This is powerful stuff: it reminds me of when I first heard Linton Kwesi Johnson back in my youth. Like LKJ, Cleeshay uses spoken word, though the music is stripped-back R&B rather than roots reggae.
Django Unchained is a vivid autobiographical account of a young man who has spent nearly two-thirds of his young life in prison. It’s devastating – and all true.
Back in May 2010 Joseph Appiah was just 15 years old when a playground scrap got out of control and a schoolboy was killed. “It was broad daylight. School uniform,” he recalled to Helen Brown in her excellent feature in the i.
Cleeshay – Appiah’s rap name – was actually 200 yards away from where the stabbing took place, in revenge for one of the boys being “disrespected” by another, making him feel humiliated.
Appiah didn’t even see the murder and there was CCTV to prove it. But he was convicted, at the age of 16, of the controversial crime of murder by “joint enterprise.”
Contrary to the cliché after which he is named, Appiah was not from a tough urban background; he came from a financially comfortable background with two hardworking parents.
He went to grammar school in Kent and was studying for AS levels in drama, business, media and politics at the time of his conviction, supported by his Japanese journalist mother and a Ghanaian father who worked as a housing officer for Lewisham Council.
Today, still campaigning to get his conviction overturned despite his release, he gives talks to secondary school pupils warning them about how easily – and quickly – life can take a wrong turn. In his case, it was just from hanging out with the “wrong” older guys.
After two years in prison Appiah began putting his feelings into music, writing rhymes with pencil and paper in his cell and setting them to music from an instrumental CD that served as backing tracks.
His first performances were at prison church services, rapping about faith and questioning the path that led him to jail. Today he has his own YouTube channel using his stage name Cleeshay, rapping over smooth R&B samples.
Performing in a balaclava and sunglasses and using a stage name, initially to protect his anonymity, he is adamant that his rhymes are all autobiographical: “Don’t see me as a rapper / I’m just talking on the mic / Something like a storyteller / Non-fiction’s what I write.”
They graphically describe the horror of being banged up: “Prison ain’t a friendly place, you can get robbed,” he raps in Life’s Perspective. “I see a man stab a man for an Xbox / See a man cut his wrists cos his girl’s leavin’.”
And on Last Lap he describes “boiling eggs in my kettle / I hid my phones in the ceiling” before confessing how he felt “finally comin’ out the dungeon / going through depression.”
After being transferred to HMP Liverpool, he was able to make use of the prison’s recording studio and enrolled in a radio production class to work on podcasts, broadcasting his own music on the prison radio station – and finding an appreciative audience among his fellow prisoners.
He recognises that he was lucky he “always had the love and support of my parents and my brother. I was embarrassed that I’d ended up in prison and I was focused on getting out and making them proud. But most of the guys you meet in prison don’t have that.
“They ended up inside because they were poor and committed crime to make money. When they get out they’re still poor so they go right back to it. I’ve seen so many get out and bounce right back into prison.”
Despite his own experience he remains sceptical about prison’s success with rehabilitation, saying he’s only seen three people actually change in 12 years. He believes that while it gives offenders time to reflect, it can also lead to mental health problems, depression and drug addiction.
And also, for the lucky few, to a new career.