Songs of freedom
Learning to feel free again when you've witnessed the other side

& in the beginning there’s the word, & the word is known as FREEDOM & that’s the first thing you hear screaming through the speakers when you press play on Regional Justice Center’s new album which is titled Freedom, Sweet Freedom, which holds weighted meaning today because the band started in 2016 after the drummer’s 18-year-old brother was incarcerated, in fact the band’s name refers to the jail where his brother was locked up & so from the beginning, the powerviolence punk band has been an outlet for Ian Shelton, drummer/vocalist of RJC, to reflect on his brother’s incarceration but the band is also an outlet for his brother, Max Hellesto, because you see even while Max was behind bars, he would speak to Ian from a prison phone & excerpts of those phone calls would be included on early albums & it was a way for Max to be a part of the project, it was a way for the brothers to be together again, it was a way to offer freedom & dignity to a locked-up soul & that brings us to the present with this new album because in 2022, Max was finally released & Freedom, Sweet Freedom features Max on vocals & on the first track you can hear him bellow out the word FREEDOM with heart & soul & what I hear in his guttural scream is the way FREEDOM is pronounced like a statement but also a question because Max has had two years to process being free & he’s still working through what it means to be free in a country that constantly criminalizes & punishes & murders more than it nurtures, I mean Max Hellesto’s voice is a tornado that thrashes & mangles any punctuation standing in the way 

 

& the album is only 13 minutes long, meaning the 12 songs each clock in around a minute, meaning I keep listening to this album letting each pummeling second throw punches at my heart, I mean the buzzsaw guitars & blasting drums sound like they are tearing down prison walls, I mean that’s the sound of freedom & I need that sound because days after the album came out, the state of Missouri executed a Black man named Marcellus Williams & Williams spent 25 years behind bars for a murder someone committed in 1998 & Williams spent those 25 years trying to prove his innocence & even though the state admitted evidence used against Williams was mishandled by a botched police investigation & even though the two witnesses against Williams were known liars & even though those two witnesses kept changing their stories several times before trial & even though the victim’s family pleaded to let Williams’ life be spared & even though the prosecutor’s office that put Williams on trial filed a motion in January to vacate his conviction, the state of Missouri still executed Marcellus Williams by injection of a chemical known to cause extreme pain & suffering 

 

& in the days leading up to Williams’ execution, I saw a statement online that said: “Marcellus Williams could be any of us/ Marcellus Williams is all of us” & I feel those words because I too have done time & I know what it’s like when your fate is in someone else’s hands, I mean when I was young, it was easy for cops & white folks to already assume I was a criminal simply for existing while brown & since my fate already seemed pre-determined, I stopped caring & I got in trouble, each incident worse than the previous & like Max from RJC, I faced serious time at 19 but I jumped through all the hoops of probation & somehow I made it through, but even then I still carried shame & self-loathing from the whole experience, I questioned being alive & found the answer in being numb & for years I had no will to write poetry, what I’m saying is Marcellus Williams stared death in the face behind bars & wrote poetry that will outlive empires, in other words: How innocent do you have to be to avoid being executed? What I’m saying is Max Hellesto picked up the pen & microphone & started screaming his existence back into the world & I know how Max from RJC feels when he screams FREEDOM in that agonized, bittersweet way because it’s hard to feel free again when you’ve witnessed the other side 

 

& I still wonder what my life would have looked like if random mercy didn’t kiss my forehead back then, how much further down the pipeline would I have gone? & so I have empathy for relatives like Marcellus Williams because he may have been more innocent than me but nonetheless the people behind bars & on the margins deserve grace & dignity & like Max from Regional Justice Center, they deserve to shed the chains & step back into this beautiful messy world pronouncing FREEDOM at all volumes, figuring out how to survive better & rest in power, Marcellus Williams who could have been any of us, rest in power, Marcellus Williams whose last words were: All praise be to Allah in every situation… 

– Kirbie Bennett