It’s pretty depressing when someone you admire does something wrong. Think about Bill Clinton admitting to sexual relations with an intern, Michael Jordan retiring from basketball to “play” minor league baseball, or Joaquin Phoenix’s chilling appearance and unintentional Charles Manson impersonation on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” These things make me feel dirty. Especially the Michael Jordan thing.
But there’s also something inspiring in seeing them redeem themselves. Bill Clinton’s redemption came in not being George W. Bush, and Michael Jordan triumphantly returned to the Chicago Bulls to win three straight NBA championships. I guess we’ll have to wait until Phoenix’s apparent “rap album” drops for the verdict to come in on that one, but in the meantime, we can trick ourselves into thinking it’s some kind of planned Andy Kaufman stunt and not a nasty ketamine trip.
Luckily, MTV realized that people like watching public figures redeem themselves, so they’ve created a documentary-style show about rapper T.I.’s recent legal troubles called “T.I.’s Road to Redemption.” That, or they’ve just run out of footage from summer on the Jersey Shore to show on “True Life.”
T.I., born Clifford Harris, was arrested in 2007 on federal weapons charges so menacing that Charlton Heston is rising from the dead so he can get in on the gun action by prying them back with his cold, dead hands. In a deal struck by his lawyer and the court, T.I. has the option of reducing a potential 30-year sentence to one year if he completes 1,000 hours of community service before his March 29 court date.
“T.I.’s Road to Redemption” chronicles the rapper completing parts of this community service by schooling at-risk teens about the pitfalls of thug life by personally intervening in their lives, focusing on a different kid in each episode.
It would be so easy to dismiss the show as a grossly blatant PR move on the part of T.I., who ignorant haters may assume is just another childish, gangbanging cog in the Top 40 rapper machine looking to unrightfully get off easy so he can return to his life filled with an endless supply of narcotics, giant piles of money, and gilded pimp cups. But I have to say that after looking deep into his eyes from the crowd during his performance at Bruin Bash in 2007, I saw the real T.I. What I saw was a highly attractive, good man who’s just made a few mistakes. After watching him interact with 18-year-old Pee Wee from Atlanta on last week’s episode, this belief was reaffirmed. And I know that he’s not faking his sincerity for the judge. I saw his movie “ATL,” and he’s not a very good actor.
Pee Wee was a hustler, a title used to describe a job that basically means you’ll do anything to make money regardless of the consequences ““ like a handyman of the hood. His father was killed when he was young, and his mother lives in poverty. Pee Wee’s mumbling diction was so unintelligible, it required subtitles.
The most heartwarming part of the show came from his personal interactions with Pee Wee. Of course, T.I. used scare tactics by making Pee Wee sit in a jail cell with a book and a dictionary (oh, the horrors of Merriam-Webster), and took him to visit a mortuary where a hustler lay on the mortician’s table, his death a direct result of his dangerous lifestyle. This aspect of the show was dramatic, and crucial to exposing T.I.’s commitment, but the best part of the show, aside from T.I.’s new song with Justin Timberlake, “Dead and Gone,” being prominently featured, was watching T.I. just talk openly with Pee Wee.
T.I. had a real conversation with the kid about his hopes and dreams, a conversation that Pee Wee had probably never had with anyone before ““ I would bet that fellow drug dealers care more about selling their crack than listening to a kid wax poetic about his love of comedy. When Pee Wee told T.I. his dream job was to be an actor, T.I. hooked him up with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and made him recite lines from the play in Elizabethan language, the point of the exercise being that you have to (legally) work hard to get what you want without being thrown in prison, a revolutionary concept to be sure. I have to say though, it was really adorable hearing T.I. describe the plot in that curling southern drawl, and then use the word “thespian,” which is just begging to be rhymed at some point with “lesbian.”
I really hope that T.I.’s judge watches this show before he sentences him. The message of the show is that even though T.I. is a rap superstar, he made a mistake and wants to make things better for kids who are in trouble and have no one to tell them what’s what. T.I. is genuinely riding along his road to redemption, with no assault weapons in the trunk to speak of.
If you wouldn’t mind playing Juliet to T.I.’s Romeo, then e-mail McReynolds at dmcreynolds@media.ucla.edu.