Monster, the first "Calls From Home" hip-hop album
Beckie Rose-Bowman (WMMT) & John Bowman (Dream.org)
Monster: Creating a Hip-Hop Album Through Calls From Home
I’ve learned in my time hosting Calls From Home that nothing within the American carceral system is linear. Simply put, time is not real to anyone but the system, and it only applies to the system when it helps the system. You can make a plan, you can dream up some lofty ideas, you can build momentum and get folks excited — and then the system reminds you who holds the power.
Monster, the first Calls From Home hip-hop album, has been created in strictly in-between moments: between lockdowns and silence, between phone calls that never came or stopped coming, between grief and worry and eerily loud silences.
Calls From Home, a community radio program rooted in Whitesburg, Kentucky, centers the voices of incarcerated people and their loved ones. The program began as a way to recognize and participate in the humanity of folks incarcerated in these mountains and their families. Calls from Home broadcasts messages from individuals to their loved ones but has always been about more than broadcasting messages. It’s about care. It’s about holding space. It’s about making sure people inside are still heard, still remembered, still part of the cultural fabric of where they come from and recognized as a part of the communities they live in.
Why a hip-hop album?
Hip-hop is especially important to this project because many incarcerated people held in Appalachian facilities come from urban areas across the country. Colorado. Wisconsin. Cincinnati. Detroit. They are moved far from home into rural communities where they may never see their culture reflected back to them — where the music, language, and creative traditions they grew up with feel absent or invisible.
That kind of cultural displacement deepens isolation. Not just separation from family, but separation from self. Hip-hop becomes a way to carry home with you. A way to stay rooted in identity when everything familiar has been stripped away.
There is a longer history here that made a hip-hop album feel not only appropriate, but necessary.
Twenty years ago, incarcerated individuals reached out to WMMT with a simple request — to send messages of love to their families back home. Those early calls were actually letters, acts of survival and connection, carried over the airwaves from people who had been removed from their communities but not from their humanity. That outreach is what gave birth to Calls From Home.
WMMT began airing Hip-Hop From the Hilltop — a program that made space for hip-hop in a region where it was often treated as out of place or invisible. The show affirmed that hip-hop already lived here, that Appalachian identity was never as narrow as it was often portrayed, and that culture could travel, adapt, and take root even in unexpected places.
This album sits at the intersection of those two legacies. It honors the origin of Calls From Home — incarcerated people reaching outward for connection — while also honoring Hip-Hop From the Hilltop’s insistence that hip-hop belongs in Appalachia. Bringing those threads together felt like closing a circle that has been forming for decades.
By centering hip-hop in this album, we are not importing something foreign into Appalachia. We are acknowledging who is already here. These voices exist inside Appalachian prisons every day, even when their culture isn’t visible in the surrounding landscape. This project makes that presence audible.
The Process (and the Pauses)
The album was built slowly and carefully using materials gathered through the Calls From Home process: recorded phone calls, spoken reflections, handwritten lyrics mailed from inside, and conversations with families and collaborators on the outside.
During the project period, facilities went into extended lockdown following the death of a corrections officer. Communication became scarce almost overnight. Phone calls were cut. Mail slowed or disappeared. People we had been in regular contact with went silent, not by choice, but by circumstance.
When communication resumed, it came back in fragments. Short calls. Delayed letters. All carrying even more weight than before.
Making Art Inside the System
Because incarcerated participants have little to no access to recording equipment or digital tools, Monster required deep trust and collaboration. Lyrics are transcribed and transcribed again. Spoken word captured through phone calls is treated as sacred material, not background noise.
We didn’t polish away the reality of incarceration. The pauses, the static, the uneven pacing — those became part of the sound. The album reflects art made under constraint.
Outside Partnerships
People don’t thrive in isolation - and this project did not happen in isolation. It was shaped, strengthened, and sustained by outside partners who understand that cultural work, harm reduction, and storytelling are deeply connected.
Dream.org offered support and encouragement rooted in justice, equity, and the belief that people most impacted by incarceration should be centered in conversations about change. Dream hosted a Calls From Home screening and asked us to panel and talk about our work. Their work helped affirm that this project was not just creative, but necessary.
VOCAL-KY brought a harm reduction lens grounded in lived experience, reminding us that culture, survival, and advocacy are inseparable. Their encouragement reinforced the idea that art can be a form of organizing, education, and care work — especially in communities most impacted by the opioid crisis and criminalization.
April Edwards provided technical support, patience, and a deep respect for the integrity of the voices involved. Working with April meant knowing the sound would be handled with care — that nothing would be rushed, flattened, or stripped of its humanity in the process.
WMMT/Appalshop provides the space, platform and their characteristic devotion to the people of Appalachia and the Calls From Home audience.
To each of these partners: thank you for believing in the work, for trusting the process even when timelines shifted, and for standing alongside Calls From Home with generosity and intention. This album carries your fingerprints as much as it carries the voices of those inside.
Why This Matters in an Intercultural Kentucky Context
Monster pushes back against erasure. It makes space for rural and urban voices to coexist, reminding listeners that their culture and humanity do not stop at the prison gates, no matter what the system tells you.
Holding the Work Gently
Creativity doesn’t disappear behind bars. It waits. This album has fallen through a crack.
—Beckie Rose-Bowman (WMMT) & John Bowman (Dream.org)
The Kentucky Intercultural Microgrant Program is a seed grant to support two or more individuals or organizations collaborating across distance, difference, or sector on projects that celebrate and connect Kentucky's people and places. Our 2025 funding partners included Kentucky Arts Council, Fund for the Arts, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, EarthTools, and individual donors. Learn more at kyrux.org/microgrants