What does Black transfemme empowerment sound like? For artist Ciara Banks, AKA Chuckie Lee (Bride of Chuckie), it sounds like her pop-infused girl power hip-hop anthem “Barbie Rockstar.” With Chuckie Lee’s rapidfire flow and her no-holds-barred attitude, she raps:
“Party Rockstar…Barbie
Everybody movin’ like a fast car…Zoom
Swerving in and out of lanes that part
I came from nothing now I’m shooting to the stars”
Chuckie Lee is a Black trans rapper currently incarcerated in Broward County Jail in South Florida. Her track “Barbie Rockstar” celebrates the expansive queer and trans joy that persists even in the face of systemic oppression. By channeling her alter ego, the Bride of Chuckie, Chuckie Lee’s music embraces freedom and shatters assumptions about Black trans women prisoners.
“ Barbie Rockstar means a lot to me. It’s definitely a reflection of who I am as a fun girl and as a trans rapper,” Chuckie Lee tells me. “A rockstar is someone that has great ambition, that wants to give back to the community, that has a life for themselves. That once was hopeless [and] that has a vision today.”
I’m talking to Chuckie Lee through the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People (CHIP), a hotline founded in April 2020 to support people incarcerated in the Broward County jail. Over the last five years, CHIP has grown into a grassroots organization that amplifies the voices of incarcerated individuals through media, art, and advocacy. From documenting jail conditions to producing music and podcasts, CHIP is committed to prison abolition, justice, and systemic change.
“Barbie Rockstar” is one of 16 tracks on Bending the Bars, a groundbreaking hip-hop album written and performed by incarcerated artists from the Broward County Jail. Released on June 11 by FREER Music, Bending the Bars is produced by CHIP organizers Gary Field, Noam Brown, and Nicole Morse.
Morse tells me that the idea for the album was inspired by the artistic work of folks inside the jail. “We were taking reports of medical neglect, especially around COVID,” Morse says. “After folks in the jail would share what they were observing and experiencing, many would then want to share art, their creativity, their poetry, or would say, ‘I wrote a new hook, I have a new beat, I’ve got some new lines,’ and would share the music they were writing inside. At that point, Noam Brown, who is a children’s musician, started thinking, what if we paired folks inside with people on the outside, and actually produce some of these tracks?”
Morse and Brown connected with Field, an incarcerated organizer, who was able to find some of the most talented people in Broward County jails to work with on the album. “Then we started recruiting folks on the outside,” Morse explains. “Beat makers, musicians, people who would want to pair up with someone inside and help get their words, their music out into the world. Then it was three years of overcoming technological hurdles, overcoming all the barriers to communication and making that shift from raw demos recorded over the jail phone lines to this fully mixed and mastered album.”
Morse, an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Maryland – Baltimore County, researches the relationship between media, art, and activism, and has been able to support the album project through grant writing and research funding. As a longtime prison abolitionist and queer anti-Zionist activist, they view Bending the Bars as an example of the transformative power of media production.
“I came into prison abolition through queerness,” they tell me. They started volunteering for the LGBTQ prison abolitionist organization Black & Pink. “At that point, I didn’t really know what prison abolition was, but I thought this would be a place where I could find queer community and learn more about the system and how it impacts people,” Morse says. “Very quickly, I found the arguments very compelling, especially the idea that, on a fundamental level, prisons are about policing gender and sexuality, and queerness is about resisting those kinds of binaries, barriers, [and] borders. Also that queerness has always been a special target of prisons. So it’s really important for queer people in queer communities to push back against prisons [and] policing.”
After writing a book on selfies and the politics of transfeminine art, Morse became curious about the power of creating prison abolitionist media. “When we made media that was just about raising awareness, it didn’t seem to have the effect that I wanted of transforming systems,” they say. “People got apathetic. They tuned out, because what happens in prisons is really overwhelming. And then people inside were silenced, ignored, and not having their experiences witnessed. So that became the research question: How do you do media collaborations that will materially transform people’s experiences?”
“Working on a project like this together is a really important way of transforming and challenging the current system in ways that go well beyond just exposing people to the realities of prison,” Morse adds.
Bending the Bars has been a transformative experience for Chuckie Lee, too. Working with CHIP has been “like a spiritual awakening” for her. “What the CHIP organization has given is one of a kind,” she says.
Fighting against discrimination, invalidation, and violence in the system, Chuckie Lee was isolated and “never felt that [she] was worthy.” Music became her lifeline because, when she writes, she becomes another person and lives a different life. While Chuckie Lee was at one point out on parole, she is back inside again, jailed among male prisoners and facing a potential life sentence for acting in self-defense. When her sister died of cancer in May, a judge denied her furlough to attend the funeral.
“I’m leaning on the opportunities like this so I can get my story out, so that the next girl that goes through something so familiar won’t feel alone,” she tells me. “I want to build this platform so that whether it’s through my rap, whether through it’s through my music, whether it’s through my advocate work, whether it’s just through me having a normal conversation with someone, I want to be able to break those chains where people feel hopeless.”
Chuckie Lee hopes that people who listen to the album will understand both the complexity and genius of folks on the inside. Incarceration “doesn’t define who we are as people,” she says. “We’re still human beings. We still have talent, we still have love to give, we still have connections in the community to make.” She also hopes listeners begin questioning their assumptions about prisons systems and learn how they can support incarcerated community members.
Morse hopes listeners will utilize Bending the Bars as an organizing tool. “Use its energy to fuel the movement,” they say. Morse suggests playing it during a get together to write letters to incarcerated folks or while designing art to protest an ICE facility. They’re planning to create a curriculum based around the album with a non-profit that provides educational content to folks inside prisons as well.
The wisdom shared in the album is more necessary than ever. “In this moment when we’re facing such serious threats to our liberty, working with folks who are incarcerated has been a very powerful way for me to learn about courage,” Morse shares. “Incarcerated folks not only have been the most targeted, but they have the longest history of fighting this kind of repression, of figuring out how to survive. They have a lot of wisdom to share with all of us as we’re trying to grapple with what for many of us is a real shift in our day-to-day lives and in our understanding of the world, as these political changes are confronting us in the U.S.”
Morse is already using the album for educational purposes. Earlier this spring, they played “Barbie Rockstar” during a discussion of feminist approaches to carceral systems in one of my Introduction to Gender & Sexuality Studies classes. After students bobbed their heads to the catchy beat, they thoughtfully engaged with debates about prison abolition. I could see the way the album could do the transformative work Morse envisions.
Morse encourages folks to support the album by following the project on Instagram, Tiktok and/or YouTube. “Every listen is a way of amplifying the voices of these artists and helping them connect to people,” they say. Morse also encourages listeners to write fan mail to the artists to let the artists know what their music means to you. This is especially important for the artists who are still incarcerated. As Morse says: “Receiving mail is a huge material support. It helps people survive. It also lets corrections officers and other incarcerated people know that this person has people on the outside. So it makes a real material difference in people’s safety.”
Meanwhile, Chuckie Lee has big plans to make more pop and rap music in order “to create this space in the world for trans girls and the LGBTQ+ [community] in the rap industry,” she says.
“When people hear of the Bride of Chuckie, she’s the queen. She’s the queen of not just the LGBTQ+ community, but she’s the queen for rights. She’s the queen of love. She’s the queen of embracing and expressing yourself and just being your authentic self.”
“Let them know that I’m coming! I’m gonna come out, and I’m gonna be big and bold, and people are gonna love the music.”
You can listen to Bending the Bars anywhere you stream music.
Baby, You did that. Your Mom love it!!
Thank you for reading and commenting!!