Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (documentary thread bound to turn into Platonic ILM rap thread)

yeah I saw that, funny how he got some interesting answers by being either totally pat and didactic (pinned Russell Simmon's old waffling ass, though he let jada weed-ramble his way away from anything useful) or waay open-ended(the white people -- dayum) . I hope there's more, the man-on-the-street wtfness was cool but I would have been more interested to see how he actually engages the average group of young people and their reception/objections/detailed take on the whole thing.

I saw it. Some really cringe-y interviews def, but I thought it was kind of all over the place (even though mostly his heart was in the right place.)

Also interesting as one of the most condensed gatherings I've seen of youngish people who have genuine affection for and understanding of hip-hop, but are ready to talk about it critically -- like the obvious inevitable shift from CD Tucker scolding to K Powell just explaining and saying "that's definitely a problem." There's something really pleasing about how eager and attentive he is about soliciting women's voices when he gets a chance, and OMG does he have a wicked deadpan openness when he wants to ("did you just call me 'colored?'").

I think he let J ramble because it came off so appropriate -- it had that stirring, convincing quality of good rapping, but you could tell it was just papering over the issues with sounding all righteous.

Also: is it just me, or is Mos Def rocking like 3 distinct personalities this decade?

Busta Rhymes too! He had three personalities in the SHOW practically!

W Post article on the doc

excerpt from Chris Richards (musician/dj/critic) article:
There aren't many female voices in the film, a conscious decision by Hurt based on his experience in community work. "It was important for me to keep a male audience," Hurt says. "I know that boys are much more receptive to hearing guys talk about manhood. When they hear it from women they get defensive."

Ha, that's kinda why I hedged with "when he gets a chance" -- it's very plain that he's hectoring / challenging men with this, and working among men, but it still seems like there's something really pointed and great about moments like calling the women passersby back to comment. (I suppose this is less about actually using a lot of women's voices and more about saying "PS they have voices right now too," which pops out there and elsewhere in a pretty interesting way.)

The "this is about men" angle comes out in some weird thinking elsewhere -- like the bit about how hip-hop is homoerotic cuz, e.g., here's L.L. standing under a waterfall and licking his lips. Which, umm, without necessarily disagreeing with the point, it's a little bit weird to shift from talking about women as blatant music-video sex objects and then act is if L.L. of all people isn't appealing to women on a sexual basis way more than homoeroticizing an all-male rap world. It's like he's so interested in rap's overwhelming treatment of black masculinity that he momentarily forgets what other audiences and concerns it might occasionally speak to.

Well he's not the only one. Chuck D's final quote is pretty par for that course IIRC.

there's a lot of subtlety missing in the presentation but I didn't want to quibble given the film's length(it was only an hour right? it felt that short), not least of which is the sifting of material and postures and conventions that nobody takes seriously from more insidious material and attitudes, all of which is up for debate, but hey, let's debate it while the floor's open. (in re: violence in particular; I don't think it's helpful to negotiate most tongue-in-cheek/blase misogyny/homophobia as anything other than misogyny/homophobia). Maybe blasting through the subtleties *is* the right thing to do as he sees it, but not acknowledging it isn't going to take the dialogue very much farther than C. D. Tucker imo.
It would have been interesting, for instance, to see those aspirant rappers in the same room as assorted hip-hop moguls and hashing out the same questions re: viability of alternative messages and postures (i'm personally in favor of more breadth of mainstream voices, no more no less, and I'd be interested to see how much of it comes down to self-censorship v. self-selection among the mainstream talent pool -- anticon can sit this one out thks)

that should read self-censorship v. self-selection v. discrimination at the label level, to complete the thought...

i think he was just pointing out that amongst the hyper-manly jousting, verbal emasculation and flag-waving homophobia, there are the inevitable moments where one day folks may say 'eh, looking back on it, i guess that was just another iteration of the ol' Judas Priest scenario...'

i enjoyed the flick- particularly the part where he asked the unsigned MCs why they always rhyme in threats!