How "Songs From the Hole" offers hope and healing from depths of prison
- Kick The Concrete
- 51 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Loneliness. Depression. Remorse.
Those are all feelings that James “JJ’88” Jacobs experienced in “the hole.”
“But when God steps in, it becomes something different."
The new Netflix film, "Songs From the Hole," explores Jacobs’ journey of redemption and how he overcame hopelessness through faith, forgiveness and music. In 2004, when he was 15 years old, Jacobs shot and killed a young man. Three days later, his older brother was shot and killed. The project details Jacobs' time in prison while serving a sentence of 40 years to life. "Songs From the Hole" is part documentary, part visual album based on Jacobs’ own video treatments that he envisioned while incarcerated.
The film is directed by Contessa Gayles and produced by richie reseda and his Question Culture creative collective. There is also a 13-track "Songs From the Hole" EP that Question Culture released with the movie. reseda worked with Jacobs to record and produce the music while they were in prison together. Jacobs wrote the songs while he was in solitary confinement, also known as “the hole.” He was placed in isolation 10 years into his sentence when guards discovered he had a connection with another incarcerated man and wanted to separate them.
“Scripture tells us, you know, what the devil intends for evil, God intends for good,” Jacobs said in the film. “Isolation is intended to isolate the spirit of a human and that isolation can be crushing sometimes. So when God steps in, it becomes something different.
“That’s what was happening in the hole. I was in isolation for sure, humanly, but God was with me the whole time and it was clear what I had to do. I had to work. I had to use this gift that God has given me to talk about something significant. And as I’m writing these songs, I don’t know if they’re significant. I don’t know if they’ll matter to the world. But I went into writing with that posture of heart, like ‘Say something that matters. Say what’s important.’”
A year after Jacobs was released from solitary confinement and transferred prisons, he met reseda, a fellow musician, through a mutual friend who was bringing a group of poets together. reseda was impressed by Jacobs’ storytelling ability. He produced all of the tracks on the EP and encouraged Jacobs to continue channeling his pain — and healing — through art.
"As I got to know his story and just how talented he was in his relationship to his story, I was really inspired to share that. It felt like an important story to share with the world," reseda said in an interview with Kick The Concrete.
"I was looking for an artist like ‘88. I was looking for somebody — I knew who they would be when I met them," reseda continued. "I was looking for somebody better than me. I was looking for somebody who could tell the stories of the streets without romanticizing them or judging them in a way that encourages all to be more introspective. Maybe I didn’t have that language at the time, but that’s what I was looking for and I found that in ‘88."
Watch Kick The Concrete's interview with richie reseda
The “Songs From the Hole” EP has elements of jazz, boom-bap and gospel as '88 spits — and sings — about life in the streets of Long Beach, manhood and forgiveness.
"This the story of lost innocence/Since I was 12, I had the inner sense that I was guilty and they gots to lie to prove my innocence/And I've been guilty ever since" he raps on "Most Hunted."
"Steel Grave" is a racing track that, in the film, is accompanied with an animated scene portraying a man attempting to escape slavery. The visuals flash back and forth between historic events and a recreation of Jacobs' time in prison.
"We wanted you to feel the history of Black music in this film,” reseda said. “The subject matter of the film is also connected to Black American history that is told through the music, and the story is told through the music. So it felt important that it sounded and felt like in the sounds, you can feel the trajectory from like chattel slavery to today, to the modern punishment industry."
reseda is referring to the prison industrial complex and the fact that the percentage of Black people incarcerated is higher than that of the general population. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says that Black people currently make up 38.2 percent of the prison population. In 2023, 14.4 percent of the United States population identified as Black, according to the Pew Research Center.
The Prison Policy Initiative reports that the U.S. government spends $80.7 billion on public prisons and jails while private prisons and jails cost $3.9 billion. The money spent on prisons and jails grew 310 percent from 1982 to 2012.
reseda pointed out how the clattering drums on "Most Hunted, Pt. 2," which is co-produced by Dylan Wiggins, were inspired by Gnarls Barkley's "Just a Thought" and Pusha T's "Daytona" album.
For "Overwhelmed," reseda used a piano composition that he wrote when he was 14 years old. When he played it for his father when he was a teenager, his father told him it should be in a movie one day. And now it is.
The sound of the music was very intentional to make the listener feel something — both the despair of being incarcerated and the hope that life still has purpose. Jacobs' father is a preacher, so Jacobs wanted a gospel touch throughout the project, too. The process was similar to how Zaytoven puts a soulful element into his trap beats by playing piano.
"We were just like trying to create the feeling of real instruments in the church," reseda said from his Question Culture studio where the beats were rerecorded. “... We kept all the vocals from prison and then we redid the beats with these new producers and with live musicians to give it that more organic, in-the-room feel.”
The “Songs From the Hole” film chronicles Jacobs' journey to seek resentencing and the emotional roller coaster that comes with it. He even gets a letter from California governor Gavin Newsom commuting his sentence and making him eligible for parole. The project shows Jacobs’ personal transformation going from a kid caught up in gang life to a man with a heart for others.
Jacobs describes how as a teenager, he thought that violence was the key to gaining respect in the community. There’s a scene where he looks back on pictures of himself from his early days in prison and mourns how lifeless he felt.
“If you look in my eyes, it’s like ‘zombie’ in every sense of the word,” he said. “I ain’t even there.”
When they were incarcerated together, reseda was serving a 10-year sentence, which he understood was much different than what Jacobs was facing. He reflected on how he would try to encourage his friend through the process of gaining his freedom.
"There are days where he had (hope), and there are days where he didn't. There's days where he was extremely discouraged,” he said. “I had a lot of time, but I didn't have life. I had 10 years in prison. And of all my friends, I had the least amount of time — so in a lot of ways, it's easier for me to have hope. You know, even as somebody with 10 years and two strikes, I had a set time to go home, in a way, where ‘88, many of our friends didn't. I just knew, and I feel like he knew, and we all knew one day he would be home. We just didn't know when.”
One of the themes of "Songs From the Hole" is healing. Families who lose loved ones to violence and the system both have to make peace. For reseda, healing is holistic and not meant to be done alone. That’s part of why “the hole” is regarded as one of the most severe forms of punishment.
"Healing is like the process of building integrity," reseda said. "It's not just like, 'Oh, I'm gonna go get a massage and keep living in a world that's terrible to people.' It's like, 'How do I treat myself in a way that's going to help me rebuild my integrity and the community's integrity and the world's integrity?'"
"Songs From the Hole," which was a 10-year labor of love, is one way reseda is living out his integrity practice, filling his own needs and those of others.
"You can measure my spirituality in how I treat myself and others and the earth," he said, "and this film is the biggest tool that I've worked towards to spread that practice."
"Songs From the Hole" is now streaming on Netflix.