No Trivia

The connection between crime movies and hip-hop’s long been established, but a recent reading of Manny Farber’s essay “Underground Films” coincided with plenty of listens to Scarface’s latest, Emeritus and it seemed that so much of what Farber’s talking about, could easily be applied to Scarface’s music, for simplicity’s sake: “gangsta rap”. Farber’s essay touches upon a group of action films (mainly Westerns and gangster/crime movies) of the 1930s-1950s and celebrates them for their defiant quasi-accidental anti-Hollywood-ness. The way they function as both obvious genre films and finds all kinds of ways to do smarter, cooler stuff than the kind of movies that win awards and get written up in “Life Magazine”.

In film, many of the classic exploitation or low-budget directors are referred to as “genre directors”. I’d like to throw in the term “genre rappers”. Obviously, it’s a muddled term because rap’s a genre already but “sub-genre rappers” sounds sort of stupid and I think it’s clear what I mean.

Basically, there are the rappers that go beyond the expectations of their sub-genre, there are the rappers that sort of just wallow in the expectations, and then, there’s the “genre rapper”; the rapper that obsessively mines the same territory and creates a kind of outer-shell of cliché within which they are allowed to say and do pretty much anything. While conventional, smart-guy attitudes about “serious art” would praise the expectation-expanding rapper the most, it’s important to see the vitality of the genre rapper.

While the parallel between the movies Farber’s celebrating the music of Scarface is clear, I think the “genre rapper” exists in all of rap’s sub-genres. Take the so-called “conscious rap” sub-genre.

Groups like De La Soul or even Little Brother are groups that go beyond genre expectations (or in LB’s case, think they do) while say, Common on Resurrection, post-Dilla Slum Village, or dead prez only on R.B.G become genre rappers. They make albums that bask in the clichés but use them as a jumping-off point for odd, unconventional personal details and stylistics.

“…perfect examples of the anonymous artist, who is seemingly afraid of the polishing, hypocrisy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art.”

Still, there’s something especially applicable about Farber’s quotes—especially the one above–and so many classic, gangsta rap minor epics. Namely, even the weirdest or dullest of “conscious” rappers occupy a place of protection and praise amongst rap fans and critics. They can always fall back on their positivity, no less or more of a cliché than gangsta talk of “keepin’ it real” but one that gets you a certain kind of praise amongst intellectuals and non-rap rap fans.

“The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists”

This could easily be a comment on hip-hop as a whole, but it’s especially pertinent to the kind of rap originated by Scarface and others in the beginning of the 90s. Rap that seemed to only be in conversation with itself and the few people who fucking got it. That it inexplicably turned into a big, sub-genre—and one that became “gangsta rap” when it could be exploited for trashy news stories—only makes sense because we’re all so used to it. What came from “gangsta rap” is the disinterest in the outside.

That’s to say, if you couldn’t get over the “foul” language or the violence and see the emotions and commentary going on in the music, you weren’t listening hard enough. Of course, there’s the additional point that the brilliance of the music comes through it’s plurality; the way it’s able to mix and match insight and tough-talk and never fall back on one or the other.

“the action directors accept the role of hack so that they can involve themselves with expedience and tough-guy insight in all types of action”

When the scratchy 20-dollar Timbaland beat of “High-Powered” drops and Scarface is on some more shit about snitches, he’s both expressing his beliefs and walking into a pit of cliché that indeed, he helped develop, but is a cliché nonetheless. That the beat’s produced by N.O Joe adds another level of weird “realness” and pop-rap concession to the whole thing.

For Scarface to continue spouting these hood mantras is a sign of confidence. A disinterest in hyper-originality, Scarface bases his observations or anger around the expected “gangsta rap” concerns and then, spirals out from there.

To the disinterested or cynical listener, it’s tough-talk and “stop snitching”—and therefore unoriginal and originality is highly overrated in capital-A art. To the attuned, sensitive listener, this is simply the canvas or the beginning, the jumping off point for Scarface’s deeper concerns, which he will weave throughout the expected boasts and threats of the gangsta rapper.

When you get to the third verse, Scarface has roped you in with the clichés and then, rattles off a deeply detailed outline of how snitching works on a personal and institutional level; the radical honesty and creativity of the genre rapper pops-out and we move a little further from the sort of thing rappers that make Blender’s year-end lists do.

“the virtues of action films expand as the pictures take on the outer appearance of junk jewelry”

When the dusty chipmunk soul of “Forgot About Me” comes in, a smile should come to any familiar listener’s face because “High Powered”, although complex and full of reversals, is very much operating in some attempt to meld rap trends—quasi reggae hook, electro synths—with Scarface’s style. It’s about as “pop” as someone like Scarface can get.

It’s the film noir director starting the movie—think of J. Prince’s “Intro” as a really cool and odd opening credits sequence—with the genre’s clichés but shooting them from a different angle or something. “Forgot About Me” though, is in the style we expect from Scarface and in that way, moves into the kind of hard-ass, single-minded focus that the rest of Emeritus follows.

Interestingly, “Forgot About Me” features rapper of the year(s) Lil Wayne and in that sense still keeps some of “High-Powered”s acknowledgement of current hip-hop—and critically acclaimed rap—even as it moves further into the hermetic territory that only Scarface and a few others can occupy.

“The important thing is not so much the banal-seeming journeys to nowhere that make up the stories, but the tunneling that goes on inside the classic Western-gangster incidents…”

“Can’t Get Right” stops having anything to do with rap music and mines the territory exclusively owned by Scarface and a few others (some of which guest on the album like Z-Ro or K-Rino). A dive straight into darkness but one that’s still wrapped around the hood, violence and all the stuff that closes the ears of certain listeners or makes them cry-out “unoriginal” even as it’s also—and more importantly–this multi-directional focus on how and why shit’s fucked the fuck up, starting with Scarface’s problems (“My momma’s pregnant with a son she should abort”) and ended up in Baghdad, having touched upon community violence, economic strife and just about everything else.

“Unfortunately, the action directors suffer from presentation problems.”

Say, instead of aping the cover of Power, Corruption, & Lies, it’s sort of this cheap-o, goofball, trophy cover or an almost powerful if not for some unfortunate photoshopping, image of Scarface staring harshly into a mirror. There’s an oddball brilliance to these kinda bad covers though and it comes to mind every time some douchebag hipster or serious rap fan makes fun of say, the CASH-MONEY covers.

Their ugliness, their formula is an affront, alright? An affront to capital-A art albums that refuses to admit they’re still corporate product and affront to polite taste. Just as pretty much every Rap-A-Lot disc is about not giving a fuck, those covers are about not giving a fuck too.

I’d prefer the cover of Emeritus to be some recreation of a plaque with ‘Face’s name on it photographed and put on the album cover. Why Scarface didn’t just walk into his bathroom, stare at a mirror, and have someone take a shot of it for Made, is frustrating but logical. It would suggest a concern about presentation that Scarface isn’t really about. Those early Geto Boys records were triumphs of design as well as music but now, the design represents too much and so, it’s been abandoned for the expected photoshop shit-job or something just generally underwhelming.

These photoshop covers connect to a low-budget, made-cheap, keep-it-real aesthetic that needs to not be forgotten. And, in a fascinating reversal that says as much about regional rap’s impulse for real-ness sincere or performed, the simple font atop a fucking bad-ass, off-the-cuff picture’s long ago been co-opted as another thing you learn in graphic design and so, they’ve moved onto the kind of image that’s never going to be lifted…a style that dares you to not take the music serious. Self-destructive indeed.

“The small buried attempt to pierce the banal pulp of underground stories with fanciful grace notes is one of the important feats of the underground director.”

“Grace notes”?

The way the talking for way too long “Intro” track of so many rap albums is turned into a rarified, political, personal, social, and everything else statement by J. Prince.

How “Who Are They” features guest verses from S.P.C veteran K-Rino and Slim Thug, the kind of rapper that like, girls in sororities probably associate with “dirty south”. It’s both an acknowledgment of rap’s changing landscape and a hard-ass attention to friends and fellow legends.

The minor detail on “Still Here” that apparently Scarface’s ring-tone is a Donny Hathaway song, which reminds us that he’s still just this awesome old dude who digs blissed-out soul classics, and maybe some kind of quick comment whether it’s supposed to be or not about ringtone rap. And this detail’s a preamble in a song that outlines the tragic murders of friends, family, etc. with novelistic detail!

There’s all this shit talking and assertion of importance (“High Powered”, “Redemption Song” the title of the album being Emeritus) in the rap game by ‘Face, but he also gives up the album for extended periods of time to the guests. The female hooks are longer and often turn into R & B outros, he often raps last after a guest or two, or giving up the intro of his album to J. Prince.

The mournful but confident “Outro” that’s really kind of inexplicable and odd for a rap album and only sort of makes sense because this isn’t the first time a Scarface album’s ended in this way.

Examining and attributing influence to figures from rap’s pre-history that had an “influence” on actual rap history always feels like leap. You’re either idealizing the creation of the genre as totally outside of most other things and compartmentalizing all the differences between Tapper Zukie and Kool Herc or you kinda admit the influence even though it’s almost always a stretch. You can hear Gil Scott or Last Poets and be like, “I see how this is like rapping” but it’s just still not rapping and it’s weird.

And then, there’s the slippery slope thing of like, why these can be considered influences and not like a ton of white, rap-like stuff from way earlier, and then before you know it, you’re like some aged English teacher trying to hip the young kids to like, Lord Byron or some shit and arguing the really stupid thing that rap is just poetry, which it just ain’t.

But whatever your feelings on rap pre-history, Rudy Ray Moore’s connection to rap is pretty solid. The over-the-top filthiness of Ghostface, Too Short’s freaky tales that always have some moral edge to them, Devin the Dude’s conflation of Southern rap dirty jokes and century-plus old–let me put my professor glasses on—characterizations from the black diaspora, and Schooly D’s “Signifying Rapper” being an update on Rudy’s “Signifying Monkey” itself an update on a pre-reggae toast/routine/rap, are obvious touchstones.

See, Moore’s influence on rap is beyond “he put rhyming words in order before it was formally called rapping” but a whole big mess of more interesting and harder to put your finger on stuff. His Dolemite character and persona is like the “multiply your real persona times ten and run with it” formula that most rappers work with today and if I wanted to be douchey, I could say Dolemite’s one of the inventors of “swagger” because it wasn’t just that Dolemite told really hilarious jokes, but it was as much the way he told the joke and in many ways, more about the way he told it. Nearly all his jokes weren’t his own, variations on dirty jokes you heard your whole life, spruced up to be even more outrageous than you’re anticipating.

It’s all about self-aware exaggeration in a Dolemite routine, women with pussies so big a truck literally drives inside them, little kids that know more about pussy eating than I do, etc. etc. A weird mix of “adult” stuff and the like, cartoony, quasi-Tall Tales imagination with some kind of lesson or moral flip to it.

That is how Rudy Ray really put his stamp on rap. That thing of talking like everybody else and appealing to so-called “base” thoughts of the “lowest common denominator” (but really just where most of our brains are most of the time), but being kinda humane and almost morally serious at the same time.

While most people will rightfully point interested parties towards the movie Dolemite or Rudy records like Eat Out More Often, I wanted to highlight two of my favorite, slightly lesser-known Rudy Ray Moore projects.

-Petey Wheatstraw (1977) directed by Cliff Roquemore (Libra)

The thing is, short of the actually terrible Avenging Disco Godfather, Dolemite is by far the least entertaining of the Dolemite movies. Directed by D’urville Martin, who tried to make the movie absurd and also sort of like a “normal” movie, Dolemite lags and doesn’t have the immediate, who-gives-a-shit feeling of the later Dolemite movies.

Starting with Human Tornado, Cliff Roquemore took over and he made the movies really crazy in a way that stopped winking at itself and just fucking went there. When Roquemore’s credit pops-up on the screen, it accompanied by a small, parenthesized “(Libra)” which always reminded me of Underground nutbar director Robert Downey Sr. sticking “A Prince” at the end of his credit, because Roquemore’s working on the same exact absurdist level as Downey-and since film critics are just now getting around to taking Downey seriously, expect at least a hundred years before a Cliff Roquemore retrospective.

There’s too many great things to talk about in the movie, so real quick: The Devil represented by an old black guy in bright red track suit, appearances by Wildman Steve and Leroy & Skillet, a really incredible soundtrack (which was re-released a couple years ago and isn’t too hard to find, lots of ridiculous Devil make-up and a ton more.

Luckily, this scene happens to be on YouTube, so you’re spared a long, over-written description of one of the funniest fucking scenes of all-time:

-Afros, Macks, & Zodiacs (1995?)

This is basically a party video back when party videos still existed. Two hours of old “blaxploitation” trailers with the occasional interjection by Rudy Ray Moore surrounded by pretty busted girls half-telling one of his classic jokes. At the end of the video, Blowfly and a bunch of other surprises show up too. Here’s a clip of one of those dirty-joke interjections (fuck anybody who disables embedding by the way).

For the hell of it, here’s my personal favorite trailer from the collection, which you know, has enough “rapping” in it to maybe be an influence on rap unto itself:

And the classic “Got Your Money” video…

Armond White’s review of Adam Yauch’s ‘Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot’ and Jonathan Levine’s ‘The Wackness’ focuses on each film’s rap fueled soundtrack and how it connects to each film’s “human dimension[s]” and “artful expression”. What’s interesting is how neither movie uses rap music as a “hood” signifier (characters enter the city=play rap) or a big dumb joke (see the work of Judd Apatow, or ‘Bringing Down the House’ and all that falls between), but for emotional and visceral pull. Especially interesting is ‘The Wackness’, which scores the white main character’s life to the sounds of classic, 1994 hip-hop without irony.

Rap music is hard to pull-off in a movie because it’s very distracting music that demands attention; it rarely blends into the background. Additionally, most of the viewing public’s stuck in incredibly out-dated (or never made sense) concepts of what rap music is, what it means, and how it can be used. So, when a rap song comes-in at a point that’s emotionally powerful well, it just doesn’t resonate, it’s just distracting. The music’s ability to work or resonate in films is further complicated by the sheer lack of black films that even get made each year. Still stuck in a conventional sense of who does and doesn’t look absurd listening to rap, it’s hard for films made by whites about whites to engage hip-hop in a way that doesn’t come-off as one big joke or incredibly cloying. Given the obsession with irony and juxtaposition in everything from Hollywood to high-minded indies, even when a movie does use rap seriously, it’s still often taken as a joke.
2003’s ‘Malibu’s Most Wanted’ didn’t exactly light-up the box office but it’s the kind of movie that everyone around my age has seen, pretended to dislike, and then ended up laughing their asses off for it’s blissfully short running time. Bakari Kitwana’s book ‘Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop’ devotes ten whole pages to the Jamie Kennedy vehicle/debacle and sets it up as yes, a smarter, more complex film than other more “serious” rap and race-baiting movies like James Toback’s ‘Black & White’ and Warren Beatty’s ‘Bulworth’. The movie’s a big, willfully retarded comedy that’s also really smart and complicated. For those wanting to laugh at white kids “acting black” it’s there, but anyone watching–or listening to the fairly eclectic soundtrack– will get much more out of the movie.

The casting of Ryan O’Neal as the father of Jamie Kennedy’s Brad character (or B-Rad, his rap name) is Kubrickian in the sense of playing-off past roles. Recontextualizing the sad-bastard WASP of ‘Love Story’ as a schlockmeister politician with a son he’s embarrassed by, is smart and you know, probably exactly what would’ve happened if Ali McGraw hadn’t kicked the bucket (spoiler alert!), and the two got married and lived “happily” ever after. Other clever casting is B-Rad’s mother played by Bo Derek and the use of Blair Underwood–best known to hip-hop fans as Russell in ‘Krush Groove’–as O’Neal’s square, hip-hop-phobic political advisor. Although hardly groundbreaking, this type of casting with movie history in mind undeniably proves intentionality in ‘Malibu’s Most Wanted’.

‘Malibu’ is basically a movie about hip-hop’s complexity and universal appeal masquerading as one big “wigger” joke. B-Rad’s rap “origin” is not shown to be a trend-hopping interest in hip-hop but something that’s been a part of his life almost since he was born. He’s shown as a child reaching for his maid’s headphones, putting them on, and being engulfed by the sounds of RUN DMC. His affected hip-hop mannerisms and attempts to remake ‘Boyz N the Hood’ in his honky suburbs are as much the result of the corporate misrepresentation of hip-hop and forced lowered expectations as they are B-Rad’s whiteboy idiocy. The movie destroys the under-the-breath chuckles of people over forty about white kids “acting black”. Underwood hires two black actors to play the roles of “thugs” that scare B-Rad out of his rap-love and into the real world, but their forays into actual gang life take them out of their comfort zone as well. B-Rad ends up being significantly more “hip-hop” than many of the black characters in the movie.

At the same time, the movie wisely avoids that weird sense of “I’m white and I’m persecuted for my love of rap” tone that a lot of white rappers and well, just white people stumble into. By making B-Rad incredibly rich, the “class not race” or “we’re all in the struggle” arguments that hold weight but get simplified by too many people are also avoided and the only thing left is sincere interest or disinterest, not separated from racial and social politics, but a degree removed.
Austin, Texas based writer/director Mike Judge sets his corporate satire ‘Office Space’ to an all hip-hip soundtrack, most famously, the Geto Boys’ ‘Still’ during a now-classic printer destruction scene. ‘No Tears’ by Scarface shows-up as does ‘Damn It Feels Good To Be a Gangsta’, which scores Peter and friends’ computer virus-based money skim. Judge clearly knows the Geto Boys and their politics and rises above simple-minded concepts of race or movie-music convention when choosing to score his movie with rap and set key scenes to arguably the biggest and most important rap group from the state he calls home.

This could easily have devolved into some unfortunate appropriation or good-intentioned but downright wrong way of relating to rap, but Judge finds a good mix of sincere use and ironic juxtaposition. Like ‘Malibu’, ‘Office Space’ couches some complicated comments on rap and culture through comedy but sells the comedy and the politics way better. Indeed, it’s funny to see a bunch of office nerds driving around to rap, but it’s a reality of the world–office nerds do listen to rap– and by the movie’s end, Judge taps into early 90s gangsta rap’s subversive and at times, almost anarchist politics and connects it to everybody’s overwhelming feeling of powerlessness and anger and general sense of being forever fucked over.
‘Boiler Room’ is another movie that sends hip-hop the the world of corporate culture and comes out looking pretty good. The movie begins with a narration from Giovanni Ribisi’s Seth, quoting Biggie (“Either you’re slingin crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”) and reading Biggie’s cry of frustration as an application to his own life (Seth hard-sells stock on the phone, opens a gambling ring in his apartment, etc.). That sense of “get money by any means” put in the hands of a well-to-do Jewish kid. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack’s maybe the best hip-hop soundtrack out-there. If I remember correctly, all the hip-hop in the music plays more like “score” than “source” music making it more like Biggie’s ‘hood platitudes continually echoing in the background.

Ultimately, Seth realizes that the company he’s working for is doing some fucked-up shit and goes along with the FBI to bring them down. Seth grows up and realizes the difference between himself and Biggie and when, where, and how this “get money by any means” concept should be applied. ‘Boiler Room’ ends-up as something of a comment on “Stop Snitching” before “Stop Snitching” was turned into everything from not ratting on your friends if you all commit a crime to you know, not telling the police you saw the dude who mugged that grandma. In a corporate world that grows even more problematic and a generation of corporate fucks raised on Young Jeezy and not Biggie, the “Stop Snitching” concept’s applied to everything including whistle-blowing. It’s fundamentally a movie about misinterpretation. Seth misreads Biggie at first (but figures it out by the end) and his fuckface co-workers quote anti-greed movies like ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ and ‘Wall Street’ like their message is to be taken literally.Rap and crime movies are inextricably tied. Most rappers weave cinematic or pseudo-cinematic tales of crime, albums are littered with samples and references to ‘Scarface’ or Scorsese movies, and there’s the oft-quoted comparison between realistic crime movies and hip-hop, made in defense of reality rap. Still, most directors for reasons outlined at the beginning of this post, won’t score their movies to rap. Instead, they continue to swipe the Kenneth-Anger by way of Scorsese sense of old rock and pop.

Abel Ferrara is one of the few exceptions. His film ‘King of New York’ is the source of Biggie’s claim to be “the black Frank White”–Frank White is Christopher Walken’s character in the film–and Lawrence Fishburne plays Walken’s right-hand man, Jimmy Jump, highly-influenced by rapper Schooly D. Some Schooly songs show up on the soundtrack, but Walken’s character is a sort of philanthropist drug-dealer who employs only black guys for his crew and so, a party scene set to ‘Am I Black Enough?’ is “explained”. Working with Schooly D and tossing hip-hop into his movie did seem to rub-off on Ferrara and give him the confidence to use rap in his movies in slightly less conventional ways.His next film ‘The Bad Lieutenant’, originally used Schooly’s ‘Signifying Rapper’ throughout–a lawsuit by Jimmy Page forced the song out of DVD versions, so pick up a VHS–to emotional effect and something of a comment on how rap is seen in movies. Each time we hear ‘Signifying Rapper’, it’s context changes. It first plays early in the movie as the Lieutenant hops out of his car and walks into a sketchy apartment. We hear that Led Zeppelin riff and it sounds like some post-Scorsese use of rock music to show how bad-ass these white guys can be but then, Schooly starts rapping and the scene plays like something out of every early 90s movie that uses rap for short-hand that we’re in the “ghetto”. The Lt. chases a black kid into the apartment building and doesn’t yell at him, he buys and smokes crack with him instead. It’s the merging of “ghetto” signifier and hard-ass Scorses-style scoring in one song and scene.

The next time the song is heard, it plays over the film’s inciting incident: the rape of a Nun. Again, we’re back to “rap music plays over something bad” logic but the scene’s immediacy and violence do match the song quite well. From there, the riff and Schooly’s voice echo in the background of a few other scenes, slowly turning the song into the Lt.’s theme song. It plays one last time over the end credits, after the Lt’s been shot in his car. The return of of ‘Signifying Rapper’ temporarily resurrects the Lieutenant or seems to pay final homage to him. The song’s forward lurch, along with Schooly’s swagger just feels like it would be the theme of a coked-out, fuck-crazy, crooked-cop Harvey Keitel.Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’ is more of the same from the director and the soundtrack is the now-predictable mix of 60s and 70s rock, except for a scene set to ‘Thief’s Theme’ by Nas. The song plays during a scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Costigan drives around with his drug-dealing cousin. It’s simple source music, the kind of thing a dopey drug dealer from Boston would be listening to, but it conceptually fits within the movie, and could be read as Scorsese re-paying homage to the many rappers in love with his films.

‘Thief’s Theme’ makes sense as something that DiCaprio’s character would be listening to and becomes an interesting comment on the background of his character. Early on, we learn that the father’s side of Costigan’s family were all mob-affiliated, while his mother’s side was a bit more upper-class. He’s both in and out of the world of crime, in it enough to have experience but out of it enough that he has a distance. He is like a rapper in this sense, connected to the world of crime but with something of an outsider’s perspective on it because like a rapper, they have chosen to analyze “the life” in addition to live in it. Costigan is not quite a criminal and not quite a cop, navigating somewhere in the middle, pulling from both experiences and observing them all. Think of Nas or Mobb Depp, rappers whose “street cred” has been questioned but who are arguably better able to articulate the life of crime than those who directly live it: next to the hood. This is also true of Costigan, who is a better cop and more of a hard-ass than Sullivan (Matt Damon) because of his connection and distance from “the life”. I also chuckled at the scene where Nicholson breaks Costigan’s cast open to look for a wire, using the ultimate signifier of 90s New-York rap: a Timberland workboot!

While the focus on rap-centric movies and movie soundtracks is interesting, often the best uses of rap fall into a single scene or event. Julian Goldberger’s low-budget ‘Trans’ is the story of a trouble white kid named Ryan who escapes from a juvenile detention center and wanders around the Everglades. In one scene, after being beat-up by some beer-drinking rednecks, he comes-to as the voices of some black peers (presumably friends from high-school) yell his name and try to awake him.

He hangs out with them, sits in on a freestyling session by the guys, dances around, and then goes on his way. It’s one of the few scenes where someone’s nice to Ryan and it’s hardly a coincidence that it’s from a bunch of hip-hop kids. The scene represents the inclusive nature of hip-hop culture and in certain ways, black culture, which as a whole, is a great deal more inviting and familial to all than the white, middle-class culture from which Ryan comes. He is immediately brought along with them, they recognize his dire situation, and it’s even suggested that this isn’t the first time Ryan’s been found like this.

The kids are generally kind, offering Ryan help, but they also mock him, in part because of the hilarious situation of getting his ass beat and also, because well, I bet he’s the goofy white boy they know that’s always getting in trouble. Their looking for girls and their freestyles (or attempts) about weed and pussy are realistic and used to complicate their character. For a rap outsider, the contradictory nature of being so kind and rapping about weed and girls would be hard to resolve but Goldberg wisely moves beyond racial or cultural presentation and just lets all of the character be themselves. The failed attempts at freestyling are particularly good because often in movies, scenes of battles are often used as shorthand for authenticity or being hip to the culture. Here, it’s more like the freestyle competitions you see in your high school science class or at a party, where it’s just a bunch of people fucking around. No one sitting there thinks they are the next Nassir Jones, they’re just having fun.In Goldberger’s follow-up, ‘The Hawk Is Dying’–one of most underrated movies of this decade by the way– there’s less of a connection to rap, but the sense of communty transcending race is all through the movie. Most interesting however, is the scene where we meet Michelle Williams’ Betty, “a doctor’s daughter” who chooses to live in a shitty squat-house, smoke pot out of a Confederate flag bong, and dress like a fat lady with a black eye that you’d see at Wal-Mart. When we first see her, she’s in her bed in her room in this flop-house listening to Splack Pack’s ‘Shake That Ass Bitch’ as some fuck-up in another room listens to bass-heavy electro. The two songs mix around in the background until finally she turns Splack Pack off. Goldberger attended school in Florida–where this movie, like ‘Trans’ is set– and just as he deals with race is a way that’s attuned to the complexity of our interactions, he does the same to the music. To him and to anyone with hip-hop knowledge, Miami Bass and hipster electro have a whole lot in common but that’s not as much of a given to outsiders and he subtly makes the connection. Gus Van Sant’s experimental, skate-boarding murder anti-mystery ‘Paranoid Park’ is ostensibly about a kid who may have accidentally killed a security guard, but it’s more of a realistically drab dive into the head of the average, vaguely hip fifteen year-old. It’s clear a great deal of research and understanding of 2008 youth-culture was employed and Van Sant applies it on all fronts. One of the most interesting aspects of the movie is an all-over-the-place soundtrack: ambient electronics, Elliot Smith, fifties rock, Nino Rota’s score for ‘Juliet of the Spirits’ etc.

In one scene, the main character Alex takes his Mom’s car and drives around Portland before stopping at infamous skate-park “Paranoid Park”. Camera mounted on the hood, through a series of cuts, we see Alex driving around listening to an eclectic mix of music from the radio-his mood changing depending on the music. At one point, ‘I Heard That’ by Portland rapper Cool Nutz plays. Alex leans further into his seat, grips the wheel from an angle, and bobs his head back and forth. It lasts about ten seconds, but it says a great deal about how ill-informed white teenagers respond to hip-hop, the porous borders between genre and style for any kid growing up in the iPod/internet age, and something about regional music as well.

Pre-internet, it would seem absurd for a teenager to listen to such an out-there variety of music and Van Sant maybe takes it a little too far, but one can easily imagine Alex going over some hipster Portland-ian’s house, seeing ‘Juliet of the Spirits’ and doing a GOOGLE blog-search for the score. An iPod on Super-Shuffle creates all kinds of weird transitions from classical to hip-hop and back again or whatever. As for Cool Nutz, a fairly-obscure rapper to most of the world, he’s probably known by most or everyone in Portland. It makes an interesting comment on regional music, especially rap. Now, it’s accepted, but think of a crazy amount of people in Houston buying screw tapes–the rap equal for doom music–or how kids of any age or race in Baltimore simply grow up with the spastic, A.D.D insanity of Baltimore club. The use of rap is also a brief nod to the ways that hip-hop and skateboarding culture continue to mix. There are plenty of black skateboarders in many of the skateboarding scenes in ‘Paranoid Park’ and the issue’s not acknowledged, just taken as a simple reality of the world.

And finally, Rip Torn in ‘Freddie Got Fingered’ shaking his bare-ass to ‘Microphone Fiend’?

…how dude’s late on everything. His article ‘Why We Line-Up For Tyler Perry’ is an interesting defense of the much-maligned and mocked Tyler Perry movies. He provides the black comedy precedents for Tyler Perry and wisely confronts the elitism and lack of perspective many have when they critique stuff like ‘Meet the Browns’: “Those black people who are not so estranged from Perry’s kind of humor that they even find the inanely narcissistic “Seinfeld” sophisticated…” He adds–and rightly so– that part of what makes Perry’s movies not only very successful but quite good and affecting is their heart. It’s a good point, but this late in Perry’s career, Crouch’s opinion one way or the other on something like ‘Meet the Browns’ means very little. Early on, when every smug critic (black and white) laughed-off his movies and success as simply dumb or worse, invoking words like “coonery”, Crouch’s nuanced perspective could’ve done some good.

NYPress brilliant mind Armond White’s been defending and defining Perry’ artistry for a couple of years now. A personal favorite was this review of ‘Why Did I Get Married?’, which wisely contrasts it with the smug, knowing, white buffoonery of Judd Apatow: “Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry’s spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement.” I won’t complain about one more critic however late, being genuinely discerning, but Crouch’s oscillation between old-man curmudgeon and quasi-post-race idealist is not only inconsistent, it’s cowardly. One of the recurring issues of the anti-identity-politics baiting of Crouch is his persistent frustrations with the Al Sharptons and Spike Lees of America who’ve made careers and developed followers because of their infatigable cynicism, but it’s rare that Crouch will go out on a limb and praise anything himself. And when he does, it’s often something already established. Another good example is his very-late discovery of BET’s ‘American Gangster’ which he only praised during it’s significantly higher-profile Second Season and in contrast to the obviously-goofy ‘American Gangster’ movie. Even this stupid blogger knew BET’s ‘American Gangster’ was smart early on: You Should Watch: BET’s American Gangster’.

The worst thing is other than his sadly misinformed take on hip-hop, Stanley Crouch can actually be a pretty brilliant mind. His book ‘Notes from the Hanging Judge’ is a contrarian classic and his kinda recent book ‘The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity’ has probably the best take on Quentin Tarantino and race out there. But between a certain vested interest in being the insider’s outsider and his obsession with hip-hop’s “negative effects”, Crouch nuance stumbles into muddled argument and ideas. It’s hard not to throw his argument out the window when he contrasts Perry’s populist and arguably negative appeal with “the mush-mouthed posturing of hip hop’s thug icons” but ends his article with a concession that perfectly defines hip-hop’s appeal: “He [Perry, but also hip-hop] knows how to bring trash and soul together in a way that doesn’t make one get in the way of the other. Like it or not, that is some form of genius.”

For the same reasons I avoided ‘Control’, I’ll probably avoid ‘Notorious’, unless I hear really great– or really terrible– things about it. Nevertheless, stills like the one above seem really depressing. I know, I know, it’s a big dumb Hollywood biopic but those stills, with essential unknowns as Biggie and Faith Evans make it feel more like, some terrible cash-in made-for-TV bio that would’ve premiered within six months of Biggie’s death and somehow incorporated “gangsta rap” into the title. The plan was to find unknowns as to not overshadow the real Christopher Wallace and company, but if it’s going to be a big, dumb Hollywood biopic, at least fill it with big, dumb Hollywood actors, not arguably less attractive, melty-looking versions!

Like many recent biopics, ‘Notorious’ is riding on its approval from friends and family to convince possibly cynical fans that this movie’s worth their time and will be “true-to-life”. The worst people to look to for an interesting or objective view of Biggie would be those closest to him! It’s funny that the cast is not star-packed except for Angela Bassett, who plays Biggie’s mom. With people like Puff Daddy still in power and you know, producing the movie, don’t expect any hard-hitting revelations about Puffy’s relationship with Biggie or the entire Biggie/Tupac-East Coast/West Coast feud, because all the people involved– and partially responsible for the deaths of two rap legends– are still alive, making money and proudly “squashing” those old beefs that killed their friends and business partners. I’m again reminded of a quotation from film scholar Ray Carney who had this to say about the concept that a movie is good, real, or accurate if those actually involved in the real-life version approve: “Spielberg bragged that Holocaust survivors were proud of Schindler’s List, and World War II veterans loved Saving Private Ryan. That’s not a virtue but a vice. All it means is that he let them wallow in their own clichéd views of themselves.” And wallowing in cliches is exactly what the biopic genre does.

The trend to grab on to the lives of very popular and very troubled artists and turn their life into a simpleminded, linear, idealized–or unidealized idealized– two hours isn’t anything new, but the subgenre’s recent popularity is why we’re now getting a Biggie biopic and why we’re getting a cast of look-alikes: these movies are not interested in working-out the life of the musician at their center, but continuing to bask and in part, cash-in on the image of that musician. We’ll get a narrative that bounces from iconic Biggie scene to iconic Biggie scene with pitch-perfect recreations of the ‘Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems Video’ or maybe, Biggie near a bodega in Bed-Stuy, freestyling to a surprised crowd, but it just won’t mean much of anything. I harp on this cast-someone-who-kinda-looks-like-the-guy logic because it shows just how silly and image-oriented these biopics are. Isn’t it a bit silly to watch ‘Walk the Line’ and see an actor with dyed hair doing a Johnny Cash impression? Was that movie really well-reviewed and respected when it literally has a scene where June Carter literally says to Johnny: “You can’t walk no line!” Can we expect a scene where a groupie whines “Oh, Biggie give me one more chance”?

At the same time, I’m not on some ‘I’m Not There’-type abstract bullshit either because that’s silly for its over-wrought metaphorical casting, just as Hollywood versions are silly when they find a fat dude who can sorta rap to play Biggie, or feel the compulsive need to slap a witchnose on Nicole Kidman for her to play Virginia Woolf. I guess I’m saying some Anthony Hopkins as Richard Nixon thing, where it’s close enough to not be absurd or too artsy-fartsy, but it’s more finding the actor or person that can embody and interpret that real-life version and not just do a pretty-good impression. I don’t think it would work for how literal-minded ‘Notorious’ probably will end up being, but I still think the best and most interesting choice would’ve been Beanie Sigel.

The casting of Sigel as Biggie would add a realistic edge that is less about looking realistically like Biggie and more like grabbing some of Biggie’s emotional character. Beanie’s neither a heir to the Biggie throne, or too highly indebted to the rapper, but he does have some of that same mix of vulnerability and anger and for you literal-minded dopes, he’s fat enough. Beans is also a pretty impressive actor himself. While he’s yet to be cast in anything that Dame Dash hasn’t been producing, his performances in the ‘State Property’ movies are convincing and real when they really don’t need to be. My fanboy dreams have long planned a kinda brilliant acting career for Beans, especially when Dash Films made its few moves out of the straight-to-video rap movie armpit and aided in the production of the nothing-great but pretty good ‘The Woodsman’ and the bonafide new-generation hip-hop classic ‘Paid In Full’, (which features a genuinely amazing performance by Cam’ron, mind you). Imagine a Biggie bio made by people who really, really care about the guy, who get ‘Ready to Die’.

Get rid of that Hollywood shine and idealization we all know it’ll have and replace it with the still-attractive but way more realistic lensing of someone like Rik Cordero and maybe narrow the plot down to a very small part of Biggie’s life, or even focus exclusively on his early career leading up to ‘Ready to Die’ and flash-forward to those fateful final months- like, start the final part with Biggie’s car-crash…I don’t know, just anything but another bio-pic which will race through his early life, define his career by re-creations of stuff we already know is career-defining, and end it “tragically”…

Some Other Half-Baked Movie Ideas for Beanie Sigel:
-‘Bird Lives!’ – A Charlie Parker Biopic: As a kind of rebuke to the awful, awful, awful, ‘Bird’ by Clint Eastwood– perhaps, the quintessential biopic– I began fucking around with some ideas about a more thoughtful and realistic movie about Charlie Parker. With Beanie as Parker, and the movie focusing on the last few weeks of Parker’s life, not to dwell in his junkie-hero persona, but to ground the movie in Bird’s self-destructiveness and then even at his worst, show him as human and humane, I think a more realistic image of him could be attained. By skipping out on his career and life, played-out scenes like his first big gig or him practicing non-stop or even his first shot of heroin, would be avoided. As so many YouTube videos of a probably-on-purple Beanie would show, he could do fucked-up junkie well, but I can also imagine him doing the humorous side of Parker that biographies have acknowledged with equal honesty. My favorite Parker story is recounted in many places but maybe most famously in the Ken Burns ‘Jazz’ series and it’s Parker, playing Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ to a group of hipster-red out, Bird-worshipping ‘bop heads who all dismiss it as “redneck music” and can’t understand why Parker insists on playing it over and over. “Listen to the stories” he tells his worshippers; I think Beanie Sigel could sell a line like that pretty well.

-‘Untitled Homeless Movie’: One rainy afternoon, like four years ago, I was watching ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ and there was this amazing story about a white tennis instructor in Boca Raton who’d befriended a black homeless guy who to the instructor’s rather uptight family, was not only disturbing but maybe even something of a confidence man. The tennis instructor and the homeless guy became good friends, with the instructor eventually allowing the homeless guy to move-in to his rather nice apartment and bringing the still-stinks-like-he’s-homeless homeless guy to the home of his parents for dinner. The instructor began spending lots of his own money to help the local homeless and pretty much became a part of the homeless culture. Eventually, the instructor went missing, his car found parked in a nice neighborhood, his wallet, ID, and keys, on the driver’s seat. The homeless guy– now living full-time in the instructor’ apartment– had not seen the instructor in weeks. This presumably true story seems to be, a pretty entertaining way to address the white liberal’s relationship with a downtrodden culture and with Beanie Sigel as the mysterious homeless guy– mysterious because he’s crazy, not some Bagger Vance crap– could add some interesting ways to address white interest in “blackness” and hip-hop culture. It could easily be a satire, but I’d like to see it a little more straight, with the white guy being genuinely intrigued and affected by it all– enough that he’d get rid of his former life– but still coming off a little absurd. I had this idea in like 2004, when Roc-A-Fella was still a thing and so, I imagined a weird, hip-hop instrumental score by Kanye West or even just a bunch of Kanye instrumentals as the score.

-‘Song Cry’: Once again, an idea I had back when The Roc was real but were still making garbage like ‘Paper Soldiers’ like they weren’t real. Imagine a movie version of ‘Song Cry’, but starring Beanie because it would keep it in the Roc family and Beanie’s just more real in personality and look than any actor who would try to look hard or of “the life”. For some reason, I always imagined ‘Song Cry’ as being about a relationship but Jay’s contrast of his rise to success with the distance in his relationship related to the ‘Scarface’-like success of a drug dealer. Think ‘Godfather II’ or plenty of other gangster movies where the couple pulls apart as more and more money comes in. On ‘Song Cry’, Jay makes this reality a little more tragic and it totally works and is very cinematic: “We used to use umbrellas to face the bad weather/So, now we travel first class to change the forecast”. An early romantic scene of the two in the rain, is contrasted with a later scene of the two, now on a plane, flying somewhere exotic but hardly giving a shit. The movie that would come out of ‘Song Cry’ could be full of these like cinematic doubling of scenes; a kind of epic-ish drug-dealer out-of-love story, but starring a kinda grimy Beans instead of like, Denzel Washington done-up to look kinda grimy.

On ‘20K Intro’ from the latest Clipse tape, Pusha mentions a “tree-huggin’ ass bitch” that told him he was “nice” but proceeded to give him a lot of shit about how his songs are all about “dope” and “street shit”, which of course, is very, very bad. Pusha, in one of the few points on the depressive tape where anyone climbs out of their frustration, responds with “Tree-huggin’ ass bitch please” and asserts who he really rhymes for: “niggas on the corner.”

This kind of defense or half-defense met with an angry assertion about “street niggas” or “niggas on the corner” isn’t new to rappers’ attempts at sounding “real” but it seems more glaring because well, the Clipse simply aren’t rapping for those “street niggas”. Maybe they are in the sense that that’s their intended audience, or maybe they mean it in some instructive way, but in terms of whose ears are open to Clipse, it is not who they claim to be rapping for; if this were true, Pusha wouldn’t even be confronted with a woman offended by their crack rap, you know?

Maybe some drug dealers have decent music taste, but the assumption that because one is from the street, one is apt to embrace street music, is incorrect. I see the logic, but most people are just more into ideas of escape and it’s why blue-collar whites listen to mainstream country music and not sad-sack songs about why their life sucks. The illusion that the drug-dealer is some near-Nietzschean businessman beyond good and evil that embraces his/her fate is a myth sold by dealers and the popular rappers that leech off of that myth. It’s a fucked-up circle of bullshit and the reality is, dealers are stupid too. They want to feel good about themselves like everybody else so, 50 Cent’s image of thuggery is way more appealing than say, ‘Chinese New Year’. In last night’s episode of ‘The Wire’, there’s a scene of Snoop and Chris driving down the street with Hurricane Chris playing out their speakers; that’s what I’m getting at!

Not that Clipse is the pinnacle of actual street realness- whatever that means- but they represent something a little less ideal than many of the other rappers talking about how street they are. The brilliance of Clipse is the way they offer up the same old bullshit but said a little better, song after song, and then suddenly drop a particularly dark insight or emotional reality. These details weave through ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ but they become palpable on the closer ‘Nightmares’, despite or in spite of its cloying acknowledgment of regret. Malice’s verse on the last track on ‘We Got it 4 Cheap Vol. 2’ about being “a hamster in a wheel” is all the more affecting because he hasn’t been this emotional, depressed rapper on every track. On the latest tape, the depression seems more real and upfront but the main point is still drug-pushing punchlines. Peppered throughout however, are lines like “we keep it from the kids and tell em’ it’s detergent”. Young Jeezy might say that line, but he’d be half-bragging or throw in one of those “Ha-HA”s to downplay the reality of selling crack with a bunch of kids around; Pusha just drops that fucked-up reality and keeps going.

If anything, Pusha should stop dropping weird defenses about who he makes his music for or who listens to it, because he should be proud “niggas on the corner” don’t want to hear his fucked-up version of reality: It means he’s doing his job! It also says something about how deluded the criminal element is, that Clipse don’t offer enough escapism and justification, but this is getting long already…

Although Clipse boast and glorify, their music never feels too exciting and their swagger is on the defensive and defiant, never there on principle or some fake-ass Tupac “I don’t give a fuck” thing…the Clipse care, a lot. The dudes aren’t perfect but they certainly do not create ideal forms that can be embraced by delusional thugs or angry too-cool for rock but too-dumb for real rap middle-schoolers. That’s what the current debate on hip-hop’s quality is really about and always has been: ideal vs. the reality.

On DocZeus’s entry on Clipse earlier this month, the lively comments debate went into a smart and even-handed breakdown of what exactly made Clipse more complex or better or less amoral than Young Jeezy. At first glance, the two have a lot in common. Both rap coke braggadocio with a vague catering to regret, over cold, sterile, electronic beats but as smart listeners have pointed out, even when the darkness of dealing is not apparent in the rhymes, it’s heard in those harsh, beats. But there’s a difference.

Indeed, Clipse are hardly the ideal non-ideal rappers and Jeezy is not totally in drug-dealing fantasy land, but comparing the two illustrates my point. Clipse have production that is almost tinny and truly minimalist and it underscores their bragging; Jeezy’s production is disturbing but has a triumphant edge that turns his non-rapping into an unstoppable force of hard-ass synths and regal horns. Jeezy is what a drug-dealer wants to be and Clipse are a little closer to what a drug dealer really is. So, it makes sense that “street niggas” would gravitate towards Jeezy and it makes sense that jerkoffs who think drug-dealers are cool or people who think they’re drug dealers, would also prefer the Jeezy treatment of dealing.

I’m reminded of a similar division between the ideal and the real in film scholar Ray Carney’s The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. The book’s primary argument is that filmmaker Cassavetes consistently avoids the clean-edges of Hollywood cinema- including the Hollywood art of Welles, Hitchcock, etc.- for a less ideal and more accurate representation of life (I’m really simplifying…). Late in the book, Carney contrasts Cassavetes’ crime film ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’, a portrait of a down-and-out strip-club owner who has a lot of debt, with Orson Welles’ classic ‘Citizen Kane’, a very different kind of portrait of a failed man. Carney’s most effective point is to suggest that even as Orson Welles makes a movie opposed to Charles Foster Kane, it really only “pretends to criticize the excesses of capitalistic arrangements and manipulations in its content [and] collaborates with them in its form” (230); Welles’ movie is as bombastic and overblown as Kane. Cassavetes’ relationship to Cosmo (the main character of ‘Bookie’) is very different; the movie constantly seeks out ways to undermine Cosmo’s illusion of himself and his surroundings.

Cosmo is never smooth even when he tries to be, the women of his strip-club are either downright beat or beautiful in a way that is realistic*, and his gangster friends are hardly Deniro cool or handsome. To drive the point home, Carney creates a hypothetical, wherein the main character of each movie could watch the movie about themselves: “As his political rally suggests, Kane would love the style of his own film (even if he might have problems with its satiric point). Cosmo would hate his movie’s style.” (231).

*Sorry about the soft-porn link, there’s not a lot out there on Azizi Johari…

I know that comparison is not perfect, for rappers are not in the same exact position as the movie director, but despite most rappers’ tendency to use the “I” whether telling the truth or not, both rapper and director tell stories, create portraits, and generally, subjectivize experience. And just as Kane would approve of the however negative still aggrandizing portrayal of self in ‘Citizen Kane’, would most “street niggas” prefer the version that paints them as larger-than-life transgressors. Replace “Welles” with just about any drug-talk rapper in the following quotation and the connection seems clear: “Welles [or Young Jeezy?] is addicted to crafting a self-contained, self-justifying, self-referential imaginative world…” (230). Carney of course, is interested in art and so, his focus is on the creator but I’m shifting the focus on the audience- or a part of the audience.

The world Carney describes is the one that Jeezy chooses to reside in, but it is also the world that his audience prefers because it breeds complacency and zero self-reflection. Those “true” dealers on the corner like it because it justifies their way of living and then pumps it up a few sizes. Those outside “the life” generally think its either cool or somehow want to connect their own dreams to Jeezy’s motivational speech rap, so they too prefer the idealized form. It’s not how Jeezy intended it, but he really is like a motivational speaker in the sense that like Tony Robbins or Dr. Phil or those twin midgets that sell real-estate kids on TV at 3am, he feeds his audience a load of complacent bullshit masquerading as insight or theory.

I think I need to clarify that the embrace of this ideal is held by everyone, and is hardly exclusive to black drug-dealers (which is what we must assume Pusha means by “niggas on the corner”). I generally do not concern myself with being offensive, but I do fear this could be misread as a critique of the black criminal mind-set or blacks in general, when I’m first, discussing the escapism of popular rap and second, the growing obsession with escapism in the world at-large. That is to say, Pusha is not referring to white drug dealers or criminals, not because he uses the word “nigga”- for this word is often used as nearly all-inclusive, go to a Ghostface show, he’ll call his crowd of many white faces “my niggas”- but because going back to ‘Lord Willin’, Pusha and company have been focused on their community and their world.

Basically, when it comes to ideals, everyone likes to feel cool and smart and not part of the shitty reality in which they live. Rock musicians still revel in an ideal version of the debauched rocker, or, when it comes to crime, escapist forms of the life of crime are hardly exclusive to black drug-dealers. The best example would be the mafia, which has pushed idealized forms of their life since their life came about during the 1920s and 30s. Most “gangster” movies end morally and have an edge of justice to them, but they are first and foremost, obsessed with the criminal and his (especially during that early era) transgressive acts of crime.

It is interesting to note that so much of the glorification of the criminal life that is so pervasive and sensitive to criticism in rap, has its roots in white crime films that mainstream critics have praised since the 1930s. The pinnacle of course, is hip-hop movie royalty, ‘Scarface’ and ‘Goodfellas’ and rappers have continually picked apart these movies for influence. Ridley Scott’s recent ‘American Gangster’ and in some ways, Jay-Z’s accompanying album, would be the pinnacle of this embrace of the ideal life of crime and a conflation of the white-oriented “gangster” ideals with the black oriented “gangsta” ideals.

As Jay-Z recently said on ‘Ignorant Shit’, “Scarface the movie did more than Scarface the rapper for me”, and of course, that’s true because despite occasional forays into a less glamorous image of thug-life, Jay-Z has worked in ideal gangsta forms in a way that Scarface the rapper, never has. Even on his recent semi-hit ‘Girl, You Know’- a song that is a rejection of love, another ideal- there’s that reference to how “she don’t suck dick like she used to do” and he dubs in this gross slurping sound, which you now, is real because getting your dick sucked is this weird thing of this girl like slurping all over your dong; it’s weird if you think about it.

The point is, you watch ‘Scarface’ or ‘Goodfellas’ and while they end poorly and do not approve of their characters’ actions, the movies are celebrations of the swagger and confidence of the lifestyle. The directors reject the moral perspective of Henry Hill or Tony Montana, but love the attitude. This is why you read stories of real-life mobsters watching and performing the actions of these characters; it makes them feel awesome and not you know, gross weird, kinda pathetic criminals (which is how ‘The Killing of Chinese Bookie’ and maybe a Clipse album and certainly a Ghostface album, makes you feel…). Corner dealers, once given the option, will choose nebulous coke rap over the well-wrought realities of Ghostface and to a lesser extent, Clipse, every time: Nobody wants reality!

-Stills stolen from DVDbeaver.com.

-Carney, Ray. ‘The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies’. Cambridge UP, 1994.

The video- or possibly first half of the video- for Kanye’s ‘Flashing Lights’ premiered last week and it’s a pretty brilliant three minutes. Summary will be spared because you can watch it above and it’s fairly clear what it’s about, because even though people toss around phrases like “avant-garde” and “next-level” to describe the video, it’s fairly straight-forward: a few long, elegant camera moves that culminate in a women presumably stabbing a tied-up-and-in-the-trunk Kanye with a shovel. Like everything on ‘Graduation’ it’s about how celebrity and sex appeal are fucked-up.

The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has a thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the video chick or the sexless and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).

Kanye putting himself at the center of a revenge fantasy for rap’s misogyny and exploitation is typically cloying and oh-so-contradictory of ‘Ye, but it works because the video is genuinely real and disturbing and never gives in or steps back from its intended concept. Dunno why this comes to mind, but think of this Toby Keith video, which too involves revenge on the opposite sex (and a shovel!). Way more disturbing and genuinely misogynist than anything Nelly’s ever done (note to everybody: Sliding a credit card between a girl’s ass cheeks is funny), Toby’s video shows him singing an angry song to a tied-up Ex as he walls her in the basement, brick by brick. In the final moments of the video, the joke switches and is on Tobes as he somehow accidentally walled-himself in! Hilarious. This video’s always annoyed me because it’s a video of genuine misogyny that covers its ass in its final moments with a twist that allows it to still get airtime. Fuck that- ‘Flashing Lights’ sticks with its gender-revenge reversal to the end and gives you a genuinely complex and fucked-up experience.

Kanye takes a genuine backseat to the video chick, and in a darkly comic way, absorbs rap’s misogynist sins. He doesn’t even show up until half-way through the video and when he does, he gets stabbed with a shovel. The model, on the other hand, is allowed to strut in slow-motion and totally take control. The moment where she tosses the zippo and turns is as bad-ass as all the mean-mugging done by rappers in other videos. I get the weird sense that this will all be played for laughs when there’s a second half of the video and go the way of Toby Keith, but as it stands now, this is how I’m reading it.

The comfortable and patient camera too, adds to a certain level of respect (or relative respect) to the entire thing and moves it further away from being any kind of “typical” music video. This avoidance of the typical is the root of Kanye’s brilliance as well as why his work so often falls short of being brilliant but here, it works because it’s fairly out-there and it thematically connects to the song’s sense of how fame can put you in some goofy and/or dangerous positions. Upon seeing the video, I was immediately reminded of a comment on my ‘Flashing Lights’ entry by commenter Miss Shai:

“Maybe I read too many gossip blogs (maybe? lololol) but from the moment I heard it I figured this track was about his last girlfriend Brooke, the one that ‘be running on myspace’. The chorus about her taking things too far would be a reference to her apparent affinity for fame, being photographed everywhere (whether Ye was around or not)and then discussing her relationship issues on the internet or to anyone who’ll listen. Anyway, thats my reason for assuming both verses are about the same girl. I also felt like his reference to the paparazzi was a frustration with being caught cheating by the paparazzi, like them catching him out to dinner with other women or in places where he told her he wasn’t, making them a believable target for his contempt. The ending of the verse is her discovery of the infidelity and the end of the relationship, the beginning of the next is the separated reminiscing.”

Yeah! Taken with Miss Shai’s reading of the song, it’s a very confessional video in the sense of delving deep into Kanye’s post-fame fears of the women he’s fucked, fucked-over or both.

The entire thing has the feeling of a dream (or nightmare). The song never really matches up with the video in any overt or kinetic way and the actions both make sense and seem inexplicable. Why does she park the car, walk twenty or so feet out, strip, burn her clothes, and then walk back to the car? It doesn’t matter because you feel it and that’s what dreams and nightmares are about; a feeling. And it’s a feeling that matches the song quite well. It’s both obvious symbolic and totally free of a simple interpretation. The burning of her clothes is a sort of classic ritualistic trope but here, what does it mean? She’s in a sense, reduced to “shoes and cars” when she removes her clothes and walks in heels back to the car…but Monique pointed out to me, that the car is sort of unidentifiable and has the dust of the dirt road all over it; most videos go to great lengths to keep cars and objects of wealth clean. This is the second video where Kanye has sort of used the car as a sort of after-thought. One of the best parts of the ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video is the brief appearance of a Lamborghini, as if it’s stuck in there for a few moments to say “Look, I can get a Lambo but I’d rather give you this weird Madonna ‘Frozen’ type shit…”

It is interesting that Spike Jonze “co-directed” this video, for he’s a director that only occasionally makes rap videos but always breathes new life into the ones he does. It’s fun to see this video as the opposite of ‘Gold Digger’ because in a way, Spike Jonze is the anti-Hype Williams. Both guys are perhaps the most well-known music video directors of all-time and both have immediately identifiable styles, but while Hype’s style often signifies nothing, everything Jonze does is intended to serve the song or feeling of that song. The desert, car, and woman too, recall Williams’ ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video. We’re again in the desert and it’s again this beautiful night, but Jonze cuts a great deal less and incorporates a grittier film stock, not the super-clean imagery of Williams. I never thought Williams and West fit because Kanye’s always something of a joker and Hype Williams is embarassingly sincere, even though his videos are like, Ma$e floating in Vegas-space in a shiny-ass jacket.

The ‘Flashing Lights’ video is a good excuse to look back at Jonze’s decidedly anti-Hype Williams rap videos:

-Beastie Boys ‘Sure Shot’

Spike Jonze has made better and more conceptually cohesive videos for the Beastie Boys than ‘Sure Shot’ and that’s why I’m highlighting it. It’s a conventional performance style video but finds way to be weird and kinda reverse hip-hop video conventions. Like Kanye, the Beasties are dudes who’ve constantly moved in and out of the world of rap and are defiantly “hip-hop” in the same way that they are defiantly “punk rock”: because they do whatever they want.

You get the classic rap video “beatdown” shot here, but it’s the Beasties and Hurricane and they are having fun and it’s like mid-day in California and not like, midnight in Queensbridge. If you listen to the commentary on the amazing Criterion DVD of their videos, they mention that those weird igloo-ish homes they are walking around are some kind of California version of housing for the homeless, so in one sense, they’re as surrounded by poverty as any of the other “real” rap videos that would have followed this on ‘The Box’. Don’t sleep on Ad-Rock’s Peace Frog shirt.

-The Pharcyde ‘Drop’

Another thing that’s great about Spike Jonze is the way he totally commits to super-complicated concepts and rarely shorts-cuts on them, which for this video as you probably know, meant shooting the whole thing backwards, including the Pharcyde memorizing their lyrics backwards and other impressive stuff. Again, a kind of variation on rap video cliches that doesn’t try to be some corrective , but just happens to be a stranger take on a conventional concept.

-Notorious B.I.G featuring 112 ‘Sky’s the Limit’

A video that puts Jonze’s sometimes annoying cleverness to good use. Quite a few videos or guest verses by Biggie after his death used old-footage of him, which had a way of being very affecting, but somehow, this video that recreates Biggie videos with children is fun as well as affecting. It’s the sort of video that if not out of necessity, a label probably wouldn’t have approved because it breaks Biggie’s mainstream “gangster” persona even though it highlights the playful and funny side of Biggie that real fans remember equally well. As usual, the idea is saved because Jonze keeps it as authentic as possible, doing his best to match the old videos.

-Fatlip ‘What’s Up Fatlip?’

A totally low-budget video that perfectly fits Fatlip’s depressive but hilarious single. Some of it invokes the aesthetic of ‘Jackass’ which Jonze had a part in…the kid kicking him in the nuts, the obviously-shot-without consent gags, the shaky cameras, and a general sense of on-the-fly fun. The part where he visits his Mom is really great.

On the Spike Jonze Director’s Series DVD that Palm Pictures put out, there’s a pretty lengthy documentary about Fatlip that’s really revealing and funny and adds another level to his insane persona.

-Ludacris ‘Get Back’

This video seems to be sort of forgotten because it came in a time where rap videos stopped being fun on like, any level. The concept of giving Ludacris Robert Altman’s ‘Popeye’ arms and a team of uniformed fat chicks is brilliant and fits Ludacris’ comedic take on aggression; a lesser director would’ve taken the song’s hard-ass message as serious.

The fact that the arms are these big rubber things is good as well becauses it avoids annoying CGI (see Luda’s stupid ‘Stand Up’ video…) and you can tell Luda’s having more fun because he really is inhabiting the dude with big arms character. Some of the best parts are these quick, obviously improvised shots of Ludacris just being goofy with the arms. The whole video is a celebration of easy, old-fashioned special effects…the wire effects when he punches people, Fatlip’s twisted legs, the exploding bricks of the wall, it’s just really fun. When it came out, it made me wish the Keenan Ivory Wayans would’ve just turned this into a movie…like a low-budget blaxploitation pic about this dude in the hood who fights pimps and drug-dealers because he was born with these big-ass arms.

Science Fiction Doesn’t Have To Be Completely Terrible.

Along with Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Children of Men’, Darren Aronofksy’s ‘The Fountain’ and shit, throw Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘The Road’ in there too, Danny Boyle’s just-released ‘Sunshine’ marks a minor, but not insignificant trend that “returns” to the headier sci-fi concepts of the past to address our rather dire present. This strain of science-fiction/dystopia movies and one book manage to be in-tune with the world around them, actually thought-provoking, and skeptical of recent politics, without becoming reactionary, oh yeah, and really entertaining, which is important.

Just as we rap fans compare pretty much any quality, recent rap to rap of the 90s, a group of recent movies that are quasi-philosophical, and politically-relevant are inevitably compared to 70s movies. The comparison is apt because with the exception of ‘Children of Men’, all of the other works consciously recall the movies of the 60s and 70s “film culture”. No doubt ‘Children of Men’ pulls a great deal from ‘Blade Runner’ among many others, but it has a distinctly contemporary feel, relatively free of overt homage. ‘The Fountain’ is clearly indebted to Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ as well as heady, European sci-fi (and a little ‘Aguirre: The Wrath of God’ thrown in). ‘Sunshine’ has the stamp of ‘2001’ all over it as well, as well as Tarkovsky and some John Carpenter and a lot of ‘Alien’.

Even McCarthy’s novel feels more like a 70s movie than a novel. Although the author will continually cite Melville, Faulkner, and the Bible, the stamps of Peckinpah and Peckinpah collaborators courses through the veins of ‘The Road’. L.Q Jones’ ‘A Boy and His Dog’ and ‘Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid’ screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer’s novel ‘The Flats’ address nuclear fall-out in strikingly similar ways. Still, there are major differences in approach and ones that mark all four pieces of work as products of this era and not complete throwbacks.

The first is a near reversal of the 70s sci-fi style, where those movies were first, concept, “thinking” pictures with characters taking a backseat to ideas, these recent movies aim for that ideal, but ultimately seem more interested in the people. For me, ‘The Fountain’ is hardly “better” than ‘2001’ but it is a great deal more moving, as the same concepts of life, regeneration, etc. are filtered through real characters (husband and wife) and palpable things (cancer). ‘Children of Men’s plot being rooted around infertility also hits viewers at a gut, emotional level in a way that ‘Blade Runner’s identity-crisis, “who are we?” bullshit just doesn’t. Much of the time in ‘Children of Men’, Cuaron puts his characters in an immediately stressful situation that is upped to a level of tension that feels so immediate we kind of forget the real plot of the movie for a few seconds. Those technically-impressive single-takes are not only technically impressive, they put you in with the characters, so in you empathize with their problems. ‘The Road’ is primarily a story about a father and his son and unconditional love, with the causes and relevance of the nuclear fall-out kinda irrelevant.

‘Sunshine’ too, ends up being more about the people involved than the ideas. Even a sci-fi stoner moment like a dude literally touching the sun feels less important than the crew’s arguments. The group of astronauts is well-observed and rooted in updated clichés, ones that could not fit into the previous century, short of cheap concessions to multiculturalism. The crew of the ship is mostly Asian, along with one Arab, an indie-ish guy, a whiny white girl, a white vengeful prick tough guy, a possible homosexual (Harvey’s supposed to be this whiny, ‘Queer Eye’ gay, right?). The crew resembles the room of an Undergraduate seminar in Biology or something.

My friend John pointed out the point that the Arab crew member Searle, is like one of those smart Arab engineers that also happened to be stoners (Afghani weed is killer). Searle spends large parts of his time on the ship staring into the sun; getting high on the sun. Crew member Cassie, who obviously has the hots for the indie-ish guy played by Cillian Murphy is this sort of liberal arts college scientist. She makes jokes about the excess of “manhood” on board and won’t budge about taking-out a problematic crew member on proud, moral grounds. These are not offensive stereotypes but well-observed although generalized characters and perhaps, archetypes for this new century. The point is, as much as time was spent thinking up these fairly complex characters for a sci-fi allegory as was spent on the logistics and design of space and the quasi-philosophy of the movie.

I see this focus on the human side of big ideas, as a return to emotion and sincerity. It is the up side of the “I” generation, who blog, post on Youtube, have Myspaces and Facebooks, and walk around with iPOD earbuds on; all of this self-consciousness, this unwavering focus on the self, can, sometimes lead to some interest in your fellow man.

The second difference between these recent sci-fi movies and that of the American movies they look back to has to do with the approach to politics. On this site, I spend a lot of time addressing rap’s “conscious” side and how its vapidity equals that of the much-more hated crack rap. Both push complacency to different groups, both rely on nothing much clichés. Whether you’re spouting off about that “white girl” and kitchen utensils or “the people” and the establishment, it makes me yawn. I think of so many older intellectual types and my self-righteous peers bemoaning the fact that no one is political anymore. Does anyone get some immediate form of AIDS everytime they watch some 70s movie and there’s some pointless knock on Nixon or Agnew? It pretty much renders all of Robert Altman’s catalog unwatchable. It’s the same feeling I get when I hear another Bush-bash or mindless wish for “peace”. I think the latest generation can’t drum up the self-righteousness of the hippies because it’s a bad idea, not because of apathy.

These recent science fiction works are obviously in part, a response to post-September 11th, the clusterfuck that is Iraq war and the messy war on terror in the same way that so many 70s movies were about Vietnam and Watergate and general American unrest. There’s one major difference: The obnoxious pride and simple-mindedness of 70s moviemakers is now gone. The current directors are reaching towards science-fiction to express their worst fears because that’s how bad their worst fears are, they extend beyond the reality we live. Also, science-fiction is particularly good with heavy-handed allegory and heavy-handedness is what most politically “conscious” types embrace. But that’s what’s so weird about the movies (and book) I’ve brought up! All of them handle the scare-mongering, the nightmare situations with a great deal more understanding and sympathy.

None of these pieces of art are complaints about the current state of the world, instead they are vaguely instructional in how we can deal with it! Pragmatic instead of idealistic. Realistic instead of utopian. How amazing is that? And people call this generation apathetic! These political movies are about what we do next, not what happens and how it’s totally bullshit that it happened at all.

‘Children of Men’ is equally skeptical of the radicals as it is the corrupt government, both sides are buffoons and it is those few who see above political leanings that try to save the day. ‘The Fountain’ is the straggler of the bunch as it is not political but it has distrust of monomania even for good intentions and an incredibly insightful distrust of science. ‘The Road’ is about how we need to continue on after something totally fucked-up happens. McCarthy obviously avoids the “reason” behind the fall-out as to not point any political fingers. ‘Sunshine’ acknowledges global warming in a subtle way, by being about the Earth getting cold. I might be accused of stretching it a bit, but I can’t help but see the movie as a clever way to address climate problems without being inextricably tied to it. Radical types might call it cowardice, I call it subtlety.

Links and Lots of Stuff Unrelated to Rap…

First, shameless plug…if you haven’t checked out my article at Hiphopmusic.com, please do.

Second, I got a cool link about my Kanye entry over at film critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s super-amazing House Next Door. It means a lot because to be linked by anybody is nice but especially because Seitz, a former film critic for the ‘New York Press’, along with Armond White (still a critic for NY Press), are two of the first writers I ever read that seemed fearlessly intelligent. I was in 8th grade when I got the internet, exposing me to movie stuff beyond what my local library and ‘The Baltimore Sun’ critics had to offer and these guys blew me away…still do.

I feel like an outsider for a number of reasons among bloggers, particularly rap-bloggers, the foremost reason being I’m not really like, a fan of journalists, especially music writers and I’m not internet-saavy. Breihan and Noz were the only guys that made me think “I want to do this!” and the other two journalist-types really would be Seitz and White. I’m an old-fashioned pretentious douche so my writing influences, if I were to be honest, pretension be damned, would be like, D.H Lawrence, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Ruskin…but it’s really the two music writers and film critics mentioned above.

-Souled-On Music also gave me a nice link. It feels self-important to “thank people” but it means more than I can really explain when people link me or give me a compliment about the blog. It’s also pretty great to see that I have a decent-sized group of readers/fellow-bloggers who always expound and complicate things in the comments section.

Linksies
-The Ed Zone (from Baltimore’s City Paper): A very interesting article about a very interesting man connected to Baltimore. Ed Norris, actor on ‘The Wire’, former Police Commissioner, current radio talk show host, held a press-conference announcing his crime plan in response to our pretty-much totally retarded mayor’s non-crime plan.

I generally try not to get too emotional or sincere about political issues but the rising murder-rate in Baltimore is nothing short of tragic. I was discussing it with my father the other day and just the thought of so many lives lost, due in large part, to state government incompetence and disregard, brought me to tears. It truly isn’t fair and its criminal the way this issue is being ignored or downplayed.

-Cute Overload: Pretty self-explanatory.

-‘We Want Weezy’: This is so amazing and it has nothing to do with being a Lil Wayne fan or non-fan. Despite what so many Wayne stans seem to think, I don’t hate the dude. My entry just said he isn’t “Great” and I tried to say it in a way that is a little more respectful than the way Dallas Penn said it.

But yeah, this guy making an entire album of Weezy parodies is incredible. Like ‘Outsider Art’ incredible. It would be easy to make a parody SONG but to do a whole album, wow. Also, it’s so well-done and accurate, yet hilarious, it moves beyond being malicious or anything. I personally like ‘I Need Baby’ and ‘Because of Baby’.

Please Rent: ‘Holy Mountain’

The above clip is from this movie ‘Holy Mountain’ by Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s really great. You should rent it. I’m generally opposed to artsy-fartsy hippie shit but this movie somehow, did it for me. It’s ultimately kind of about how all that mystical stuff doesn’t mean jack and it has a never-serious tone mixed with a less harsh, less self-important instructive side. To me, it seems like a lot of people have snatched a lot from it. I think unlike other surreal or “experimental” directors, Jodorowsky cares about people and his movie’s contempt is slightly different than most movies as he has less contempt for his satirical targets and his audience because this movie is never boring or tedious or even that obvious.

I may go buy the box set because I’ve never seen his other big movie ‘El Topo’ and it comes with the soundtracks as well, and the ‘Holy Mountain’ soundtrack by Don Cherry was great, especially this broken-saxophone lamenty-esque song that played as the Woman whose planet is ‘Mars’ climbs out of bed with her bald, lesbian lovers.

-‘Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America’: THIS MOVIE LOOKS AWESOME. Too bad it will NEVER play anywhere really. The trailer posted here makes it seem even better.

Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ Video.

Everything related to ‘Graduation’, the singles, the video for ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ and now, the ‘Stronger’ video, give me a slightly ambivalent feeling. All of it is cool but none of it is amazing. I respect what these songs and videos sound or look like, but they don’t have me very excited. My initial response is a mixture of “that was cool” tinged with slight disappointment because it never really adds up to what Kanye hyped it as or what my little super-fan imagination turned it into. When you compare what Kanye is releasing to the crap that is on the radio or MTV, it stands out as impressive but on its own, it falls slightly short.

It’s hard to even begin to explain without sounding like a nit-picky asshole (but when have I been afraid of that?). The best place to start would be that, the video is essentially an ‘Akira’ homage. For those that don’t know, ‘Akira’ is in many ways, the definitive anime, the kind of anime that even people who aren’t interested or don’t care for anime should be able to enjoy. I think it basically ruins all other animes because almost anything you see after ‘Akira’ doesn’t really compare. Monique, upon seeing it recently, compared it to a bible story or something and I think that’s a really accurate comparison. It moves from being a story of a group of friends to being about all kinds of metaphysical shit without ever being bogged-down in pretension or exposition (the bane of most animes’ existence). But yeah, there are better places than here to read about ‘Akira’ if you don’t know about it and of course, you could just go out and rent it; it’s totally worth it.

The Kanye video is primarily a homage to a sequence in the movie where Tetsuo is subjected to a series of tests by the government, then locked in a hospital, and busts out, destroying an entire line of armed guards. The video contains numerous recreations of shots from the anime (see above) that are really effectively done. Kanye’s does some excellent physical acting, contorting his face just right, not too over-the-top, and his walk is as scary as it is when Tetsuo is doing it in the movie. Kanye’s apparent empathy with Tetsuo makes me think the sequence has some thematic resonance: Something about fame and being subjected to criticism (deserved and undeserved) and blasting back at it with full-force?

It all works conceptually, invoking ‘Akira’, particularly the character of Tetsuo is apt. Apt because it suggests Kanye’s mix of blind, righteous indignation and unblinking self-awareness. Tetsuo is the antagonist of ‘Akira’, slowly over-taken by his powers and the hubris newfound power entails, but he is also undeniably the main attraction, in part, because of his out-of-control-ness; he’s the most complex and engaging chracter. I think Kanye understands these kinds of contradictions in himself. We’re oddly annoyed and sympathetic with Tetsuo and likewise, with Kanye West.

Kanye’s music has always been fueled by opposition, but there’s a seething disdain and anger in ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ and ‘Stronger’ that feels a little different than the mix of enthusiasm and arrogance on ‘Late Registration’. As he did on ‘College Dropout’, Kanye feels like he’s really got something to prove; it doesn’t seem like he’s going through the motions, which he basically was when ‘Late Registration’ was released. Kanye seems to be tapping into Tetsuo’s very rarified form of defiance.

Unfortunately the video itself, even in the scenes that mimic ‘Akira’, share little of the movie’s energy and anger. The video’s failure to be as engaging and impressive as it sounded like it was going to be, falls on Hype Williams’ shoulders. Hype Williams is a stylist not a kinetic, movement-oriented director. His video for ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’ was clever in its parody of ‘De Beers’ diamonds commercials, that sort of too-clean, ultra-clear black and white and the ‘Gold Digger’ video was better than the song, but he seems to have the unfortunate habit of attempting to constantly create a new signature effect or stylistic flourish for every video. That effect used in the Ne-Yo video and the Robin Thicke video, wherein the images overlapped, essentially, putting images where the black-bars of normal widescreen would be, was too busy. The ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video and the ‘Stronger’ video have this obnoxious technique where the footage kinda looks like security-cam footage for a few seconds and then stutters or freezes like a computer glitch and it just isn’t very interesting or clever. It makes sense in this futuristic video but it had no place in ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ and it highlights a certain copying-and-pasting of techniques that plagues most video directors. They just don’t seem to have much of a grasp of what actually fits or makes sense, just what looks really “cool”.

There’s also the frustrating fact that it still relies on the typical music video structure of inter-cutting two “stories” with performance footage. Even a video this strange and out-there is still anchored in convention. All of it looks amazing on its own but as a whole, it just doesn’t really gel, particularly the Kanye performance footage. The most alive part of the video are these quick hand-held shots of Japan that look like they were maybe even shot on-the-fly; they give the video an energy it lacks in most other places.

Hype Williams is an amazing stylist and I half-regret all the shit I’m talking here already, but ultimately, I don’t think Hype Williams and Kanye West really fit together. The raw feel of Chris Milk’s videos for Kanye (‘All Falls Down’, ‘Jesus Walks’, ‘Touch the Sky’) fit significantly better than Hype Williams’ smoothed-out direction. Kanye, despite his popularity, just isn’t a typical rap superstar, he’s too weird, too idiosyncratic, too daring. No matter how hard he tries or no matter who he hires, Kanye can never be bigger-than-life because his appeal is how honest he is about everything. Imagine a cheaper version of this video directed by Milk, or even Michel Gondry who directed the ‘Heard Em’ Say’ video. The biggest problem with the ‘Stronger’ video is that it isn’t very fun. Only a director as vapid as Hype Williams could make a futuristic rap video, in Japan, with the most ambitious rapper around, and end-up with something uninteresting.