Songs in the Key of Incarceration

Prison Music and America

Fuck the police. –N.W.A. (1988)

I began to think about America in relationship to policing, incarceration, race, and class when I was 12, in 1992. Watching television from my parent’s bedroom in Austin, Minnesota, in April of that year, I could see that Los Angeles was on fire, and the reasons had to do with policing, race, and class in the United States. I understood those connections at the time, not from television news broadcasters, but from gangsta rappers. My soundtrack for the Los Angeles riots was N.W.A. (above), Ice T, and Ice Cube, and later Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur. The sounds of the police were familiar to me at the time, not through my lived experience, but through the mediated experiences and observations of Black men from South Central Los Angeles. These early sonic experiences stuck with me through my teenage years, and I excavated them from memory as I began to critically connect my graduate studies in race and ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles to my prison-abolition organizing work, and my continued listening to rap music. Interested in the antecedents of prison themes in American music, before gangsta rap, I found myself following a historical trajectory of the sound of prison backward through genre, time, and place to some of the founding sounds of the United States.

I heard one beginning of what I began to call prison music in the sonic beginnings of “America.” During the War of 1812, a poet named Francis Scott Key met with British officers aboard a ship off the coast of Maryland to negotiate the release of American prisoners. He was detained overnight, having gained knowledge of the position of British military units and their plan to soon attack Baltimore. From detention in a ship floating on the Atlantic, Key watched the Battle of Baltimore at Fort McHenry and reported at dawn to the prisoners below deck that he was still able to see the American flag waving: “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air/Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there” (Key, 1814). Notably, it is the third stanza that intimately connects unfreedom to what has become an all-American proclamation of freedom: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave/And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!” (Key, 1814, emphasis added). Unfreedom, even death, for “the hireling and slave” is articulated here by Key as part of, perhaps even a requirement, of American freedom.

Key chronicled his experience in a poem titled, “In Defence of Fort McHenry,” and later put it to music with John Stafford Smith’s “To Anacreon in Heaven.” The title of Key’s poem changed in October of 1814 when a Baltimore actor performed the song in public and called it “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1889, the secretary of the navy designated “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the official tune to be played at the raising of the U.S. flag, and in 1916, the song was declared the national anthem of the United States. Key’s experience in detention, along with other American prisoners in the middle of the Atlantic was memorialized as the U.S. anthem, but it is rare, if ever, that the country’s ode to freedom is understood as its opposite: as an ode to unfreedom, as prison music. Set against contemporary examples of prison themes in U.S. popular music and culture, the U.S. national anthem can be understood as a beginning point for an American tradition of prison music.

Decades later, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” allowed one to hear this dimension of the American anthem. Offering a scathing and raucous rendition of the national anthem at the 1969 Woodstock Festival off the heels of his song “Purple Haze,” Hendrix blurred the lines between a drug-induced delirium and the reality of U.S. confinement, at home and abroad. Hendrix improvised on Smith and Key’s tune, allowing the notes and sounds to escape the page, and signified on the sonic and political constraints the song represented: major chords, patriotic lyrics, and “American freedom.” In riffing on the national anthem, Hendrix perhaps released what was being held behind these classic American “bars”: the pain, the chaos, the possibility. Note the intervals bending from major to minor to major (harmony to disharmony and back again); the (song) structure being destroyed, re-formed, rebuilt anew; the reduction of the refrain to organized noise. Sonic escapes in the forms of cries, screams, and explosions. Here, Hendrix’s performance fits into a trajectory of U.S. prison music by retooling the U.S. national anthem as a song of unfreedom, or perhaps, a different kind of freedom.

Prison Music and the United (Carceral) States

To live and die in L.A. on bail. – Tupac Shakur (1996)

I first considered the prospect of spending the rest of my life in Los Angeles while listening to the song “To Live and Die in L.A.” by Tupac Shakur in 1998—2 years after Tupac both recorded the song and was tragically murdered. I was working then in South Central Los Angeles building homes with Habitat for Humanity through AmeriCorps to earn money for college. Six years later, I returned to South Central (now renamed “South Los Angeles” by the Los Angeles City Council) to earn my MA and PhD in American studies and ethnicity at the USC. My experiences in South Central during graduate school were privileged ones, unlike the experiences of the mostly low-income, Black and Latino residents around me. I lived during that time a few blocks from the USC campus, and although I regularly heard the sounds of police sirens and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) helicopters (echoed on Tupac’s “To Live & Die in L.A.”), I had little to no interaction with law enforcement. Undeniably, however, the sound of policing was the soundtrack of South Los Angeles.

The year I finished graduate school, news organizations reported that prison spending in California outpaced higher education spending (Anand, 2014). Reports also identified that the United States led every other country in the world in terms of incarceration rates (Walmsley, 2014), with more than one in every 100 U.S. residents in prison or jail (Pew Center, 2014). At the same time, images and sounds of prison were consistently used as modes of entertainment in television, film, and music in the United States—from ubiquitous shows like Cops, Law and Order, or Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), to the plot of most Hollywood action films, to songs regularly on the Billboard Top 40. Both culturally and politically, prison is popular in the United States. Prisons and jails so saturate U.S. culture that they are virtually invisible and inaudible in plain sight and earshot, much like prisons themselves that often embed themselves in city and rural landscapes.

Take the Twin Tower Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, for example, a short drive north on Figueroa Street and right on Cesar Chavez Avenue, from USC. The Twin Towers is the world’s largest jail and the nation’s largest mental health facility, yet it blends smoothly into the downtown Los Angeles skyline, quietly functioning amidst the bustle of the downtown financial district and entertainment complexes. In addition, U.S. prison themes are increasingly exported internationally via American media, along with actual U.S. prisons by way of military and detention centers. Prison is also big business in the United States, from politicians running “tough on crime” initiatives, to the increasing privatization of the prison industry, to the interrogation of terror suspects world over, to major network, film studios, and record labels cashing in on the latest ode to jails, prisons, and prisoners. Orange is the new (and old) black.

The point is that it is normal to hear and see prison in the United States, either from outside or inside prison walls. We literally live in a prison culture. What might it mean to consider prison in the United States, then, not as contradictory to the values and beliefs of U.S. democracy and equality, but as an intrinsic and necessary component of the functioning of American capitalist democracy? Indeed, prison culture in the United States extends far beyond prison walls, through the walls of entertainment, politics, economics, and into the walls of our collective living rooms. Prisons are a large part of the rhythm and background for this song called America.

So what does it mean to listen to America and hear incarceration? Or, in other words, what is the song, theory, and method of prison music? These questions build on long-standing questions about institutional violence in the United States, engaging the origin points of “America” in genocide, slavery, exploitation, colonialism, and empire, as well as questions that explore the trajectories of these collective violences in contemporary forms: military, police, reservations, jails, detention centers, prisons. My academic work, in this respect, examines the cultural component of prison in the United States, tracing the noises and sounds that emanate from, and structure, the prison state. This includes study of, and close listening to, prison music, prison policy, and prison activism.

States of prison, I argue, are the various manifestations of prison that go beyond prison walls; the immaterial, though essential aspects, of prison construction, maintenance, and expansion. States of prison include the cultural aspects of prison: music, songs, television, films, even noise from or about prisons. I argue that it is these states (or forms) of prison in American culture that act as the “sediment,” and accordingly the “foundation,” of prisons themselves, from votes for prison construction and expansion, to prison policy, to our collective relationship with prisons. My research attempts to examine the dynamic between the material and immaterial aspects of prison in U.S. culture, and to understand how prison (sonically) structures American identity and U.S. nation-building.

In this way, the United States can be thought of as the United (Carceral) States, united in a commitment to prison and incarceration as a one-stop shop for solving social issues (poverty, homelessness, joblessness, mental illness, immigration, etc.) and entertaining the populace along the way. As many scholars recognize, criminal justice in the United States is not always (nor some argue, has it ever been) compatible with social justice. Notions of democracy, freedom, and citizenship have been produced simultaneously, and often have depended upon, institutional projects that have guaranteed inequality, unfreedom, and social exclusion. These institutional projects have often congealed around the mechanisms of imprisonment: slavery, chain gangs, work farms, detention centers, jails, and prisons. Perhaps, our cultural obsession with these carceral spaces in music, television, and film reflects our collective conundrum over the meaning of America itself.

Prison Music and Blackness

They won’t let me out, they won’t let me out, (I’m locked up)

They won’t let me out no, they won’t let me out, (I’m locked up). – Akon (2004)

The debut single, “Locked Up,” by Sengalese-American artist, Akon, was released in 2004, the year I began graduate school. I heard the song, detailing Akon’s seeming indefinite incarceration, often—it played on perpetual repeat on the largest hip-hop radio station in Los Angeles at the time, Power 106. The song exemplified the sonic confluence of realities of imprisonment, policing, and Blackness on repeat in the United States that I had been hearing for years, but had not been able to put into words. This song, and others like it that I began to seek out as a researcher of justice, race, and sound, solidified for me the relationship between prison and music in the United States; a relationship that could be heard most audibly through Black soundings of voice, instruments, and technology. I would argue that this is primarily because of the historical relationship Africans in America have had with white supremacy, forced incarceration, and attempts at physical, political, and cultural escape. What began as tribal African songs sung over plantation work in slavery conditions became field hollers, gospel, chain gang songs, work songs, the blues, jazz, country, rock, and hip-hop: distinctly American music. It is here that the “logics of U.S. white supremacy”—slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, Orientalism/war (Smith, 2012, p. 68)—simultaneously coalesce and are rendered illogical, problematic, and questionable; simply (or not so simply) by their audibility.

Take the song, “Early in the Mornin’,” sung by Black prisoners in a 1940s Mississippi work farm, as an example (Lomax, 1947). In this prison song, one hears sounds that confound the work that is being performed. The sounds of chopping wood and heavy labored breath punctuate and literally keep the beat for the waning melody sung in broken harmony by the group of imprisoned men. In this case, the music makes the work sounds illogical. It sounds as if the work is not productive, at least not for the bodies performing it. This is destructive, or more precisely deconstructive, physical and sonic work: breaking down (song) structures, bodies, minds while literally constructing an American nation and tradition. It is a sonic protest against imprisonment, even as prison labor is being performed. This is the sound of prison music, simultaneous confinement and escape, and perhaps explains why prison, and accordingly, prison music is so popular in the United States. Prison is a necessary function of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, a necessary warehousing of surplus (bodies) for exploitation or elimination (Gilmore, 2007). Prison music is a sonic documentation of this process. Listening to, and perhaps playing, prison music is our attempt to hear people survive, and potentially escape and transform, these dehumanizing systems.

Prisons are popular in the United States, and not just in terms of music and popular culture. The popularity and predominance of actual prisons, and the increasing rate of incarceration of U.S. residents, is what undergirds the general public’s simultaneous aversion to, and fascination with, these literal echo chambers. Prisons in the United States are hyper-inaudible/invisible, and simultaneously hyper-audible/visible. The location of U.S. prisons behind distant, opaque, and quiet walls sits strangely against the reality of prison as an increasingly intimate, transparent, and loud source of entertainment for the general public. It is in the midst of this prison spectacle, however, that sounds, noises, and music of resistance emerge, even as they reinscribe and sustain the structures and realities of prison and imprisonment in the United States.

Take the song, “Locked Up” by Akon, as another example. The song, written by Akon when he was literally locked up in jail for 6 months awaiting trial for car theft (a charge that was later dismissed), became a hip-hop and pop music anthem, reaching Number 8 on the Billboard Top 100 chart in 2004. Forbes ranked Akon as the third highest paid rapper in 2010 and fifth in its Most Powerful Celebrities in Africa list in 2011. Billboard ranked Akon Number 6 on their list of Top Digital Songs Artists of the decade, and his song “Locked Up” was memorialized in a VH1’s Behind the Music special in 2012 as the song that started it all. Akon, himself of Senegalese descent and raised between Missouri, Senegal, and New Jersey, represents not only the historical continuum of transatlantic Black music, but also of the increasingly transnational (and intranational) dimension of what might be understood as American prison music.

Regrettably, sounds (musical or otherwise) from those incarcerated are rarely audible above the din of the prison spectacle: in politics, economics, and popular culture. Jacques Attali wrote, “Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society” (Attali, 1985, p. 5). The question is, when prisons and prisoners make noise, will we listen?

Prison Music and Listening

Listennn! – DJ Khaled (2006)

DJ Khaled’s “Listennn!” was the first DJ shout-out on a record that stuck with me. He reminded fans again and again on his 2006 project, Listennn: The Album, to do just that, while they were supposedly already listening to the music and the 20+ rappers he had assembled on the project. Sure DJ Khaled’s shout-out was self-promotion, a la “Listen to my record!” but it also felt to me like a call for a particular method of listening: to listen closely enough as to not miss anything, to uncover all the possible meanings communicated. This for me was a command to deeply listen, to hear the music and noises in all their layers of sound and substance. I believe this is the kind of listening, when applied to research or political projects on prison in particular, that has the potential to transform individual, collective, and institutional realities.

Jacques Attali defined music as “the organization of noise,” writing that music “constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society” (Attali, 1985, p. 4). Listening deeply to music, to noise, for Attali, would also mean hearing society. I have applied this idea to my listening to and for prison music in the United States, working to hear the various ways in which noises from or about prison might be organized: in popular culture (in music, film, television, photographs), in politics (for or against the prison state; in various grassroots and institutional forms), in resistance (from within, outside, and across prison walls), in discourse (prison policy, newspapers, briefs, prison industry marketing), in technology (prison technology, recording technology, and the confluence of the two). Tracing the sonics of prison across space and time has been a long, but worthwhile project, one that has required me to listen to and for sounds of imprisonment across a wide spectrum of genres, spaces, and times. I’ve worked since 2012 to compile overlapping genealogies of prison music, prison policy, and prison activism, with attention to noises and sounds of objects of study within each genealogy, and with the historical bookends of the explosion of prisons post–Civil War to the explosion of detention centers post-9/11.

My research has attempted to focus on specific objects of analysis from a variety of geographic regions, areas of society, and disciplines, including historical events, songs, films, television shows, news headlines, riots, rebellions, concerts, technologies, and policies, which might elucidate the sound of prison in various times and spaces. In doing so, I have begun to develop an archive of prison music (the organization of noises from or about prison) in U.S. history, which traces a sonic arc of prison aesthetics and politics in U.S. culture. I have begun to make portions of this archive public in the form of articles like this one, and online. My larger research agenda is to produce a book-length project, as well as an online database, that connects a majority of the research objects in this archive, with the hopes that other scholars might continue to build on this effort—to collectively listen to prison music in and beyond the United States.

Inspired by Ronald Barthes’s (1978) article, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image-Music-Text, I have worked to pay special attention to the texture and feel of these cultural and political objects of prison music, as well as what the objects might literally suggest. In addition, Attali’s focus on noise has helped orient me to less obvious cultural and political manifestations of prison. This includes hearing elements of confinement and escape in other forms of organized noise that might not be considered music: pauses, beats, sound effects, moans, groans, bent notes, silences. Combining Barthes and Attali’s conceptions of music as something beyond song enabled me to fashion a theory of prison music that connected otherwise disparate genealogies of music, policy, and activism. Here my attention was drawn to suggested meaning, feeling, response, and imagination as much as material and literal translations of music, policy, and activism. My evaluative criteria for examples of prison music from within or beyond the assembled archive have become that which moves me on an emotional level (like music). In many cases, research objects that interest me do not directly address prison, per se, but suggest states or forms of physical confinement. This is the way in which my research method is most informed by music: the very way in which I select objects of study occurs through sensing, primarily through hearing and feeling. For me, prison music is at once sound, theory, and method.

In addition, in an effort to not exclude from this theory or methodological approach to prison music those people who have little or no auditory capacity (the deaf or hearing-impaired, for example), I like to consider the way in which music is also felt via vibration or beat. Vibration is at the foundation of the listening process itself, through the literal vibration of ear bones and bodily tissue. In this way, the vibration of the voice, beat, instrument, word, drum, wall, cell, bars, and chains in prison music is necessary to hearing, and is as important, if not more important, than what is actually said, sung, or heard. In paying attention to vibration, feeling becomes a paramount, and foundational, aspect of listening: What is felt is at the core of what is heard. In this way, theories of listening are extremely valuable to me in my research and life, as ways in which to understand and engage in aesthetics, politics, and community simultaneously. Participation in the artistic and activist realms of prison music requires a kind of deep listening and deep feeling that asks the listener/reader to stretch their senses to hear and feel the particular analysis that is occurring, to fully experience the prison music “listening session.”

For me, listening to the songs, sounds, noise, and music of incarceration is one of the best ways to understand the contemporary movement for Black lives (and accordingly all of our lives) in the face of extraordinary police and state violence. These are sounds of escape and liberation, as much as they are sounds of confinement and injustice. The way in which “the star-spangled banner…doth wave” will depend upon our collective capacity to hear society, one another, and ourselves. Listennn!