Meet B. Alexis, the First Woman to Release an Album From Prison

This essay is a part of Redemption Songs, a limited-run publication that spotlights one tune every week by incarcerated artists. Join now to get a brand new tune every Sunday afternoon over 25 weeks:

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Freer Data, a label that works with “prison-impacted” musicians, lately introduced it could launch the first-ever album made by a lady behind bars. That achievement is tough to fact-check, however it’s plausible: Of the handfuls of American jail albums I’ve discovered from the final century, almost all function males.

The girl behind the album, “ninth & Gasoline,” goes by the moniker B. Alexis. Her face is on the quilt. However I’ve been requested to not inform you her actual identify or the place she’s serving a 30-year sentence for homicide. (Her advertising supplies simply say it’s within the South.)

BL Shirelle, the Freer Data co-executive director who produced the album, instructed me that each she and B. Alexis are involved that in the event that they reveal her full identification, she may face retaliation from the jail the place she’s in custody.

They’re proper to be cautious. It’s simple for jail workers to discover a pretext and retaliate. Rappers in Michigan and South Carolina services had been despatched to solitary confinement after they launched music movies utilizing unlawful cellphones (one thing B. Alexis has not accomplished right here). Jail workers stated they had been threatening facility security by utilizing these units. The U.S. Supreme Court docket permits some censorship when there are “reliable penological considerations,” however the authorized requirements may be ambiguous.

B. Alexis accepts the opportunity of retaliation. “I feel the professionals are nicely value any dangers,” she instructed me in a message relayed by her label. “Something I endeavor to do regarding my music is out of integrity, so the dangers or penalties don’t trouble me.”

Formerly referred to as Die Jim Crow, New York-based Freer is the one label in the present day centered on prisons, and has labored with incarcerated artists in Colorado, California and one other state the label received’t identify. Shirelle instructed me she needed to discover ways to negotiate with services to herald recording tools. “They may put you within the health club or the janitors’ closet,” she stated. “We construct fairly spectacular soundproof studios out of PVC pipe and outdated blankets.”

Shirelle stated B. Alexis’ facility let Freer, a nonprofit, maintain auditions for artists who wished to document with the label in 2019. B. Alexis, who shot and killed a lady when she was 17, rapped about how she was pressured into intercourse work when she was 13. “Ladies typically glorify prostitution in music, however she wrote about genuinely making an attempt to outlive off her physique, and it caught with me for weeks,” Shirelle instructed me. “She makes use of every thing as a teachable second and doesn’t really feel sorry for herself.”

When B. Alexis went to jail, she had lately given start to a son, Ja’Mir. (A few of her relations are named on the album.) Eighteen years later — after the midway level in her sentence — Ja’Mir was shot and killed at a bus cease. His demise was dominated a murder however by no means solved.

B. Alexis raps movingly about watching her son develop up from jail on the tune “I Can’t Lie,” however her strategy is normally extra indirect. It will possibly really feel such as you’re in her head, as she talks to herself about how the horrors she confronted formed the horrors she perpetrated. “The pistol had been loaded lengthy earlier than my fateful calling,” she raps on “Struggle to Stay.” However at different instances, I hear a call to maintain the listener one step away, as if she is aware of you may really feel a way of voyeurism. I hear in these lyrics regret but additionally a problem: Who’re you to guage me?

There’s additionally hope and comfort. On “Black Barbie,” the primary observe, B. Alexis is reassuring a lady who may nicely be herself: “I see the damage and ache you attempt to conceal behind your eyes.”

“Once I wrote ‘Black Barbie,’ I used to be in a spot of feeling insufficient, like I couldn’t measure as much as the expectations of these round me,” she instructed me. “I began serious about the younger girls in my ‘hood who I believed had all of it. I spotted I actually wasn’t too completely different from them. All of us had been making an attempt to faux it ’til we made it.”

In early press for the album, Freer tried to shroud B. Alexis’ identification extra utterly, releasing pictures through which she held up a pocket book over her face, as if she had been the Sia of jail. To advertise “Black Barbie,” the label sourced a Barbie doll from the yr B. Alexis was born and made a video through which the doll slowly breaks out of its field, strips off her garments, and dances in freedom — however is then handcuffed and shoved again inside.

Because the album’s launch approached final month, B. Alexis determined to let Freer put her face on the album cowl. Thus far, Shirelle tells me, there are not any stories of retaliation from her jail.

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