An 18-year-old high-school football player has been charged with making a “terrorist threat” after releasing a diss track about another player.
Cortez Lyles, a defensive back for the Heritage High School football team in Rockdale County, Georgia, reportedly recorded a diss track — a rap insulting and challenging someone else — after he was allegedly attacked by another player on the football field.
His parents advised him not to respond to violence with violence, so he instead recorded the song and uploaded it to his Instagram account as a way of responding to his alleged attacker.
Shandela McKnight, Lyles’ mother, told Fox 5 Atlanta that she thought responding without violence was preferable to her son fighting.
“What do y’all want him to do? Come back to school and fight?” she asked. “We don’t teach our kids that.”
She said her son returned home after the fight on the football field with “a knot on top of his forehead.”
Some of the lines from the diss track did reference violence, threatening to “beat his a**” and another line that warns “get a body bag,” but no further evidence beyond the song lyrics has been made public to suggest that Lyles actually intended to hurt anyone, or that it was some kind of “terroristic” threat.
The mother of the other young man involved in the fight — the subject of the diss track — reportedly pressed charges last month, and Lyles was arrested by Rockdale County Sheriff’s deputies on his high school campus in February. He released the track in November.
Lyles’ mother told Fox 5 Atlanta that if her son had actually intended any harm to the other young man he had months to act, but did not, proving his lyrics weren’t meant to be literal threats.
Regardless, Lyles was charged with making terrorist threats for his track, and was booked into the Rockdale County jail.
Diss tracks and battle raps, long a staple of hip hop, typically feature aggressive lyrics. They’re typically not meant to be understood as literal threats, but rather creative boasting. However, the recipient’s mother did take the song literally and reported it as a legitimate threat, which is how Lyles wound up facing a misdemeanor charge.
Nachez Lyles, Cortez’s father, said his son’s words shouldn’t have been interpreted as literal.
“The same thing with the [rappers] Kendrick Lamar and Drake situation,” he said. “The complete consensus was, ‘Oh, Kendrick bodied Drake’ so, for that to be mentioned in a song and translated into something literal is egregious.”
His parents want to talk to the parents who pressed charges in hopes that they can reach a resolution and get the charges against their son dropped. Lyles is a senior at his high school and hopes the join the US Air Force after he graduates.
“Anytime, any place, we can have a sit down and talk about this,” Nachez told the broadcaster.
