Check out JJ Demon’s EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Highwire Daze, where he discusses his inspiration, his past, and his album Funeral Disco!

This past week, JJ Demon recording a freestyle over the “I’m Back” beat by TI. Be sure to stop by next week as we will be releasing the video!!

Check out the music video for JJ Demon’s “The Phone Song” off of his debut album titled Funeral Disco:

D-Block. High bail pod. Most of the guys back here are here for serious crimes. Fuck, so was I for Christ’s sake. It was around 6 at night when they brought me on the block, so the inmates were out in the day room. All eyes were on me. With my belongings wrapped in a sheet, I walked into the large, gothic room, making sure not to make direct eye contact with anyone, but also trying not to seem scared. The C.O. led me to cell 199, and I tossed my stuff up on the top bunk. Behind me, I felt someone move into the doorway. I spun around to find a white guy of about 25 staring me down. “Yo…uh…what size shoes are those?” Welcome to the Back Jail. They call it the “back jail” because it is literally at the back of the prison. It’s just general population. No one works jail jobs or does anything. It’s just a bunch of convicts living in a dimly lit concrete square. The blocks are 2-stories high, ten cells on each floor. All painted one color, usually blue or green. The dayrooms consist of to large metal tables with 4 seats attached on each side, and along the far wall are 3 phones and a water fountain. There is an old T.V. mounted on the wall. No cable, so you watch a lot or Maury and Jerry Springer. Most cells were 2-man huts, but there was also two 4-man huts on each block. My cellmate, or “celly”, turned out to be a Mexican guy who didn’t speak a single word of English. Score. There is nothing worse than having to live with someone who talks too much. We got along as best we could considering the circumstances. As I said before, meals come in trays stacked on big metal carts, and they get wheeled onto the blocks by kitchen workers or COs. Breakfast is at 7, lunch at 1130, dinner at 5, and that’s it. On certain days you can go to the weight room, other days the library, but for the most part you’re doing nothing. This is your life. Enjoy. Coming through intake, my knowledge of rap music as well as my sense of humor had earned me a few acquaintances. One such acquaintance was a very large black man named Boon. Lucky for me, he got moved to D-Block the same time I did. This proved helpful in situations such as the one I mentioned earlier. Boon was clearly the biggest guy on the block now, and he thought I was the coolest white boy he ever met. Clutch. Still, this piece of my saga kinda drags somewhat. Not much happens here. I made friends with a kid named Nile who is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. I also met a guy that was a personal trainer on the outside who began training me in the weightroom. I never really got into any fights. There was a guy on the block who would rip up sheets and make dye out of different comissarry items and weave necklaces for guys in exchange for food. I had him make me a pentagram, an old Tim Burton-esque tree, and a vagina which i sent to my manager, Cole, for Christmas. As for money, my parents were keeping a little bit of money on my books so I could make phone calls and get some food. Cole sent me some money and a few books about music and the industry. I spent most of my time cracking jokes with Nile and some of the other younger white guys (jail is very segregated, even to this day). Most of us were heroin addicts whose problem had put us here one way or another. A few weeks in, 3 dried soups went missing from my hut. I walked up onto the the landing of the steps so I was right in the middle of everyone and screamed “Next time someone wants to steal from me, do it while I’m there. Stop being a coward. You want something of mine, take it from ME!” I knew this would make whoever had done it feel like a scared little bitch, and that was my point. I never had an issue again after that. Around Christmas time my celly got released, and one of the guys from a 4-man hut moved into my cell. His name was Chris, a 24 year old heroin addict and tattoo artist. He said he played electric guitar. We vibed about music and made jokes. All in all he was the perfect celly. For Christmas, both our families put enough money on our books to buy radios. They were cheap little hand-held things with ear buds, but it got the job done. Friday nights from 12-2 all the white boys would listen to a heavy metal show called “Rockers” and stood at there locked gates headbanging. This scared the shit out of everyone else. That little radio became a very important instrument to my current success. See, on the outside, I NEVER listened to the radio. I was strictly an iPod man. But the more I listened to the radio, the more I began to see the draw of mainstream music. One song in particular perked my interest. “Kids” by MGMT. It had this electro-rock feel, but it could easily have been rapped over. It was catchy but silly, however still dark and not-without-purpose. The more I listened to it, the more ideas it gave me about my own music. Dark, driving, danceable. Real, meaningful, fun. This is what I should be doing. If I can write pop songs, why not do it? That’s a gift that should be shared, not hidden. I explored the radio. That is, of coarse, the true measure of music. If it’s on the radio, average people think it’s good. Is that everything? Absolutely not. But it is something… I had asked one of the guards to look up my release date on the computer. With good time and time-served factored in, I would be released on May 5th. Just in time for spring. I’m doing ok. I’m working out. I like most of the people on my block. No one seems like too much trouble. All in all, I’d say I was “dug in”, so to speak. Then one day as I was playing a game of Dirty Hearts (card game) with a few of the boys, I got the call. “John Shinners! Pack your shit! You’re being moved to P-Pod!” Ugh. Next time around, which I promise won’t be as far off as this was from the last, I’ll discuss the second phase of my sentence. It involves the death of a friend and my divine revelation. Don’t go far… Yours in Life, Love, and Loneliness, JJ Demon.

Ok so the last time we spoke I was turning myself in to serve a 9-23 month sentence. I was feeling hopeless. Death lingered about me like the ghost of regret. I ate a handful of valium, drank a pint of vodka, and staggered to the entrance gate of the Montgomery County Correctional Facility. I hit the call button. The gate cracked and slid left. I stepped through and turned to watch it close behind me. Okay. Here we go… Jail has an air of violence that is tangible. You can almost see it. In Montgomery County, your first stop is The Gym, which is an actual gym with about 50 mats on the floor and one toilet off in a cubbyhole. This is do to the vast over-crowding of the Pennsylvania prison system. Since this is your first stop, mostly everyone in this large (but not large enough) room was arrested within the last week. Tension is high. It’s a room filled with 50 criminals, most of which don’t have any idea when the next time they’ll breath clean air is. Everyone is stressing about their case and their kids and their girl and their car and blah, blah, fuckety, blah. To top it off, the majority of the younger white guys are heroin addicts. So they are going into withdrawals simultaneously. They try to eat and either vomit it right back up or have to run to the ONE toilet they have access to. And forget about sleeping. I myself was kicking dope. Lucky for me I was smart enough to stop 5 days before turning myself in, so the worst of the withdrawals were over. But I still couldn’t sleep for my first 2 weeks in. Not fun. A fact people don’t often talk about when discussing prison is that it is freezing fucking cold. I assume this is for the purpose of not promoting germs and infection (though Staph still runs ramped throughout the jail). When you first arrive, they give you a raggedy gray wool blanket to sleep with. However most inmates can be seen fully wrapped in this morning, noon, and night. I had the luxury of turning myself in, so I came prepared by wearing three pairs of socks, three pairs of boxers, and two thermal long-sleeve shirts. I also got lucky by having a pretty cool officer check me in, because most C.O.’s wouldn’t have let me keep all that on. But although I was warm, having things that other people want is never a good thing in prison. So I had to make sure no one saw my extras. Otherwise I may have had serious problems. This was precisely the reason why I wore my oldest and most beat-up pair of sneakers. There are a few more odd stops before you reach general population. The reason for this is, again, vast over-crowding. Either people can’t stop committing crimes, or P.O.’s can’t stop locking up ex-cons for petty shit. It’s probably somewhere in between. Regardless, it took me about 3 weeks to make it to the actual jail, which is pretty standard. During that time you are starving and filthy. See, they serve you your 3 meals a day, but the portions are so small it’s like eating nothing. And the little plastic bag they give you when you first come in, filled with a mini toothbrush, tiny shampoo, and a bar of soap, has long-since expired. Once you hit gen pop, you can order commissary, which is basically just food and hygiene products bought with the money your friends and family have put on your books. Believe me, you’ll never be so happy to get your hands on a tube of toothpaste in your life. Another thing about the food is the taste. Now it is jail, so nobody expects fine French cuisine. However the food is so bad, even when I was famished, I could hardly choke it down. It has the texture of what can only be described as “not food”. Do you kinda get what I’m saying? It feels like something that you shouldn’t eat. And about 4 times a week you get what’s called a “meat and cheese” for lunch, which is just that. Some mystery “meat”, and yellow piece of “cheese”, and two soggy pieces of bread. That’s it. For me, the worst meal was the entire breakfast menu, which consisted mainly of oatmeal and what felt like a cardboard flour substitute. Once I was able to order commissary, I ate breakfast maybe once a week. It’s that bad. Even still, as bad as the food is, guys are continuously beating each other up for meals. In MontCo, the meals are brought to the blocks (or “pods”) in giant plastic trays on large metal carts. These trays have giant plastic lids. Those lids will often times be used as weapons. The plastic tray lid, when wielded correctly, can crack a grown mans skull open with one swing. This may sound horrifying, but to a scrawny white boy like me, this was my only hope of winning a fight in there. See what prison lowers us to? Do you want to know what the worst aspect of jail was for me? The uncertainty of physical and mental safety. One of the freedoms you lose when you are an inmate is the freedom to feel safe. Around every corner and behind every steel bar is someone who wants what you have, or someone who hates what you are, or someone who just wants to hurt another person. And these “someones” are looking for a reason to do it. You have to be careful of every word you utter and every place you step. Pay attention to your every subtle move. Something so benign and innocent on the outside could get you stabbed to death inside the walls of a jail. This looming doom is not only potentially harmful to you physically, but is hurting mentally all the time. A person cannot live in those conditions for very long without adapting. But what happens to us when we adapt to such irrational violence and nonsensical malice? It is certainly not a healthy transition. Suddenly you find yourself becoming the animal. You find your own thoughts plagued with paranoia and vengeance towards those you believe will wrong you. The fantasies of an inmate are not limited to prime-rib and naked females. I would often dream of harm done to those who I feared would do harm unto me. I longed for the feeling or safety. If someone made me feel as if I wasn’t safe around them, suddenly I was filled with crimson hatred and thoughts of… Perhaps some things are better left unsaid. I will tell you this though: the most dangerous people in the jails are those who feel scared into a corner. A scared man will do anything to feel safe again. Think about how you feel now as you read this. You may be stressing about a paper you have due for class, or a deadline at work, or the rent, or the car payment, etc. But generally speaking, you know that you are safe from physical harm, as well as free to see the people who make you feel safe. Imagine having that taken from you, and being placed in a womb of concrete and steel filled with violent individuals with nothing to lose. How would you deal? So I’m 3 weeks in and finally they call my name for General Population. I’m filled with mixed emotions. On one hand I’m moving to what will essentially be my “home” for the duration of my term, and I’ll be able to receive toiletries and food. On the other hand, I had never made it this far into the system. I had been inside these walls 3 times before, but never to general pop. Some of these blocks were infamous for their brutality. In some areas of the jail it was a crime to be white. As I followed the Corrections Officer through the bowels of the prison with my life wrapped in a sheet, my heart sang me the song of my nerves. Next time we talk I’ll tell you about D-Block and my new friends. It’s not all bad. Just mostly. Yours in Life, Love, and Loneliness, JJ Demon.