Posts Tagged ‘hip hop’

R.I.P. Roc Raida

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

rocraidaI just read something shocking and sad – Busta Rhymes has announced that the great DJ Roc Raida has died at just 37 years old. Now, I know when that DJ AM guy died recently I had no idea who that was except that he dated Lionel Richie’s daughter, and most of you probly know even less about Roc Raida. He didn’t date anybody related to anyone famous as far as I know and was not very well known outside of serious hip hop fans, so I’m gonna give you a little impromptu history lesson here.

If you just know hip hop from modern TV and radio you don’t really see alot of DJs. Scratching is not usually really a component of popular rap music these days and some of the big ones don’t even have a DJ as part of their stage show anymore. This is exactly what was happening in the early ’90s as well. (more…)

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Notorious

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

tn_notoriousNOTORIOUS, the biopic of the late rapper Christopher “Notorious (Biggie Smalls) B.I.G.” Wallace comes out on DVD today.

I don’t know about Gene Shalit or Tom Shales or some of these guys, but I gotta admit I don’t come to NOTORIOUS as a Biggie fan from day 1. I was a late adopter. I knew a couple of those catchy songs with the R&B choruses, so I thought he was just a gangster Heavy D or a fat Ladies Love Cool James. But years after his death when I finally heard the whole “Ready to Die” album I was converted immediately.

It’s true that Biggie (who was only 24 when he died) mostly had the same materialist tough guy obsessions that 50 Cent still has as a grown adult and business leader. He’s rhyming about money and guns but like a real slick director his execution elevates the subject matter. He was one of the best storytellers in hip hop.

I just read a negative review of NOTORIOUS that called Biggie “talentless” and quoted one of his rhymes to supposedly prove it, but Biggie had the type of intricate flow that makes the words sound much more complex than they would be on paper. (And they’re only on paper after you transcribe them because Biggie kept all the rhymes in his head.) (more…)

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The Hip Hop Project

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Here’s a little documentary not many of you will probaly bother to see, but I just saw it and I have to vouch for it. I know THE HIP HOP PROJECT sounds like a working title they never bothered to change, but it’s actually the name of the youth outreach program documented in the movie. This is the story of a guy in his 20s named Chris “Kazi” Rolle who finds some troubled teenagers with a talent for rapping and helps them record an album. It’s not only his way of keeping them off the streets, or giving them a voice for self expression, or even getting into their lives to be a mentor and a positive influence. It’s all of those things, but it seems like it’s also a form of redemption and self discovery for him, having been an orphan and a homeless criminal and still not having come to terms with where he came from.

Kazi lures these kids in with the promise of recording, and then he tells them the catch: you can’t talk about “money, hoes and clothes.” He wants them to talk about their lives, their problems, try to touch somebody emotionally, maybe change somebody’s life. We do see a scene of some rappers battling, insulting each other to each other’s faces, and it’s very entertaining. But Kazi is trying to get at something more sincere and from the heart. As an exercise he asks them to tell about something that has happened to them in their lives. This leads to an amazing scene where one of the kids rhymes (and I’m not clear whether he has had time to write this or if he is improvising) about his father. While he’s rhyming he starts to cry, his voice quivers, tears start pouring out. But he keeps going. I heard DMX gets tears on stage sometimes but I don’t know if he rhymes while crying. I never seen anything like it.

So then the movie starts to go into the lives of these kids. The girl whose dad got locked up 3 weeks before the movie started, the guy whose mom dies during the 4 years of the project and his landlord uses it as an excuse to evict him. You can see how having the album and the influence of Kazi keeps them going. The lyrics they write about their troubles sometimes sound a little forced, a little too much like an assignment, but sometimes they’re really good. The most powerful is probaly the song by Princess about the pain and guilt she feels over having had an abortion. That’s one topic I haven’t seen Little Jon or 50 Cents delve into yet. (more…)

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Get Rich or Die Tryin’

Friday, September 15th, 2006

50 Cent, aka Curtis “Mumbles” Jackson, is not a rapper. I mean technically you might think he was one because he’s released rap albums. Pretty popular, too – the one this movie’s named after went six times platinum. But in a profile in Forbes magazine he talked about his albums and all his other products (a record label with all his buddies on it, a line of clothes, a line of Reebok sneakers, a flavor of VitaminWater, a video game, a ghost-written autobiography) as a continuation of the drug dealing he did starting at the age of 11. Just another hustle, another product.

When I read about his deal with Apple to sponsor a line of low-cost computers aimed at the inner city, I wondered if maybe he was smarter than he was letting on in all his music and interviews. Had he used his fame to give back to the community, strategically getting Apple to help the poor catch up technologically with the rest of American society and build a better future? Maybe, but he never mentions anything like that in the article. It ends with the quote, “I never got into it for the music. I got into it for the business.”

I wonder how it would go over if he put a sticker on the front of all his albums explaining that. “Dear consumer, I don’t give a shit about music, I don’t give a shit about hip hop, please buy my product because I want to be even richer. That is my whole thing, being rich. Thanks for your help in this important cause. I also own part of VitaminWater.”

Of course, coming up from the ghetto is a common theme in hip hop, and this movie does an okay job of explaining why growing up poor in a family of criminals could make you obsess over money. The movie tries to recreate the 8 MILE formula (acclaimed director [Jim Sheridan this time] + semi-autobiographical tale of Detroit rapper = surprisingly good movie, they hope). It actually starts out as a pretty decent crime movie, starting with 50 – playing an alternate universe version of himself named Marcus aka Little Caesar – and Terence D. Howard falling out during a robbery. Then Marcus gets shot and his life flashes before him in the form of him narrating his life story. (more…)

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Dave Chappelle’s Block Party

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

DAVE CHAPPELLE’S BLOCK PARTY is the happiest, warmest, most joyful movie I’ve seen in a long god damn time. And not in a stupid way. The problems of the world are not ignored. There’s some light-hearted jokes about race issues, there’s a mention or two of the war, there’s some militant rap lyrics and a brief sermon by Fred Hampton Jr. All things I’m in favor of discussing. But mostly what this movie is is a whole bunch of people coming together to laugh and make beautiful music and have a good time together. In that sense it turns out it is kind of like WATTSTAX, the movie they mentioned as a model when they were filming this. I made fun of my ain’t it cool colleague Quint for writing that the trailer gives off a Wattstax vibe as if he came to that conclusion on his own. But there is a faint whiff of that vibe in the final movie I guess, if you’re really making a close examination of its vibes.

I saw this movie in what I consider a JASON X set up: the same big auditorium where I saw JASON X, mostly empty with only a few people peppered throughout, but sharing their love for the movie across the empty rows. At the end of the movie people clapped, like it was a live performance. I can’t remember the last time I saw that at a regular multiplex showing like this. (more…)

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Black and Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop

Friday, February 24th, 2006

I don’t know if you ever saw that Nick Broomfield documentary BIGGIE AND TUPAC. It’s a pretty good one, but I mention it because it had this one part that kind of threw me off. At one point in the narration, Broomfield claims that the government had Tupac under surveillance. It seemed believable, but the movie doesn’t back it up or mention it again and I’ve never seen it explored since then. I just wondered if this was true why the documentary didn’t explore it at all. I mean that seems like a pretty big story to me.

This movie is not exactly that story, but almost. It’s about a special task force of the NYPD set up specifically to spy on famous rappers. At first the movie kind of seems like it’s full of shit. They interview various A-list and B-list rappers who sort of brag about getting harassed by cops. In particular I noticed there was a white dude named Pitbull who bragged that “the hip hop cops” must be following him, he bets, in his opinion. I almost turned the movie off at this point figuring this was going to be the level of documentation they were willing to settle for. Some dumbass white rapper you never heard of claiming that MAYBE people are spying on him. Not because he has noticed being spied on, but because he’s fuckin PITBULL, man. Why wouldn’t they spy on him?

But then right away the movie actually proves that it’s not full of shit. They talk to some journalists in Miami who were the first to prove the existence of the long rumored “hip hop cops.” It started with a reporter who did a profile on some local rapper, and later she received a letter from the police department asking for contact information on this rapper, and the letter specifically stated that it was for a database the Miami Police Department was keeping on rappers. The reporter was smart enough to realize there was a story there and investigated until she uncovered that the Miami rap squad had been trained by the long-rumored-but-never-before-proven-to-exist task force in New York. And specifically she found a retired cop named Derrick Parker who had started the task force. Apparently the NYPD still hasn’t officially admitted to its existence, but Parker and other retired cops tell all about it. None of them think there’s anything wrong with the task force so they’re pretty open about it. (more…)

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Hustle & Flow

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

I had a good feeling about this movie from right about the time the title came on the screen. It was a shot of a pimp (Terence Howard) and a ho (Taryn Manning) driving in a car, and it freeze frames to write the title in yellow ’70s style lettering.

I always like Terence Howard but I’ve never seen him in a lead role before. He’s always the supporting role that steals the movie. Here he has a lead role that steals the movie. I haven’t seen GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN but I would be surprised if Terence Howard’s performance in this movie doesn’t run a hundred circles around his co-star in that movie, both as an actor and as a rapper. True, he does mumble alot in this movie (you almost need subtitles) but I still feel his enunciation is better than Fifty Cents.

What I am doing here is starting a feud with Fifty Cents. Apparently he told GQ that if he wasn’t a felon he would’ve voted for Bush because “he’s a hustler” and blah blah blah. I think that’s enough to write the motherfucker off forever. If a grown man says that kind of retarded fifteen year old street hustler horse shit that means he is 100% lifetime chump. That pretty much proves what I was saying about how today’s so-called rebels have the same values as the corrupt bastards that they would be rebelling against if they actually were rebels. This guy might as well be fuckin Pat Boone. But he’s not in this movie fortunately so let’s get back on topic.

Anyway, this movie is about a small time pimp and weed dealer in Memphis who starts to question what he’s doing with his life. He says he’s having a mid-life crisis. Then he is inspired to become a rapper. Sounds simple and it is, maybe sounds stupid, but it’s not. It’s an underdog story, an unlikely dude chasing a dream and also becoming just barely a little bit more enlightened (like BAD SANTA maybe, but this isn’t a comedy). (more…)

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Biggie and Tupac

Monday, June 3rd, 2002

Dearest Harry and Moriarty,

It has been a while since I’ve had my works printed on your page there (ain’t it cool news) but this time I got somethin that I think will move your heart. I know how much Tupac and Biggie Smalls mean to you young people today so I’m sure both of you are very anxious to see BIGGIE AND TUPAC, the new documentary about them from Nick Broomfield (who directed the Heidi Fleiss picture and maybe more in this vein, KURT AND COURTNEY). Because Tupac means to a young man like Harry or Moriarty the same thing Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash meant to their dads, only with more tattoos and brighter colored suits.

This is the story of Tupac and Biggie, who started as friends, then had a rivalry, then both were murdered in what was seen as the culmination of an “east coast, west coast” rap feud. It is told through photos, blurry archival video, but mostly Broomfield’s usual style of interviews, which often come as a surprise to the interviewees. He talks to many friends of the rappers, bodyguards, police, witnesses. The obvious reason why this is an important story: these are two of the biggest stars in music, they were murdered less than a year apart, and neither of their murders have been solved.

How is this possible? If Carmen Electra and some dude from ER got murdered, do you think they’d just let the case sit there and collect dust? I think the shooters would have their death certificates on Access Hollywood by the end of the week. But America doesn’t treat rap stars that way. David Letterman made fun of Tupac in his monologue for the days he sat in a hospital dying. And there’s a reason why they don’t want this case solved. More on that in five paragraphs. (more…)

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