Should Babylon Release The Cure?: True Reflections on Freedom, Art, Prison, and the “Reggae-Star Rapist”

The reggae tune ‘‘Longing For’’ is not a song but a phenomenon. It was released in 2004 and topped reggae charts for months, but it may as well have been recorded yesterday: It still earns forwards in the dancehall as if it’s the hottest new thing out of Jamaica. The track—released at a moment in Jamaican music when a Rastafarian-reggae renaissance turned the dancehall into a tuneful house of worship, where the most popular songs were brimming with righteous indignation or sweet and nice as fresh cane—was featured on a one-drop riddim named the Drop Leaf, created by producer Don ‘‘Corleone’’ Bennett and consisting of a simple acoustic guitar riff. As hot as every Drop Leaf tune is—the riddim features songs by Sizzla, Luciano, Maxi Priest, and so-called dancehall ‘‘Warlord’’ Bounty Killer, who lets down guns and guard and sings a love song over it—‘‘Longing For’’ puts them all to shame. What’s striking is its singer’s adoringly aching, perpetually strained voice: somewhere between a passion-struck lover and an importunate child. Its enduring popularity in the Caribbean and the Diaspora suggests that this sweet song about love and unanswered desire—‘‘When, when, when, when?/ Will we see each other again?’’ the singer wails—truly strikes a chord.

If only it weren’t sung by a convicted rapist.

His name is Jah Cure—real name Siccaturie Alcock—and when the song was released he was 26 and serving 12 years in a Kingston prison. He became a virtual reggae legend: vastly popular, buzzed about, beloved, reviled. In 2005 the BBC dubbed him ‘‘the hottest artist anywhere right now.’’ [1] He had his own unofficial lobby group: The ‘‘Free Jah Cure’’ movement was behind several MySpace sites as well as T-shirts and even license plates; he also had the support of a slew of reggae artists, from Morgan Heritage to Beenie Man, who hailed him up at show after show.

This article offers reflections on Jah Cure and the irony of a so-called ‘‘reggae-star rapist’’ singing some of the most stunning love songs and spirituals in contemporary reggae; it considers what his stardom might suggest about contemporary Jamaican culture. But it’s also about issues broader than Jamaica and reggae. Psychological issues: how do we—women, in particular—wrap our heads around our love for the love songs of a convicted rapist, or what does it mean to shy away from the artist and cozy up to the art? Legal and moral issues such as the question in my title, lifted from ‘‘Longing For’’: is it just for jailed artists to be free to release their art into the public sphere? This is an increasingly critical global question, relevant to the swelling American genre of ‘‘street lit’’—books by, about, and/or sold to inmates—and the ever-escalating number of incarcerated hip-hop acts. The right of inmates to release music and obtain fame is ultimately wrapped up in long-debated notions about the function of prison: is it about retribution or rehabilitation—a word that Jah Cure deserves credit for thrusting to the forefront of the Jamaican justice system’s vocabulary?

First, the facts. Or rather, versions of them. [2] According to the victim, whose name has not been released, but who is known to come from a comfortable family in Montego Bay, in November, 1998 she, her aunt, and two cousins were ambling along the road when a car pulled over and the two men inside drew guns, told the cousins to run for their lives and forced the victim and her aunt into the car. These men drove the women to another location, viciously raped them and robbed them of jewelry, then left them in the road with cab fare. The victim took note of the car’s license plate and reported it to the police. One week later, Jah Cure—whose vehicle allegedly bore that license plate—was accosted by both the police and his accuser outside a nightclub in Montego Bay, where she identified him based on his voice, which she claimed to have remembered because it was distinctive. Jah Cure asserted that he had never seen her before and that he was innocent. But before a Gun Court Magistrate in 1999, he—19 at the time—was given 15 years in prison; after an appeal that sentence was reduced to 12 years. In 2004 his parole plea was rejected, but on July 28, 2007, he was—to much fanfare in Jamaica and global Caribbean communities—finally granted freedom.

Rumors about the case still abound. Those claiming Jah Cure’s innocence insist that he was discriminated against because he was and is a Rastafarian, and Rastas have long confronted the contempt of West Indian elites. They attest that DNA evidence was never obtained, or that it was indeed obtained but was concealed from the courtroom. They point out that the aunt’s rapist—Jah Cure’s companion—was never caught, and they claim that the Chief Detective in the case was the live-in partner of the victim’s mother, or that Cure’s lawyer was friends with the victim’s lawyer. Most compellingly, they deem the arraignment and the trial a travesty of justice: Jah Cure was held over one week before being charged, and his lawyer was supposedly so indifferent to his cause that Cure had to wake him on the morning of the trial by throwing rocks at his window. Those claiming that Jah Cure is guilty speak of his lack of alibi: He claimed he was at his mother’s house, but she initially denied this. They also allege that the victim was contacted by phone by both Jah Cure and his celebrity supporters and offered great sums of money to retract her accusation—but refused. Why would she accept harassment and refuse a sizeable payoff, they say, if she weren’t telling the truth?

Innocent or guilty, Jah Cure saw his star rise behind bars. At the time of his conviction he was an up-and-comer with promising connections. Born to a poor family in a fishing village near Montego Bay, he left for Kingston on his own when he was 13, calling himself ‘‘Little Melody’’ and aspiring to be a reggae star. There, he caught the ear of fiery deejay Capleton, who introduced him to Rastafarianism and gave him his moniker, in homage to the copious amounts of ‘‘cure’’—marijuana—that the young singer smoked. After Jah Cure recorded a duet with Sizzla that was produced by Lover’s Rock legend Beres Hammond, Hammond took the young artist under his wing and on tour with him to Europe. When he returned, full of optimism about the future of his career, Jah Cure was accused and imprisoned. [3]

During his first five years in prison he gave up music altogether, investing all of his emotional energy into the possibility of parole. But after his first parole plea was rejected, Cure knew he could waste no more time and felt compelled to manipulate the system in his favor. He and his management company, DangaZone Records, bribed a prison official into becoming Jah Cure’s official middleman; this officer served as the link between producers and Jah Cure, who accepted producers’ riddims and recorded over them on a mobile recording device. One such producer was Don ‘‘Corleone’’ Bennett, who paid the officer about $3,000 to deliver the ‘‘Drop Leaf’’ to Cure. ‘‘Longing For’’ was the second tune that Jah Cure recorded behind bars; the first was, ironically enough, a love song to his country: In ‘‘Jamaica,’’ Cure sings patriotically about the very same ‘‘island in the sun’’ that, though he never mentions it, putatively doled him a drastic injustice. Bennett had to ask Jah Cure to re-record ‘‘Longing For’’ after the first take, because the producer wanted no effects to alter the singer’s voice, which was aching with emotion. When the song reached radio, Jah Cure’s fame was catapulted to another level. The tune hit big, surely because the longing in his voice felt undeniably real. Everyone knew that the man crying ‘‘Babylon release the Cure’’ was speaking literally.

Prison has played a bit part in Jamaican musical history—in 1967, for instance, Toots and the Maytals sung ‘‘54-46, that’s my number;’’ Bunny Wailer, arrested for marijuana possession, was sentenced to 14 months in prison [4]—but Jah Cure is Jamaica’s first incarcerated musical hero. It is thus interesting to set his story in the context of American culture, which boasts a legacy of behind-bars music. Jamaica and America, after all, have long been engaged in a game of musical ping-pong. Although it is commonly claimed that hip-hop was the child of Jamaican dancehall, in fact the story is hardly so simple; the two musical cultures have been influencing each other for decades. During the ’30s and ’40s, Jamaican big bands adapted the arrangements of popular Black American musicians—Count Basie and Duke Ellington, for instance—to suit available instrumentation in Jamaica. Soon ska co-opted the scene; it was a product of the blue beat, which was ‘‘the Jamaican musician’s interpretation of American rhythm-and-blues with a mento flavor.’’ [5] Dancehall was born at Jamaican parties during the late 1950s, where men with modish monikers—Count Matchukie, U-Roy, King Stitt—were garrulous hosts. Inspired by American radio DJs of that era, they chatted ceaselessly over the music, serving up smooth talk such as this, courtesy of King Stitt: ‘‘No matter what the people say/These sounds lead the way/It’s the order of the day from your boss deejay/I King Stitt.’’ ‘‘Toasting,’’ as chatting over music was soon called, became a Jamaican art form that was transported to the Bronx in the early ’70s by immigrants like Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc: forefather of a ‘‘new’’ style of American music in which men rhymed over prerecorded music and dubbed themselves ‘‘rappers.’’ In America, rappers became stars of the billion-dollar industry that hijacked pop culture. Jamaica’s golden-tongued talkers—eventually called ‘‘deejays,’’ still the name for dancehall artists—were not so lucky: they had none of the marketable qualities that Bob Marley had—not pretty faces, inspirational melodies, or even intelligible lyrics (unlike reggae singers, dancehall deejays doused their speech in thick patois). Reggae was international music; dancehall was local stuff. [6] Until, that is, the early ’90s and early ’00s, when crossover figureheads—first Shabba Ranks and Supercat, then Sean Paul and Elephant Man—took dancehall overseas and into hip-hop clubs, where American rappers such as Lil’ Wayne and Lil’ Jon listened up and began sprinkling their beats and rhymes with some Caribbean flavor. When it comes to Jamaica and America, the anxiety of influence ultimately runs deep—in both directions.

The African–American outsider voice, meanwhile, is part and parcel of a musical tradition that runs back decades, to the jailhouse blues of Leadbelly and Robert Johnson, and even centuries, to the field hollers of slaves. It lives in doo-wop—in the ’50s, The Prisonaires recorded their Sun Records releases, including the original ‘‘Walking in the Rain,’’ with the help of prison day passes—and especially in hip-hop, where the tradition begins with Tupac Shakur’s releasing Me Against the World while in prison in 1995, and flourishes in recent years thanks to the jailhouse rap of Slick Rick, Beanie Sigel, Pimp C and C-Murder, all of whom released records while incarcerated. Rap’s most prominent inmate is former P-Diddy protégé Shyne, who signed a $3-million deal with Def Jam while serving time for a 1999 club shooting; his 2004 album Godfather Buried Alive landed him on magazine covers and MTV. Rap’s most prominent former inmate is Lil’ Kim, whose incarceration for perjury was preceded by a buzzed-about album and chronicled in a reality-television show on BET, Lil’ Kim: Countdown to Lockdown. During the early ’00s, behind-bars rap was propelled to a new level, one that some cultural observers began deeming the hip-hop generation’s version of the prison writings of Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Y. Davis, or Assata Shakur. Instead of glorifying prison, these critics argue, jail-house rap ultimately benefits from a built-in moral: no matter how lurid their boasts, the very fact of who delivers them—imprisoned men—denotes that actions reap penalties, and no amount of behind-bars flossing can detract from that hard-and-fast lesson. ‘‘If ever there were a deterrent for kids,’’ asserted Stephen Hill, Senior Vice President of Music Programming and Talent at BET, ‘‘it’s the sight of their favorite rapper—who used to be so braggadocios, and wear diamonds—wearing an orange jumpsuit, filmed with a camcorder against a stark background. It does not look sexy. Their life before? Very sexy. Their life now? Not sexy at all.’’ [7]

Unlike most of these rappers, however, Jah Cure’s real-life persona both boosted and hindered his fame: the public was simultaneously fascinated by his real-life situation and, because there was such an incongruity between the content of his music and the content of his rap sheet, in denial of it. Even while insisting on his innocence, fans tried to focus on his time, but not his ugly crime. So when his incarceration was milked for his persona, it eschewed mentions of crime or criminality in favor of general references to freedom and justice: his 2005 album was titled Freedom Blues: The Testimony of Jah Cure, while his 2000 set, sales of which funded his appeal, was called Free Jah Cure: The Truth CD; both delivered avid love songs and fervent paeans to Jah. Even after his release, Jah Cure never spoke in interviews of ‘‘prison,’’ ‘‘jail,’’ or ‘‘crime,’’ instead referring to his incarceration as ‘‘the journey,’’ ‘‘captivity,’’ ‘‘the struggle’’ or, simply, ‘‘inside.’’ Not only did this further an established program of referencing the time but not the crime, it also transformed Cure’s stint behind bars from a mundane mandate into a lofty spiritual exercise.

As Jah Cure’s fame grew—‘‘Longing For’’ achieved anthem status in Jamaica and the diaspora—Jamaica’s Department of Correctional Services battled backlash: from the victim, from women’s rights groups, from citizens fuming that a convicted rapist’s music ought not be on Jamaica’s list of exports. Correctional Services responded with a show of force, seizing Jah Cure’s cell phone and recording equipment and having him transferred from the St. Catherine District Prison to the stricter Tower Street Adult Correctional Center. But the buzz around Cure only intensified, at which point the powers that be decided not to beat ’em but join ’em. Superintendent Gladstone Wright—who, as he explained during an inter- view with me in April 2006, is also trying to break into the music industry—was granted permission by the Commissioner of Police, Major Richard Reese, to launch the Rehabilitation Through Music program, through which inmates would be permitted to record and release music. Together with Kingston-based Down Sound Records, they launched the pro- gram and made Jah Cure its unofficial poster child. Jah Cure later informed me that the RTM program was simply a convenient slogan for the recording activity that was already occurring at the prison; it was a way to put an official stamp on what had been taking place unofficially for some time. Either way, Cure released a single and music video under the auspices of the RTM program in 2005 that became such a hit, it almost eclipsed ‘‘Longing For.’’ It’s called ‘‘True Reflections’’ and it begins this way:

Behind these prison walls
Doing my paces, doing my time
I’m spending my restless nights
Visioning faces, all day I cry
Cry
Prison anuh bed a roses
Di livity it makes mi bawl
I wish that Jah could come and take us back in time Cause I swear, I can be a better man
Yes I swear, if only you could understand
The faith in me shall set me free, reflection

The remarkable thing about ‘‘True Reflections’’ is that even though it contains an admission of guilt—Jah Cure asserts, ‘‘I can be a better man’’ and confesses, ‘‘I was young and unwise, don’t you hear my cries?’’—fans fast came to know that Jah Cure didn’t write the song: It was penned by several people—including, notably, Gladstone Wright, who potentially earns profits from the track (though he assured me he has yet to see a penny from it). Ironically, in other words, the criminal was performing a script written for him by the cop. Plenty of fans thus read between the lines, recognizing that even though he was talking the rehab talk—in a September, 2005, interview in the Jamaica Gleaner, Cure stated, ‘‘it is not a case of guilty or innocent anymore. It is all about rehabilitation’’ [8]—the chat and the song were designed to advertise the Rehabilitation Through Music program, and to affirm the criminal-justice status quo by validating Jah Cure’s guilt. And so the ‘‘Free Jah Cure’’ movement lived on. As for the RTM program, the grand plans that were once in the works—a ‘‘Prison Life’’ documentary, the recording of more music by other artists such as Zebra, a ’90s-era reggae star also convicted for rape—were never realized, most likely because the program weathered a barrage of criticism.

What’s ultimately remarkable about Jah Cure as Jamaican idol is that he is a new sort of musical idol. Perhaps the archetypal reggae hero is the ‘‘badman,’’ a figure whose legacy was passed on to hip-hop culture: Jimmy Cliff’s Rhygin character in The Harder They Come, or Super Cat, Ninja Man, Mavado, Vybz Kartel, and so on. He may be behind bars, but Jah Cure can hardly be hailed as a badman, because rape is not a crime that can in any way be glorified in the way that gangsterism can be. Neither is he a justice-obsessed ‘‘fire man’’: a forceful, uber-masculine Jeremiah figure such as Peter Tosh, Capleton, Sizzla, or Anthony B. No, Jah Cure has above all been painted as a living martyr, an innocent and helpless casualty. In this respect he’s utterly unlike the heroes of America’s jailhouse rap—Shyne, C-Murder, Tupac—who, even while asserting innocence of the crime for which they’re serving, nonetheless thrive on personas in which they’re either gangsters or former gangsters, bad boys with admitted pasts. Shyne, for instance, boasted during a behind-bars interview with XXL magazine that he was a greater gangster than the ultimate bullet-proof badman, 50 Cent: ‘‘[50 Cent] is not a G, he has no street credentials. I was really living the street life. Official Tissue. You makin’ millions off of my lifestyle, off the things that I do.’’ [9] Like Lil’ Kim, Shyne is defiant; both admit their guilt but attack the system that incriminates them, claiming, in Shyne’s case, self-defense—‘‘I’m here ’cause I was defending myself,’’ he told a journalist—or, in Kim’s case, the right to never ‘‘snitch’’ on a friend—‘‘I’m a stand-up girl, and I’m a loyal girl. I just can’t help it. I’m a very loyal person by nature,’’ she stated, after telling her interviewer that she still stands by her decision not to ‘‘snitch’’ on the witness stand. [10] C-Murder, too, delivered a single from behind bars—‘‘Y’all Heard of Me’’—that’s drenched in gangster swagger: ‘‘Test me with that glock you get popped, boy,’’ he rhymed. C-Murder, Shyne, and Kim are badmen, then, in the sense that they are, as Imani Perry writes, ‘‘heroic by virtue of [their] very lawlessness in a society where law has often proven the definitive sign of African-American inequity.’’ [11] Jah Cure, on the other hand, never admitted to guilt or gangsterism; he said only that he’s a man of Jah and an innocent victim of injustice.

And considering the political and criminal climate of Jamaica in 2004 and 2005, when Jah Cure rose to fame, this brand of victim-hero befitted the national mood. The history of Jamaican posses, or gangs, stretches back to 1970s Kingston, when poverty and political turmoil ran rampant. During the 1980 elections, Jamaican’s major political parties, the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP) hired posses to funnel money, jobs, and guns to constituents and to intimidate voters at the polls; two prominent posses (who worked for opposing parties) were the Showers (known for showering their victims with bullets) and the Spanglers. Thanks to the posses’ political connection, gang violence remains a permanent fixture in Kingston and Montego Bay, and during election season this violence grows more rabid and intense. Since the 1990s, therefore, Jamaica’s murder rate has been escalating at an astonishing rate: in a nation of 2.7 million people, the homicide rate in Jamaica is an astounding 60 per 100,000 inhabitants, com- pared to less than 15 per 100,000 in large U.S. cities. [12] The country’s homicide rate rose from 3.8 at independence in 1962 to 17.6 in 1976, and then jumped to 43 per 100,000 in 2001. [13] Jamaica ended 2005 with the highest per-capita murder rate in the world; contributing to this rate is the also-escalating youth unemployment rate, currently at about 11%. In late 2004 the Jamaican Constabulatory Force launched Operation Kingfish, a counter narcotics and major crimes task force still trying to dismantle the longstanding ‘‘don’’ system in Kingston’s garrison communities by capturing prominent dons. Attitudes toward Operation Kingfish of course varied, but among the sufferahs there was plenty of skepticism and even despair about the fact that dons—community heroes and father figures—were being undermined; when the alleged head of the One Order Gang, Andrew ‘‘Bun Man’’ Hope, for instance, was murdered in Spanish Town on February 8, 2006, it sparked a riot the following day. In such a climate, a vengeful crime-and-justice super-hero icon could have some appeal for a despondent public, and so one arose, for a moment: In a bizarre example of the fine line between art and life, a notorious badman Jamaican cop—Senior Superintendent Reneto Adams, who was acquitted in late 2005, after a controversial trial, of the murder of four people—released a dancehall track entitled ‘‘To Protect and To Serve,’’ in which he listed the bad men in various Kingston neighborhoods for whom he was personally coming. But Adams’ musical moment faded and Jah Cure’s lived on, because there was and is something about an innocent victim icon—a suffering martyr, a casualty of forces beyond his control, a spiritual figure who embodies the hopelessness of justice—that perhaps struck a chord in these serious times. Casualties were the order of the day, and no one represented a casualty more than a supposedly innocent, imprisoned artist and his music of martyrdom. The single that Jah Cure’s camp released after ‘‘True Reflections’’—‘‘Dem Nuh Build,’’ a duet with Fantan Mojah—played up his martyr status. The track is a lament for lost leaders, destroyed by ‘‘Babylon’’—‘‘Dem killed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King/a same ting dem bring upon Rodney King/ Millions vexed’’—and it gives Jah Cure the last word: ‘‘Still I’m surviving/Jah Cure stay alive in,’’ he cries. Jah Cure—his persona and his music—was a kind of outlet for national mourning.

To this day, though, his fame presses buttons in circles both in and out of Jamaica, stirring debates about the function of prison: is it retributivist or rehabilitationist? Plato argued for the latter—criminals were sick souls in need of treatment, not wicked souls in need of punishment, he said—but Aristotle presented a more pragmatic, retributive model of punishment and imprisonment. [14] If we agree with Plato—and the numerous criminal justice scholars who argue against the ‘‘just desserts’’ model of punishment that was popular in the ’70s and ’80s—then Jah Cure’s music is perfectly in line with the growing number of arts-based prison rehabilitation programs that are familiar to the U.S. but very new to Jamaica, where the prisons are at 115% capacity rates and have been lambasted, by such groups as Amnesty International, for their ‘‘appalling’’ conditions. [15] Arts-based rehab programs have proven psychological benefits as well as—by virtue of giving inmates vocational training—a tremendous effect on recidivism rates; in this sense Jah Cure’s CDs are no different from, say, the paintings or baskets made by inmates and sold at fairs around America. In this sense, too, Jah Cure deserves credit for at least momentarily making rehabilitation part and parcel of the Jamaican prison system’s program. Following his release he continued to speak about the power of music to rehabilitate prisoners, mentioning his incarcerated friend Serrano as an up-and-coming artist who is still recording behind bars, and whom he would like to promote.

But then there’s the retributivist model: a popular notion that positions prison as the victim’s revenge. [16] Consider, for instance, the debate surrounding a 2002 VH1 series called Music Behind Bars, in which each episode spotlighted a prison band and—as the show’s press release put it—‘‘the redemptive effect that music has on its members.’’ The show sparked outrage and a lawsuit after one crime victim turned on the television and saw her assailant jamming on VH1. It was argued that justice was not being executed here, for two reasons. First, retribution was not being rendered: the victim was being deprived of both her right to revenge and—by having face her attacker again and again—of her right to protection from harassment or further victimization. Second, prison is designed to confiscate the liberty of those who violate a social contract, but here the criminal’s liberty was not being confiscated because by having a presence in the public domain—or, in Jah Cure’s case, having a voice that roams freely through the public domain—the prisoner still in some sense possesses liberty.

But these arguments are not so clear-cut. What if liberty is defined solely as physical liberty, because after all the function of denying liberty to the criminal is typically considered a matter of safety: to protect the victim and society from being further victimized. As for the argument that retributive punishment benefits the victim, insightful scholars such as Todd Clear and Barbara Hudson have composed thoughtful arguments contesting this claim. Not only, Clear writes, does the focus on ‘‘getting even with the defender’’ hinge on the notion that two wrongs somehow make a right—the victim has been harmed, so the perpetrator must be harmed as well—but it potentially impedes the victim’s healing pro- cess by preventing him or her from ‘‘let[ting] go of self-protective hatred.’’ As Clear explains, ‘‘the focus on getting even with the offender diverts the victim from his or her personal path of recovery. It suggests that after the court has imposed a penalty, the vic- tim’s needs have been served by the state. Yet, for the victim, the long path of recovery really begins only after sentencing.’’ [17] Even for those who accept the retributive model of punishment, however, the case of Jah Cure hinges on a conflict of rights: on the one hand is the victim’s right to retribution; on the other is the prisoner’s right to rehabilitation, which Edgardo Rotman defines as his ‘‘right to an opportunity to return to . . . society with an improved chance of being a useful citizen and staying out of prison.’’ [18]

Some might point out that in America the issue might be resolved via Son of Sam laws, first designed in the mid-1970s to prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes by transferring any such profit from the criminals to their victims. Jamaica has no Son of Sam laws—but in many respects, neither does the U.S.: these laws have been so fraught with problems that many states have either eliminated or severely curtailed them. In 1991, the New York law was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court because it was said to violate First Amendment rights and ultimately amounted to censorship: ‘‘A statute is presumptively inconsistent with the First Amendment if it imposes a financial burden on speakers because of the content of their speech,’’ the court declared. ‘‘That the Son of Sam law can produce such an outcome indicates that the statute is, to say the least, not narrowly tailored to achieve the State’s objective of compensating crime victims from the profits of crime.’’ Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued, further- more, that by muzzling convicts or former convicts, the community is being denied the potential knowledge that the prisoner might have bestowed upon us; had Son of Sam been in effect for centuries, she continued, we would be without Malcolm X’s Autobiography, Henry David Thoreau’s ‘‘Civil Disobedience,’’ and St. Augustine’s Confessions. In 2003, when California’s Son of Sam law came under legal attack, Stephen Rohde, the lawyer who successfully challenged it, wrote persuasively about the case in Los Angeles Lawyer:

In the long run . . . anyone who values wide-open, robust debate and the resolution of important public policy issues through the open clash of ideas, instead of repression imposed by governmental restrictions, will celebrate the elimination of all Son of Sam laws, thereby contributing to an open marketplace of ideas where books and movies about crime and punishment will succeed or fail on their merits, free of direct or indirect censorship. [19]

So here we have another potent rights issue: what of the community’s right to not be deprived of—and to benefit from—the knowledge and/or art that the imprisoned has to offer? This concept of deprivation seems directly applicable to Jah Cure—whose fans find in his voice and lyrics enormous comfort and inspiration. In some sense the message and the beauty of Jah Cure’s love-and-peace music—unlike that of jailhouse rappers—is a gift to women, even as it’s an insult to his victim. It’s as if he repays his debt to society and perhaps to women by releasing such songs, which are not only rehabilitative to him, but also to his listeners.

That is not to say that listening to Jah Cure does not sometimes involve an attempt to block out thoughts about the man and the saga behind the sweet lyrics. In interviews following his release, Jah Cure himself promoted this sort of blockage, refusing to speak of guilt or innocence at all: ‘‘I let my music speak for me,’’ he stated during our interview, throughout which he was evasive, hesitant, and visibly nervous. Though many had imagined that Jah Cure’s release would at last put a period at the end of his sentence—it would finally deliver answers to the questions surrounding his case—it fast became clear that Jah Cure was either being silenced by the powers that be, who were invested in maintaining the criminal justice status quo, or that he was himself ready to move past his past. The questions remain unanswered; the Jah Cure enigma lives on; the rumors continue to fly. And ultimately, perhaps that’s a positive thing for those of us who love to enjoy the Cure. The question mark allows us to disregard the veracity of the singer and encourages us to privilege art over artist, and there is something redemptive about that act: about not being duped by a persona or by an obsession with authenticity—the idea that the man and the music are one and the same—because the quest for authenticity usually disappoints, in a way that Jah Cure’s divine music, standing on its own, never can.