By TaRessa Stovall

Another hip-hop artist is headed to jail, seemingly determined to live out the drama of his own lyrics.

Grammy Award-winning superstar Lil Wayne, real name Dwayne Carter, pleaded guilty on October 15 to a felony charge of attempted criminal possession of a weapon in New York City.

He will receive a one-year sentence, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. With his latest song, Down, a collaboration with Jay Sean, No. 1 on the pop charts, the New Orleans native acknowledged possession of a loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic gun when stopped in his tour bus after a NYC concert in July, 2007. Without the plea, Lil Wayne would reportedly have faced at least three-and-a-half years in prison if convicted of the original charge. A resident of Miami, he was not licensed to carry a gun in New York.

According to an October 22 Associated Press story, “Lil Wayne, 27, is also scheduled for trial in Arizona in March on felony drug possession and weapons charges stemming from a January 2008 arrest at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.”

Lil Wayne is certainly not the first hip hop star to land in the kind of criminal situation that permeates the lyrics and energy of the musical genre known as gangsta rap. Many in the genre—including the late Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Beanie Sigel, Shyne, Mystikal and C-Murder—have served sentences from a few months to many years for criminal acts committed after they achieved fame.

In May, rapper T.I. entered a federal prison complex in Forrest City, Arkansas, to serve a 366-day sentence on federal weapons charges. T.I., real name Clifford Harris Jr., 28, was arrested for attempting to purchase unregistered machine guns and silencers from undercover federal agents in 2007, after his best friend was killed in an attack that Harris believed was meant for him. He faced a maximum 10 year sentence and a $250,000 fine for each charge in his three-count indictment, but got a plea deal after spending time on house arrest and talking with high school students and community groups about the dangers of guns, drugs and a violent lifestyle.

Recently released was Shyne, real name Jamal Barrow, who left prison on October 6 after serving a nearly nine-year sentence in a New York State prison for his involvement in a shooting associated with his mentor, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, and Jennifer Lopez at Club New York in 1999. The CD he released while doing time, Godfather Buried Alive, debuted at No. 3 on Billboard’s album chats. Today, he is reportedly being held by immigration officials and facing possible deportation to his native Belize.

“Nobody goes to prison to better their career. Nobody wants to go away,” T.I. told Cox News Service in 2005, after he had been locked up for a probation violation on a felony drug conviction.

But is that true?

If, as Real Facts About Hip-Hop, the Music Industry and Black Folks by Pearl Jr. reported in a 2007 blogpost, hip-hop artists have the highest incarceration rates of any musical genre—a genre that, like many others, showed declining sales last year, then might some hip-hop stars think, at some level, that doing time might bolster their street cred, generate priceless media coverage and notoriety, and possibly boost their product?

T.I. filmed a promotional video while in an Atlanta area jail, expressing that the street credibility he earned from his stint led him to name his CD Urban Legend.

An October, 10, 2005 story, Hip Hop Stars Behind Bars, by music journalist Sonia Murray for Cox, included a telling quote from Tosha Love, music director at a leading Atlanta radio station, V-103: “It’s like [T.I.’s] absence made the hip-hop community’s heart grow fonder. People feel even more in love with him and his music while he was away.”

Griff, a radio personality at another top Atlanta radio station, Hot 107.9, joked on-air that “They need to just go on and build a hip-hop penitentiary.” That same year, leading hip-hop magazines XXL and Source devoted whole issues to hip-hop stars in trouble with the law.

But if living the thug life is some kind of deliberate—or even unconscious—strategy of rappers and/or their record companies to boost sales, one has to question the results.

In recent year, according to Billboard.com, as reported in the article, Real Facts About Hip-Hop, the Music Industry and Black Folks by Pearl Jr.:

Hip-hop sales dropped 21 percent between 2005 and 2006

In the first quarter of 2007, hip-hop sales [were] down 33.6 from the same time last year

In 2006, only two hip-hp artists – T.I. and Jay-Z – went platinum

The latest figures, according to Nielsen Soundscan’s 2008 Year-End Industry Report, show a lesser decline in hip-hop sales, while demonstrating Lil Wayne’s selling power:

While overall album sales declined 8.5 percent compared to 2007, Rap 2008 album sales were down 19.8  % from 2007; compared to R&B, down 19.4%; Latin, down 21.1%; and Rock, down 6.5%

Lil Wayne was a top-seller. His album, Tha Carter III, was the biggest-selling album of the year, with 2.8 million sales. His Lollipop was one of two songs, along with Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love, that achieved the 2008 milestone of being the first digital songs to break the 3 million sales mark in a single year, with sales of 3.4 and 3.2 million respectively. And Lollipop, was the top-selling ringtone of the year, with more than 2.5 million units sold; and the second top-selling digital song, with more than 3 million sold.

Like many hip-hop stars who have spent time behind bars, Lil Wayne has earned numerous Grammy nominations (8), and several other industry awards. He is also a father, with three children, and another on the way, by various women, and an addict with a reported fondness for a mixture of promethazine, codeine, and either soda or juice, a mixture that is, according to Mr. Frost on the music blog, MOG.com, “known as ‘lean,’ ‘drank,’ ‘purple,’ ‘syrup,’” and other names. Frost writes that since two southern rappers, Pimp C and Big Moe, died from complications related to drinking the mixture, “This has led many people in Wayne’s inner circle to pressure him to cut back on abusing the drug.”

In an interview with MTV, Lil Wayne said he’s not stopping because detoxing is too painful, plus his lifestyle is bringing him big success. “I feel like everything I do is successful and productive. It’s gonna be hard to tell me I’m slipping …  how can we tell this n**** to stop when every … thing he do is successful? This n**** is making progress. He just went and talked to kids and that … was amazing.’ Feel me? So what am I doing wrong?”

Presumably, he’ll have time to ponder those questions during his year behind bars. Maybe then he’ll have a more hopeful future to share with audiences of his music and his public speaking engagements. Perhaps, as some have speculated hip-hop is, if not dead, then on its last legs; or maybe it’s ready to replace the glorification of crime, violence and incarceration with something more useful and substantive. Top rapper Nas said in his 2006 his song, Hip-Hop is Dead, from the album of the same name: “What influenced my raps? Stick ups and killings. Kidnappings, project buildings, drug dealings.”

The connection to poverty, crime and rap expressions are well-known, and not new or unique in any way. But is there a chance that a genre with global influence and money-making prowess has the potential to change the story? While that might be nice, it doesn’t appear likely at this time.

Since, as the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) Annual Report 2007-2009 states, “Black men make up 41 percent of the inmates in federal, state and local prisons,” it seems that some hip-hop stars, even those at the top, are unwilling or unable to envision success without contributing to this needless—and often preventable—tragedy.

Hip-hop superstars like Jay-Z, who began as a school drop-out and drug dealer, but used music to become a corporate mogul reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and is now interviewed by Charlie Rose and Oprah. One of his musical rivals, 50 Cent, also went from being a crack dealer to a multi-millionaire. Both high school dropouts, Jay-Z and 50 represent a road less traveled among their peers.

Rather than leaving the thug life behind as they become household names, some, like Lil Wayne, T.I., and others, seem determined to live out and glorify a criminal lifestyle at any cost. While their success would seem to provide the means for them to embrace other options, the culture of self-destruction just appears to grow in proportion to the public’s demand for their music. And they remain shackled in a perverse kind of self-inflicted, modern-day slavery that defies the lessons of history and the promise of black progress today.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline.

Kevin Eason is a freelance editorial cartoonist and Illustrator from NJ. His brand of satire covers news events in politics, entertainment, sports and much more. Kevin’s work features include: TVOne, NABJ, WBLS_107.5FM, EURweb and various newspapers & magazines throughout the country.