Free Everybody's Brother by CeeLo Green

write songs to empower myself and to empower other people who will ultimately have to face the inevitable and the unavoidable. Early on as a little boy, I learned that music is about rising above pain. It’s about expressing your soul and touching the souls of other people too. That explains why, when the time came, I did not write a song called “Trapped” about my mother’s suffering. Instead, I wrote a song called “Free.”
Lord it’s so hard livin this life;
    A constant struggle each and every day.
    Some wonder why
    I’d rather die
    Than to continue livin this way.
    Many are blind
    and cannot find the truth cuz no one seems to really know.
    But I won’t accept that this is how it’s gonna be.
    Devil you got to let me and my people go.
    Cuz I wanna be free—
    Completely free.
    Lord won’t you please come and save me.
    Cuz I wanna be free—
    Totally free.
    I’m not gonna let this world worry me

    We are all superheroes in our own stories—haunted by our pasts, yet focused on our futures. I was no exception. If my mother couldn’t go anywhere now, well, then in my mind, that just meant that I was going to have to go everywhere. Even if my first stop was underground.

In the Dungeon, I finally found my crew and I found my way in life too. In the Dungeon, I was set free in a manner that would open up the whole world to me.

GOODIE TIMES
    Life with Goodie Mob was my education in music and life.

L ike the old saying goes, home is where the Dungeon is.
    For those of you who unwisely skipped your Introduction to Torture 101 course, a dungeon is a dark, forbidding, and often underground cell where prisoners are confined. Throughout history—fantasized and otherwise—dashing superheroes and nefarious villains like me have found themselves rightly or wrongly charged with unspeakable acts then thrown into a dungeon. As a rule, these captives cannot wait to make their big escape. But that’s not how it works in my fable. In my very strange case, a dungeon turned out to be the perfect escape that I had been looking for all of my life. In fact, finding my rightful place in the Dungeon is what finally set me free.

    While I was dabbling in psychedelics in military school, a group of very young hip-hop artists had been creating the sound of the Dirty South out of Lamonte’s Beauty Supply shop in East Point, a gritty little city just south of the Atlanta line. Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins worked there before she became a big star in TLC, and so did Rico Wade, the teenage store manager and junior gangster who’d bought his own gold and black Honda Accord before he was oldenough to drive. A lot of the young rappers in southwest Atlanta started hanging out in that shop, and eventually Rico and two of his homeboys, Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown, organized themselves into a groundbreaking production team called Organized Noize.
    In the early nineties Organized Noize moved its headquarters to a small brick ranch house Rico rented for his mother over in Lakewood. There was a scene going on there day and night. Sometimes twelve, fifteen kids would be hanging in the living room and kitchen, drinking 40s and writing rhymes on notepads, having rap battles out in the driveway, or cramming into the studio in the basement, which wasn’t even a real basement—it was more like a dug-out crawl space with red dirt walls. There wasn’t room for much equipment, just an MPC drum machine, a keyboard, some recording gear, a table and chairs, and records all over the place. But what was going on down there was so good and so intoxicating that nobody ever wanted to leave. They were captives. So they started calling the place the Dungeon. And this cramped, thrown-together corner of the universe became the epicenter of a whole new rap scene.
    Two guys from my neighborhood who hung out there—Jay Douglas and Killer B—brought me over to the Dungeon for the first time. It was definitely the craziest and coolest place I’d ever seen. That first