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A new hip-hop album takes us inside the Florida prison system and features 15 artists in correctional facilities across the state. NPR's Kathryn Fink tells us how the album "Bending The Bars" got made.
KATHRYN FINK, BYLINE: For Julius Smith, aka Prince Jooveh, making a rap demo while incarcerated all hinged on a phone call.
JULIUS SMITH: I would have to get up very early, pretty much as soon as the collect calls were turned on, because, you know, the hustle and bustle around a prison dormitory can get pretty loud.
FINK: Jooveh was serving a 20-year sentence at Florida State Prison. In a narrow hallway there, he would grab a pay phone in each hand and dial his musical collaborators.
SMITH: So I would listen in one phone, and I would rap my lyrics in the other phone.
FINK: Calls were limited to 30 minutes. I experienced that myself while talking to people for this story.
AUTOMATED VOICE: You have one minute remaining.
FINK: So for Jooveh, it took more than one call. But through a team of producers and engineers in a faraway studio, that low-quality landline audio became a polished track called "Hands Up."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HANDS UP")
SMITH: (Rapping, inaudible).
I wrote that song when I had a flood of emotions during an extended time in the Florida State Prison. I would sit and I would write. And, you know, that was my form of meditation.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HANDS UP")
SMITH: (Rapping) It's hard to maintain this total life insanity. Total life insanity. Label me a casualty...
FINK: Prince Jooveh is one of 15 artists featured on "Bending The Bars." The album is produced by the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People, or CHIP. That's a South Florida organization that advocates for abolishing prisons. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, CHIP set up a hotline to support incarcerated people in the area and learn more about the conditions and their facilities. It evolved into something unexpected.
NOAM BROWN: People started sharing artwork through the mail and poetry and music over the phone lines, and we just kind of realized that we're perfectly positioned to make an album, you know, or at least try.
FINK: Noam Brown is a founding member of CHIP and one of the executive producers of "Bending The Bars." He says the biggest roadblock to making the album was being able to communicate with the artists. Phone access inside the facilities is unpredictable, the costs of those calls racked up fast and there's a lot of red tape around sending and receiving mail.
BROWN: Part of that is the story of this album because jails are sort of designed to sever connections and isolate and dehumanize.
FINK: Isolation and dehumanization are core themes for artist Gary Field. He's currently serving a 15-year sentence in the Broward County jail system. His song "Tearing Down Walls And Burning Bridges" is the album's closing track, and it draws on his many years behind bars.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TEARING DOWN WALLS AND BURNING BRIDGES")
GARY FIELD: (Rapping) Start tearing down walls and building bridges, and finding a way to make things right. Let a man fall so he's a villain (ph), out of the darkness into light.
I'm trying to humanize, put a human face on those of us who find ourselves behind the bars and razor wire, you know, and what I see happening. You can't just tear down the walls and let these people who wound up in prison continue to do things that'll put them back, right? So you're building the bridges.
FINK: Field was also an executive producer on the album. The day he and I spoke, his song had just been uploaded to the media store on the tablets at his facility. He said he felt a rush of emotions knowing other incarcerated people around the country would be able to listen because that was part of the point - creating community through this project.
FIELD: You have people who wouldn't normally be caught in the same room, different affiliations that would fight on the street, they wound up collaborating on this album.
FINK: For Prince Jooveh, working on "Bending The Bars" is just the beginning. Earlier this year, he was released from prison. And eventually, he plans to make more music.
SMITH: Seventeen years and nine months, you know, I was locked up. Wishing, hoping, dreaming, you know, for freedom, for opportunity. I've written over 300 songs, you know? So getting into, you know, a recording studio and just being able to put all of that together is part of the dream (laughter).
FINK: Watch this space. Kathryn Fink, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE GOTTA BREAK IT")
J4: (Singing) We gotta break it to change, to change, to change. We gotta break it to change, to change, to change. I can't take that no more... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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