed the recent Drake–Kendrick Lamar feud from musical and legal perspectives, examining the lawsuit, its cultural implications, and the broader ethical questions it raised. The workshop culminated in a mock trial in which students argued for either the plaintiff or the defendant; their notes and reflections formed the paper presented at AMS.

The paper examines Drake’s lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG), in which he alleged that UMG’s release and promotion of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” constituted defamation, harassment, and unlawful business practices. The lawsuit represents a turning point in hip-hop history: diss tracks, long central to rap’s competitive tradition, entered the legal arena in an unprecedented way. The paper offers musical and lyrical analysis of the feud, a legal examination of the lawsuit, and a discussion of the ethics of balancing creative freedom with safety concerns. This collective project seeks to integrate justice-impacted scholars into contemporary debates on music and law and to highlight the depth of knowledge these scholars bring to academic and cultural discourse.

The paper was part of the panel “Legal Auralities: Critical Approaches to Music, Sound, and Law” organized by Derek Baron and Matthew Mendez, and chaired by Eric Drott. The presentation was made possible by the American Musicological Society’s Career Development Grant in American Music.