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‘Prison is not a place for rehabilitation’: jailed rapper Marnz Malone on confronting inmate suicide

The British MC has amassed millions of streams for his careworn catalogue, recorded on a prison phone. Now, his new single addresses prisoners’ mental health

Malone deals precisely and sensitively with the harsh trappings of road and prison life, disregarding drill’s myopic nihilism – he evolved out of the troubled genre ’s late-2010s golden era – and commercial UK rap’s potential for shallow glamour. He was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and his father died when he was two; his mother relocated to Newtown, Birmingham, where Malone later joined her (the photograph on the cover of Tina’s Boy shows the moment they reconnected). At school he was bullied for speaking patois, so he would focus in English lessons, soon developing a love for quirky vocabulary – he cites “aglet”, the casing at the end of a shoelace, as an example – and writing his busy thoughts down on paper to make sense of them.

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