“You will no longer hear the buzz of African belly flies / There will not be a weekend wrap-up of the continuing Sudanese Genocide / There are far too many characters for every fallen hero to be eulogized / But the photo of your junk, it will be publicized…”

It’s true, a cappella rap battles ruined spoken word, mocking poetry slams’ finger-snapping pretension with WorldStar worthy debates about who “styled on” whom. But the message of Ronnie Butler, Jr.’s latest satirical poem Photographs of Your Junk (Will be Publicized) added a few extra layers to some important, if obvious, truisms. That is, the internet has ended privacy as we know it; and the nets can be a brain-draining wasteland, where social responsibility and intellectual curiosity goes to die. To be sure, gen-Xers and their tinfoil hat-sporting antecedents have been wringing their hands about these issues for some time. If you are among such informed advocates, you may be excused. You’re sufficiently spooked about the evil workings of the miraculous tubes.

But if you happen to be reading this and you’re a celebrity (like her), left-dressing politician (like him); an anti-gay God fearing gay guy (like this fool); or high schoolers with raging libidos and unfettered access to the internet (like these guys); you should pay close attention. Ronnie Butler, Jr. will save you from yourself.

While Ronnie is a famous Bahamian son of renowned calypso singer, Ronnie Butler, Sr., he’s best known to us yanks for playing the role of Oscar on Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP, or as Jimmy Kimmel’s in-house Barack Obama-impersonator. In 2010, Butler broke out on his own to produce and star in the server-crashing clip, “Obama! A Modern U.S. President.” The satirical video, in which he sings to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Major-General’s Song,” logged nearly 2 million views on Youtube and caught the attention of Hollywood big Norman Lear (producer of The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Sanford & Son).

“I did the piece because it was an opportunity to try my hand at writing and directing,” he told me via phone. “But getting a call from Lear for a performer like me, was like my mom getting a call from Oprah.”

When Butler stepped out of Obama’s mom jeans to take on the complacency of Internet culture, he took his idea to Lear. “Not only did he support Photographs of Your Junk financially, but Lear and his team of Brent Miller and Lara Bergthold became collaborators,” he says. “The piece is better for it.”

The video, which you can watch for yourself below, finds Butler reciting a poem over Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The audience plays the role of society at large—a down-lo politician creeps with his cross-dressing date; a young girl, desensitized by all the “junk,” sighs at the bar. He updates Scott-Heron’s message—which called for action and engagement with social issues—for the 2.0 generation, tossing in a few smart phones and iPap apps. In Butler’s world, the internet has subjugated Scott-Heron’s idiot box, and is lulling you to sleep with images of your (their) junk.

“What I’m saying is the anti establishment feeling that could be going on has been co-opted,” he says. “Everybody is so busy and consumed with being their own celebrity. Our daily lives are all over Facebook, all over twitter. Everybody has the opportunity to be in the public eye. From a pop culture point of view, it is much easier to be distracted by the junk of celebrities.”

Aside from publicized privates, there is a subtext of privacy mixed up in all this, a warning to those who ought to know better. “I was originally thinking about a piece with Anthony Weiner, Tiger Woods and Arnolds Schwarzenegger together,” says Butler. “The hubris of being a celebrity or a person of power thinking you can get away with this because you’re famous. If you are going to send text pics of your junk don’t wake up the next day and whine about it and act shocked or dismayed when it turns up on the cover of the newspaper. Some people still don’t understand the nature of social media. There is no privacy.”

As for his next piece, Butler has his sights on the upcoming presidential elections. Surely, he will resurrect some singing version of Barack Obama, whom he still supports, however grudgingly. “I am disappointed by some decisions he made but I don’t think there is anyone contesting him that could do a better job,” he says. “And if you are an Obama impersonator and performer, it is in your best interest to be a supporter [laugh].”

If you haven’t read this T.I. interview yet, do so. As for the backstory, some questions will remain unanswered until time sorts things out. What’s left is after the jump…

T.I. leans back into the cushions of a well-worn sofa in the doorless green room of Atlanta’s Artisan PictureWorks studio. One foot touches the floor, the other rests high up on the sofa cushion, giving him the posture of a patient settling in for a long session at his shrink’s office. But really, he’s a man on the losing side of a war with time. On September 1, T.I. and his wife Tameka “Tiny” Cottle were pulled over for an illegal U-Turn while he was in L.A. promoting the film Takers. The officer claimed he smelled marijuana and an ensuing search turned up four ecstasy pills.

That’s how the T.I. story (“Mercy Me“) begins in the latest issue of VIBE. If you’ve read it, you know that he spoke on his drug use (oxycontin, hydrocodone, etc…), how it came about (pain pills habit after dental surgery) and how he has been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as well as a whole heap of other un-hip-hopy things he’s gotten himself into (group therapy, for instance). If you peeped it, you know that he gave his most personal and revealing interview to date.

I’ve interviewed T.I. many times. He’s always the same. He’s upbeat, charming, clever and generally thoughtful. The old stereotypes of rappers in interviews–mealy mouthed, hunched over, or inattentive and belligerent–don’t apply to Tip. He greets you with a ‘sappnin’ and on your way out he hits you with a “be easy.” But this meeting exposed a different man–defensive, defeated and hurting. More uneasy than be easy.

It started off very much like a therapy session. Like the kind you see in the movies or on cable (or every Monday at 1pm in real life, so they tell me). But T.I. wasn’t playing the role of ol’ ham fisted Tony Soprano, spazzing out on his shrink and running the gamut of emotions before the closing credits. He was more precise, more in control. Until I asked him how he developed a drug habit. That’s when he sat up, shifted in his seat and eyed the foot traffic zipping back and forth just out that doorless doorway.

He hopped up. “C’mon, follow me.”

He opened the door to the Maybach in the parking lot.

“Let’s talk in here, more private,” he said.

All clean on the outside, his car. Inside, not. Towels were everywhere, a bag of clothes, a bunch of DVDs, including some uncut season of Family Guy, water bottles. Whatever. He moved fast tidying up the joint, snatching up the towels, pushing his clothes to the side. A person close to Tip later told me that he covers his butter soft leather seats with the towels as protection. “A pet peeve of his. He hates when the jeans color rubs off onto his leather.” Apparently, all rappers cover the seats of their hundred thousand dollar cars with five dollar towels. “I got in Khalid’s car once, he does the same thing.”

Me: “Man, you live up in here?”

Tip: “Nah. I just make sure I have a bag for the day and whatever I need for the day.”

In there, we conducted most of the interview. He explained how he was beat down by the process, how he felt like he is being judged unfairly and how, this time, he is not the harshest judge of himself. He was spent. His eyes were heavy. And then he said, what he was feeling, that pretty much summed it all up. “I’m tired, man, I’m just tired of this shit.” It wasn’t an angry growl or a defiant bark. It was a gasp of submission. He was trying to convey the emotional fatigue that lives beyond the bone-tired designation. It’s the down-to-the-spirit exhaustion that has overtaken him.

Naturally, you want to know how tired?

Me: Have you ever considered ending it all?

Tip: Man, I mean, I felt like dying but I ain’t never consider killing myself.

How do you feel like dying but not killing yourself?

I felt like it would be easier to die than to go through whatever it is that I got to go through. I never considered killing myself. But I’ve definitely gotten tired. That’s the most difficult thing about being strong and resilient; nobody can ever tell when you had enough. They always feel like, He can take it. Nobody ever considers enough is enough. Nobody ever takes that into consideration. They feel like, He can take it. He’s strong.

What types of situations have driven you to the edge like that?

This situation is one of them. Once again, I’m not going to hurt myself, not going to kill myself. I might not shy away from dangerous situations as a rational person may. Due to that, I may be even more eager to put myself in harm’s way. But I’m not going to kill myself.

This is not our first pre-prison talk. I interviewed Tip weeks before the release of Paper Trial, the album he would drop before going to jail for possessing and attempting to purchase a bunch of bad-ass guns (assault rifles with silencers). That was before he picked up his drug habit, according to him. Back then, though he had a sentencing cloud hanging over his head, he was easing on down his road to redemption.

He explained his defiant stance in the face of critics over the years.

“When I did ‘Still Ain’t Forgave Myself’ nobody could have been more critical of me than I could of myself. Whereas ‘No Matter What’…if I had been as critical of myself as everyone else was being of me, I would have been under the ground. There had to be some resilience shown. They had to know that I was going to withstand any conditions, overcome any obstacles, rise above and beyond anything in my way–no matter what.”

Now, it’s as if all the harsh thoughts have reached a critical mass, along with the sentence that has taken a toll on his life. Still outwardly defiant in some ways, he has a deeper and internal battle going on that he’s been fighting longer than we know. I think that interview exposed some of that. The one posted below shows the other side.

Along Haiti's Gran Rue (main street), this lady and her family, mourns the loss of her brother, who was killed in the earthquake. Her brother lies dead just out of camera view. (photo: e.parker)

The video posted here was captured on the walk back from Carrefour to Port-au-Prince. My fancy-shmancy video equipment ran out of juice just before the quake and my iPhone followed suit shortly thereafter. We were left with a thin kodak digital camera, that belonged to Vladimir. An outdated model, it had no special gadgets or doohickies. But it did allow for video recording, which helped us to show the magnitude of the suffering. It is taken precisely at day break. In Haiti, at this time, the sun rises in a rush and disappears in an instant. As you can see, it starts out very dark and the sun rises over the wreckage and exposes the tragedy.

These were the first unattended bodies we came upon that morning. Shortly after the quake hit and the buildings shattered, the sun fell as well. You could catch some glimpses of a few dead bodies, but most were still trapped inside. So, when we set out the next day on our journey back to Port-au-Prince, we were unaware of how many people had died, which is why you see me pleading with the UN to “do something” about the dead bodies.

But, as in all disasters of this magnitude, they are focused on taking care of the living. It’s a matter of emergency policy to tend to the living. The dead cannot be helped. But that fact didn’t make it any easier for us who were walking among the bodies that  morning.

After baking in the sun, the stench of the carcasses tormented all in smelling distance. In Port-au-Prince, that was everybody. Many were rubbing toothpaste under their noses or shielding their noses with scarfs, kerchiefs, or napkins. By the time I was being evacuated–about 4 days later–the body clean-up had just begun.

When I returned in March, the stench of dead bodies was replaced by the smell of despair, as the rainy season was approaching, threatening the many citizens who now lived in tent cities.

Man sits outside Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) the day after Haiti's earthquake. "God gives them and God takes them away," he said. (Photo by Vladimir Leguerre)

Yes, I’m very late in posting this video from the morning after the earthquake struck Haiti. When the earthquake hit, I was in Port-au-Prince with Vladimir Leguerre, my fixer (and a journalist in his own right). We walked from Port-au-Prince to Carrefour, where he lives. In short, the video in this post is a continuation of what we saw on our way back the next morning.

While I was documenting this, my heart sank into my stomach. And it stayed there, tucked out of reach for the most part, which enabled me to continue pushing my camera or microphone into the faces of these victims.

But I was also astonished by how much many of them wanted to share their losses. They wanted to reveal to the world, or some stranger with a camera who seemed to care, that they were in pain. Perhaps talking to a person in some sort of official capacity helped validate their losses, allowed them to record the lives and deaths of the people they loved. After all, in a few days, many of the bodies would be  scooped up by trucks or dropped off at dumping locations to be buried in mass graves, unidentified. At the risk of sounding all pseudo-psychologist-y, it did seem as if it was their first attempt at therapy, talking out their grief. I saw this time and again. There were people gazing at the bodies of their loved-ones who were buried up to their heads in the rubble. And sometimes without breaking gaze, they would talk to reporters willingly.

The man in this video with his young sons lying next to him was mourning all alone. Smoking a cigarette. He wanted someone to see his pain, I’m sure. Someone needed to check it off a box on a checklist of hurt, register his loss. It appears, based on his words –”God gives them and he takes them away”–that he had chalked it up to God’s will. But there was the need to convey that to anyone who would listen.

I shed no tears while in Haiti. Maybe I was simply scared for my own safety or perhaps I was in reporter mode and saw the tragedy as a story that needed to be mounted and conquered. But when you come home, safe in your own environment, the wall that held back emotion shatters. Every reporter I talked to who covered the quake mentions at least one image they cannot quite shake, their personal tipping point. The image or the moment that comes to represent the thing to them. For me, it was the little girl in the picture above. Even with my heart in my stomach, that image was hard to set aside. Naturally, it would seem to connect because I am the father of two girls. But I didn’t feel it on that level. It was because she was alone there. No one sat with her. As sad as the image of the man and is two sons was, I felt weirdly comforted knowing that the two boys had someone there, even though they were not alive to see. But this girl, carefully dressed and randomly placed, laid there with no one to even shoo the flies from her eyes.

I buried this image for the next few days as I went about the dirty business of snapping pictures of the pain and documenting the fall-out. I pushed it away as I took an adrenaline-fueled helicopter flight, which launched from the lush PetronVille Country Club–over the mountains, beyond bodies of water and through picturesque landscapes, which included a rainbow.

(Photo: V. Leguerre)

While on the flight back home the images played in my mind, as if for the first time. Deconstructing these images is a heartbreaking exercise the mind cannot easily resist. There was the lady chanting as she stared helplessly at the torso of her daughter, who can be seen holding her grand daughter tight to her bosom under a pile of rubble. The lady could only look on from a distance and share that it was her daughter there, the second one she lost this year.

Another man protested me taking pictures of his brother, whose head and arms stuck out of a fallen building. He later relented, through tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, “He just wasn’t supposed to die this way.” He hadn’t resigned his loss to the workings of a higher power like the man with his two boys.

And then there was the image of the little girl. Her eyes slightly looking on, the flies preying on her solitude. The little girl has come to represent, to me, the worst possible outcome of the tragedy–dying alone. And the man who sat with his dead sons represents the equally horrifying flip side–living alone, grieving alone. It is very likely that the little girl was buried in some mass grave unidentified. It is also possible that she was not alone at all. That her loved ones–realizing, much like the spokesperson at the UN, that there was nothing more to be done for the dead–had made their peace with the child and turned their attention to the living.