Commentary: For the Sake of its Fans, Hip-Hop Has to Find a Way to Put Some Shame Back in Incarceration

By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com

So now, it looks like Remy Ma will be giving the institution of marriage a shot.

Too bad she’ll be doing that inside of another institution -- that institution being jail.

The hip-hop artist, whose real name is Remy Smith, plans to marry her fiance, fellow rapper Papoose, at Rikers Island jail. That’s where she’ll be cooling her heels as she awaits sentencing on assault and weapons charges for shooting a friend after a party last summer at a Manhattan nightclub; a friend that she thought had stolen $3,000 from her.

I’m wondering whether Smith, who could spend a good chunk of her married life in prison, now believes that outburst was worth it. I’m wondering whether she now regrets not having reacted to the revelation of her friend being a thief in a more constructive way. Me, I would have just used the thievery as an excuse to cut that fake friend loose; to rid myself of one less hanger-on.

I wouldn’t allow her criminality to get me locked up. That’s dumb.

But then again, maybe Smith isn’t so dumb. Because when you look at the numbers of rap stars who see incarceration as a career booster rather than a life killer, maybe Smith decided to use her friend’s transgression as an excuse to introduce violence and incarceration into her act.

What’s scary is that if that was the plan, it’ll probably work.

Doing time seems to be essential to the resume of many hip-hop artists. In 2006, Lil Kim turned her date with the penitentiary into a reality show, entitled “Countdown to Lockdown,” that attracted record numbers of viewers. There’s C-Murder, who was convicted in 2003 for murdering a 16-year-old boy -- and who released a CD from the penitentiary. There’s Beanie Siegel, the Jay-Z protege who was sentenced to prison for a year on a weapons charge. He also made a CD from behind bars.

Then there’s T.I., whose real name is Clifford Harris. He faces a year in prison for possessing a stash of unregistered machine guns and silencers. This genius was already on probation for a drug conviction, and then he gets caught with guns.

He’ll serve that year, however, after doing at least 1,000 hours of community service. For Harris, that means talking to youth groups about the dangers of drugs, gangs and weapons.

Society would have been better served if he had been sent to serve meals at a soup kitchen.

I say this because when Harris gets up to talk to those kids, they aren’t going to care about what he has to say about the virtues of going straight. All they’re going to see is someone who has built a career around a persona that has criminality at its core. I mean, we’re talking about a generation of kids who were raised on labels like Death Row, labels that celebrate pathology. Even Harris’ label is Grand Hustle Records.

By the time he finishes admonishing the young’uns to shun crime, they aren’t going to be afraid of going to prison. All they’re going to be is curious. Curious about how much money he makes and how many cars he owns.

But that’s the sad trajectory that black urban life has been on since rap has deteriorated into an art form that encourages the assimilation of incarceration and violence into young black people’s lives rather than rail against the poverty and frustration that causes too many to succumb to it.

And the tools needed to end that confusion are in short supply.

One tool obviously is solid parental guidance. Parents and stable people in communities once provided a buffer of reality and conscience for black youths who, although having watched the pimps and hustlers in blaxploitation movies, didn’t grow up believing they needed to emulate them in order to have prosperity or respect.

Another tool is simply racial pride.

If more black youths had that, they’d know that unless their favorite hip-hop stars were going to jail to protest an injustice, say, like trespassing at the Chinese embassy to protest its enabling the atrocities in Darfur, then anything else is likely meaningless.

If they had racial pride, they’d have serious problems with the fact that most hip-hop music is purchased by whites, and that black hip-hop artists who wind up incarcerated to boost their street cred are, in a sense, catering to people who prefer to see them in a pathological state.

But they don’t. And that needs to change.

I don’t know how things will turn out for Remy Ma. Or for T.I. But I do know that if we don’t find a way to put the shame back in incarceration, things will continue to turn out badly for far too many of our youths.

The majority of who won’t have a hip-hop contract to fall back on.