The Young Men Rapping and Beatmaking From a Youth Lockup
Listen if you like: EBK Jaaybo, Mozzy
In 2030, the young man we’re calling Mike will return to society after spending most of his young adulthood in the custody of the Oregon Youth Authority, which required us to withhold his last name. He was sentenced to a youth lockup at 17 for killing another young man. He hopes to become a barber and recovery mentor for other men someday, but you can tell, from his rap lyrics, that he’s worried about how the world will continue to judge him for his past.
“If I confess all my sins would they hang me for it?” he raps on “No Ceilings,” a song with J. and P., the monikers for two other lyricists in custody. “I can’t ignore what I endured / they probably hate me for it.”
Both the song and an animated video were produced by Keys Beats Bars, a nonprofit that estimates that it’s served more than a 1,000 young men and women through music workshops in Oregon’s youth facilities in the last decade. There are a handful of efforts to help young people produce music in youth facilities around the world. Australian music scholar Alexis Anjo Kallio has argued that they help young people process their trauma and “generate the hope needed to imagine new futures.” The value is clearer when you consider the inverse: We know horrific conditions in many youth lockups lead to lifelong PTSD and more crime on the outside.
Mike told me he won his first rap battle at age 7. “I got a pool stick and some snacks, and I remember feeling good,” he said. It was a rare moment of recognition during a chaotic childhood. His mother regularly kicked him out of the house, and at times he felt like she didn’t love him. He was often passed between family members in different states.
“I needed positive affirmation, and I wasn’t getting it at home, so I was always trying to impress people,” he said. Among young men in Portland who were constantly trying to one-up each other, that mostly meant committing robberies and threatening violence: “I’d hear about a robbery and decide I’ll go further and do the same thing with a gun and become more notorious.”
He was in and out of lockups and lost friends to gun violence. In his lyrics, you can hear him writing a new story for his life, one that winds toward redemption. “I’m traumatized, I lost my brother to the trenches,” he raps on “No Ceilings.” “I’m hoping that I’m forgiven / I talk to God to polish up on my image / Who am I kidding? I’m tempted to keep sinning.”
Keys Beats Bars paired Mike and several other young men with Portland rapper Talilo Marfil, who got a grant from the Arts for Justice Fund. He told me music has also helped Mike work through remorse for taking a life. “It haunts him, I can see it in his eyes when I talk to him,” Marfil said. “But through the music he can express it, and that’s healing.”
Keys Beats Bars emerged from arts and cultural workshops that first featured drummers from Ghana, Cuba and other countries. Portland musician and activist Adam Carpinelli was the driving force. “It was a simple idea, to expose kids to different cultures and open their minds,” he told me. “But of course a lot of the guys inside also wanted to make rap and hip hop.”
A decade on, Keys Beats Bars’ future is in doubt, because it’s been hard to raise money for this work. But he and Marfil said their ultimate goal is to go beyond Oregon, and help artists do similar work in youth facilities across the country. “We have resistance in our hearts,” said Marfil, “but amid all the abolitionist talk, we want to help the people still inside.”
There are surely thousands of other young men and women like Mike in youth facilities across the country, for whom rapping might still become “a way to vent, to let out all the aggression and other emotions you can’t talk to people about,” as Mike put it. Plus, there was the affirmation of knowing his words will travel in a polished final product: “Hearing the song, I was like, ‘Damn, I did that.’”
Liner Notes:
Song: “No Ceilings” | Project leads: Talilo Marfil and Mic Crenshaw | Beat produced by: Hokatiwi | Mixed and Mastered by: JLR Audio Productions | Executive producer: Keys Beats Bars | Funding: Arts for Justice Fund, Rites of Passage Fellowship, Awarded to Talilo Marfil