Forté insisted he believed he was justtransferring cash, but he was found guilty of cocaine possession with intent todistribute. Because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenders,Forté was shown no leniency. He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.
Forté’s famous friend Carly Simonlobbied hard on the rapper’s behalf, decrying his harsh sentence and pleadingto her politically connected friends, but to no avail. His appeals processexhausted, Forté settled into prison life, making the most of it by teachinghimself guitar, reading, practicing chess and following world events as henever had before. Then, in late 2008, a little more than seven years into hisprison term, he received some unlikely good news. President George W. Bush hadcommuted his sentence. He was a free man.
“It was like learning I’d won thelottery,” Forté says, but even that analogy doesn’t do justice to the magnitudeof his improbable break. Bush, of course, was not the type of president to showleniency to drug offenderslet alone famous rapper drug offendersbut more thanthat, Bush was extremely cautious about pardons and almost ideologically averseto commutations. In his eight years in office, Bush commuted the sentences ofonly 11 people. Why Forté was one of them remains unclear.
Forté is now writing a memoir, but ittook him a while to open up about his prison experience. After he was freed inDecember 2008, he was surprisingly reserved, declining to do interviews.
“I didn’t want to become the freak atthe dinner party, the person who everyone wants to hear tell their story for aweek and half,” Forté says. Instead he went back to the studio and beganworking on songs.
“I probably did about 70 songs almostimmediately, just to let people know where my head was at and what I wasthinking about,” he says. “The music itself is more critical than ever. A lotof people came up to me and said they thought I’d just be talking about prison,but that’s not me. There’s nothing cool about the prison experience, and Idon’t want to propagate that idea to young people who are already fed thatmisconception.”
Forté’s new songs, he says, are aboutself-responsibility.
“These are times when everyone shouldbe held accountable,” he says. “I want people who hear them to not only beinspired to question themselves and authority, but also to question me. I’m notinterested in finger pointing or playing the blame game, or saying that I’m avictim. I think it would discredit my personal history if I didn’t try to learnfrom it, and learn from my mistakes.”
The music itself is a drasticdeparture, too, more inspired by independent singer-songwriters than hip-hop.
“In prison, I voluntarily shut myselfoff from pop culture,” Forté says. “I didn’t watch TV, but I listened to NPR,so the music that I was hearing was the music that changed my life: JoséGonzález, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Regina Spektor, Joanna Newsom, Damien Rice, TV onthe Radio. I started listening to some good music, man! It didn’t sound big,and it wasn’t this wall-of-sound stuff. Perhaps my favorite was Cat Power. Tohear that imperfection in her voice gave me such hope, because to me sherepresented what a credible artist has always been: somebody able to bevulnerable to the audience.”
It’s in that spirit that Forté istouring solo and acoustically.
“No backing tracks, no band, no DJ,just me and my acoustic guitar,” Forté says. “That’s going to be the blueprintfor my next album, too: lyric-driven, acoustic, organic music. It’s going tosound like I recorded it in my living room. It should really allow listenersthe truest glimpse of me yet.”
JohnForté plays an 8 p.m. show at Shank Hall on Sunday, Feb. 14, with openermarQue.
