Through tragedy, triumph, and testimony, the story of formerly incarcerated rapper James “JJ’88” Jacobs pulls viewers into the Netflix visual album and documentary “Songs from the Hole.”

The project, currently available to watch on the streaming platform, centers ‘88, a Long Beach native whose perilous childhood caused him to take a life of a man in 2004 at 15 years old. Just three days later, the rapper’s older brother, Victor, was slain, a calamity that upended ‘88 as he was ultimately sentenced to 40 years to life. Soundtracked by impassioned songs that recount ‘88’s upbringing, family strain, and reproach towards the prison system, “Songs from the Hole” pores over his regrets of committing murder and finds the path to forgiveness in encountering his brother’s murderer.

“Songs” revolutionizes the traditional prison documentary, allowing ‘88’s written lyrics, abstract reenactments and anecdotal collect calls to largely narrate the film. Although an emotionally heavy watch, there are moments of lightness, whether ‘88 revisits the birth of his nephew (who, coincidentally, was born on the date of Victor’s death) or envisions, and later, marries, his now-wife Indigo. When his troubled upbringing could have left him hardened, ‘88 instead turned to healing, and his supportive family kept the faith long enough for him to be released from prison in 2022 after eighteen years.

At the film’s premiere in August, ‘88, “Songs” director Contessa Gayles and producer richie reseda shared that 2016 Beyoncé visual album Lemonade helped shape the visual experience of their eventual project. The team sought to fairly represent ‘88’s family and those who also have incarcerated relatives. 

“Lemonade being one of the only examples and kind of one of the first of its kind for that format was a part of the inspiration and the jumping-off point,” Gayles tells BET.com “But the way the overall presentation was one cohesive story, I think that was also like an influence for how we wanted to put this together so that the music was the narrative spine of the film and of the experience and told one cohesive story from beginning to end.”

“That was specific to ‘88 and his experience and his family's experience, but also broadened out and could speak to these universal themes that we're exploring in the film around faith and family and forgiveness and healing and transformation,” she continues.

At a crucial point in “Songs,” ‘88 reveals that during two and a half months in solitary confinement, he’d come to materialize the music that would be the basis of the film and its companion EP.

“I was thinking of the visual album side, these visuals or non-fiction side as my internal world. Writing these songs, even though they are my perspective, sometimes I have to write them away from me, if that makes sense. I have to write about me as if it's someone else,” ‘88 says.

He continues, “That’s why a lot of these original treatments were different characters even if they were recurring, they kind of felt like separate parts of myself.”

As “Songs” was developed over a year, with music videos being filmed once a month, ‘88, Gayles and reseda communicated through postal mail and fifteen-minute calls, all of which were captured to build the movie’s framework.

“It wasn't first-person, even though it's very clearly inspired by his life and his experiences,” Gayles says. “It was through the process of our collaboration and and the rewriting that we basically said, ‘There needs to be more of a one-to-one relationship between the storytelling and the music videos and then what we're experiencing with your family as we're getting to know them and you on like the nonfiction side of things’.”

‘88, Gayles and reseda grew to have a shared philosophy as filming progressed and naturally intertwined the movie’s fictional aspects–like a young ‘88 being sentenced to double life in front of a church choir–with poignant sincerity.

“We had a lot of time in-between to kind of let things build and unfold, and it was a really iterative process of writing and rewriting, especially as I was filming with his family and also interviewing him,” Gayles says. “I was getting to know him and the story and his family story much more deeply from different angles, and just hearing all these little anecdotes about dreams and memories and different events that unfolded.”

‘88, who wasn’t formally trained in songwriting, learned the art practice through listening to music (he references Jay-Z’s debut Reasonable Doubt and D’Angelo’s Voodoo) and reading.

“Understanding the song format helped me understand how visual I can be in the song, how much time I have to say what I need to say to even be descriptive,” ‘88 explains. “And I think when it comes to just being as descriptive in my writing as I am, that was just the result of being alone and only having my imagination.”

“So as a writer and as a creative, that's kind of advantageous if you want to evoke imagery in the mind of somebody you want to share your music with,” he continues.

Even when in his cell, ‘88 conceptualized what “Songs” would sound like down to the tonality and transformed mental time signatures into swelling orchestration that spans genres from folk to R&B.”

“Because this timing is rhythmic, I can just harmonize what a horn might sound like in that rhythm if I'm rapping this lyric or that,” ‘88 says. “Sometimes, as long as I'm working on a song, I might spend an hour, thirty minutes just on what the horn might sound like. A lot of it came in pieces, a lot of it came at once, but these songs really blessed me to just come as they were and I was able to go to Richie and Contessa and be like, ‘Here's what I hear in my head.’”

In expanding his vulnerabilities through music, ‘88, who’s currently 36, has long shed what he considered to be ‘masculine’ as a child, previously turning to crime to salve his angst.

“I was taught that masculinity was to look a certain way. Growing up, thinking about what type of man to be, it’s either you're going to be a churchgoing man or you're going to be a gangster,” ‘88 recalls. “When you choose to be a gangster you're like, I'm going to be the best. Even if I chose to be a God-fearing man in the church like my father, I would have chosen to do that in a very dominant way.”

“A good leader, to get justice both in the streets or in the religious sense, you don't need violence,” he admits. “To say that we need violence and retribution is a part of masculine culture, I'll say, in the overall culture, but specifically in gang culture, like, an eye for an eye is a rule.”

Now, as a first-time father, ‘88 looks to the fearless nature that his infant daughter carries as a second chance at the childhood that he lost to incarceration.

“I've dealt with a lot of anxiety coming home from prison and feeling overwhelmed by choice and newness and new things. But my daughter, literally, is like learning new things every day and is not afraid,” he affirms. “And she's learning with a spirit of fearlessness that I can adopt, because I often find that new things scare the shit out of me.”

“As a kid, I had fearlessness but for all the wrong reasons,” he continues. I should have been afraid of something, in a sense, and revered them, but I didn't and I think now it's kind of like leaning into the fearlessness that I once had, but in ways that edified me, in ways that edified the community, in ways that encourage life-living.”

And unlike the oppressive penal system,”Songs from the Hole” inspires true redemption for those who’ve been silenced under the law. With a once-imprisoned voice at the helm, the film demonstrates that creative expression can impact those beyond concrete walls.

“Some of the most powerful responses I've been getting is having people who have dealt with this type of trauma in both having a loved one incarcerated and having a loved one taken from them, they see themselves in me and my family, and that's been truly rewarding,” ‘88 says.

"Also the comments that are remarking that this is a beautiful piece of art about a really tough traumatic subject matter and that folks appreciate that that pain is being rendered in a way that is beautiful and therefore lends itself to healing,” Gayles adds. “It's not like just dwelling in tragedy and trauma without providing some kind of a road map for finding your way out of it.”