Features : Rapper Crazy 8’s “Lost” takes inspiration and hope from departed loved ones

The musical artist Crazy 8 has notebooks full of songs, rap beats and rap that that he has written in the prison where he has lived for more than six years.

He has, he thinks, more than a hundred. Some he has been able to record from a kiosk in prison and get produced on the outside, some with videos.

“Lost,” his latest, is a peaceful meditation on life and loss. It is sad —

I lost my brother, he was a demon
…
I lost my grandma, she a church girl
…
I lost my sister to a car crash
She fell asleep ending a long day

— but also celebrates his loved ones as he raps about their place in his life.

“I just know that a lot of people are going to relate to ‘Lost,’ people who lost people the same way that I rapped about in my song,” he said, “and I know people listening to a lot of my other songs are going to relate to them in a lot of different ways, and I got a lot more coming out.”

It is in this way that he can say that “Lost” is also about hope.

In prison, he has rediscovered rap, which played a major role in his younger life. At age 6 he was going to the studio with his uncle, who was one of the lost loved ones featured in “Lost.”

In his artist’s biography, he says of rap that he liked it until “I just started getting bad as hell.”

Then he expands on that story, continuing, “Well, I always been bad, but I got drawn into the street life.”

When people told him and his friends that they were going to go to jail or die, he dismissed it “because I knew that’s what happens, because my pops was in jail and my uncle dead, and it was too late. I was already hip deep in.”

So, he said goodbye to rap and “just stayed in the streets.”

The result was a 26-year prison term, down from what looked like 70 years for gang activity, shootings, a carjacking, possession of a weapon.

In 2017, he said, “While I’m sitting in prison, I’m just thinking like, ‘What type of talent do you got then? ’Cause it’s like the only thing good for you is the streets.’”

Thinking that, the memory of an earlier talent came back to hit him like a blow to the head, and he started filling notebooks with notes on people, beats and raps.

“In my notes,” he says, “ I got over a hundred different genres of raps. I like to switch it up because different people relate to different things.”

He was inspired by Gucci Mane, King Von and Lil Baby. “They made me really go hard with it and not play, people who been in this situation and made a way out of it and have really seen the bigger picture. I already started from the bottom. Now I want to keep building up.”

He considers himself primarily an artist of drill and love songs, drill for the life he lived and lives and love for what is in him.

His songs so far include “From Prison,” “How Could You” and “You Said.”

“‘You Said’ and ‘How Could You,’ that’s the type of love I’m talking about. I’m just writing it like regular life, and I write a couple songs and the beats, they just come along, going with the flow,” he said.

He has a couple of projects in the works, a mix tape, “23 and 1,” and another project called K.F.C., for “Kids Fighting Cancer.”

“I’m sitting here, thinking it’s hard for us in prison or people out there, but what’s really harder than dealing with a kid fighting cancer?”

He hopes to take his music other places, and he is working hard at his hope.

“I want to take it all the way,” he said, “to movies, shows, anything. I want to do it all.”

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