"The Dungeon" and "The Tower" by Ice T
(Critique of the prison system)
"The Dungeon"
And this place our forefathers made for man! This is the process of our love and wisdom, To each poor brother who offends against us - Most innocent, perhaps -and what if guilty? Is this the only cure? Merciful God! Each pore and natural outlet shrivelled up By Ignorance and parching Poverty, His energies roll back upon his heart, And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison, They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot; Then we call in our pampered mountebanks - And this is their best cure! uncomforted And friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces, at the clanking hour, Seen through the steam and vapours of his dungeon, By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of ever more deformity! With other ministrations thou, O Nature! Healest thy wandering and distempered child: Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and a dissonant thing Amid this general dance and minstrelsy; But, bursting into tears, wins back his way, His angry spirit healed and harmonized By the benignant touch of Love and Beauty. |
"The Tower"
I'm rollin' up in a big gray bus And I'm shackled down Myself that's who I trust The minute I arrived Some sucker got hit Shanked ten times Behind some bullshit Word in the pen the fool was a snitch So without hesitatin' I made a weapon quick If found a sharp piece of metal Taped it to a stick Then a bullhorn sounds That means it's time for chow My first prison meal The whole feeling was foul It wasn't quite my style But my stomach growled So I flushed the shit down And hit the weight pile The brothers was swole The attitudes was cold Felt the tension on the yard From the young and the old But I'm a warrior I got my ground to hold So I studied the inmates To see who hd the power the Whites? The Blacks? Or just the gun tower! In a blink of an eye, a riot broke out Blacks put their backs to the wall Cause it was north and south A gun man shouts And everybody had doubt Until the bullets started fly'n Took two men out Thn they rushed everybody Back to their cells Damn the pen is different than The county jail I'm in a one man cell I know my life's on a scale I wonder if that gunman is goin' to hell This is my second day I got a ten year stay I learned my first lesson In the pen you don't plaay I saw a brother kill another Cause he said he was gay But that's the way it is It been that way for years and when his body hit the ground I heard a couple of cheers It kind of hurt me inside That they were glad he died and I ask myself Just who had the power? The Whites? The Blacks? Or just the gun tower! You see the Whites got a thing The call White pride The Blacks got the muscle Mexicans got the knives You better be wise You wanna stay alive Go toe to toe with a sucka No matter wht size A fool tried to sweat me Act'n like he was hard I stuck him twice in the neck And left him dead in the yard It was smooth how I did it Cause nobody could see With my jacket on my arm And my knife on the side of me Bam bam, it was over Another one bites the dust I went crazy in the pen With nobody to trust Bench'n ten quarters, so I'm hard to sweat Used a tat gun, and engrved my set They call me a lifer Cause I'm good as dead I live in the hole, so the floor's my bed And I ask myself again Who has the power The Whites? The Blacks? Or just the gun tower |
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The Parallels:
In "The Dungeon," we're given a critique of the penal system. A critique that comes from the perspective of a person that sees those in prison suffering, but that isn't a prisoner themself. We have a poem that suggests the need for healing, as opposed to the suffering that one experiences in prison. The prisoners never change, they simply wither and die. In Ice T's song "The Tower," we're given a first person account of what lies within the prisons walls. Ice T arrives at the prison with a ten year sentence, but after the negative impacts of the harrowing environment, he ends up killing a man in the prison yard. This in turn extends his sentence from ten years to a life sentence. In simpler terms, the prison didn't rehabilitate him, but rather it negatively impacted him, and ultimately claimed him.
In "The Dungeon," we're given a critique of the penal system. A critique that comes from the perspective of a person that sees those in prison suffering, but that isn't a prisoner themself. We have a poem that suggests the need for healing, as opposed to the suffering that one experiences in prison. The prisoners never change, they simply wither and die. In Ice T's song "The Tower," we're given a first person account of what lies within the prisons walls. Ice T arrives at the prison with a ten year sentence, but after the negative impacts of the harrowing environment, he ends up killing a man in the prison yard. This in turn extends his sentence from ten years to a life sentence. In simpler terms, the prison didn't rehabilitate him, but rather it negatively impacted him, and ultimately claimed him.