Street scores

Ice Cube, Public Enemy, and Master P get cinematic

by Franklin Soults

Public Enemy

In just about every way imaginable, movies have been an integral part of hip-hop from the very beginning of the genre's rise from New York subculture to international pop art form. After all, hip-hop has always picked on other pop-art forms like nothing this side of, well, pop art. And there's no form bigger and juicier for the pickin' than Hollywood. If that sunny land didn't invent the idea of modern popular culture while inventing itself, it most certainly played a central role in shaping the identity of 20th-century America, and then some. So it stands to reason that young rappers and DJs would rampage through the history of film with moves of fawning identification, clever appropriation, and critical parody -- often all at the same time, a trick that makes Big Daddy Warhol look like some kind of sucker MC.

What seems less predictable is the symbiotic economic relationship that so quickly developed between the two realms. In the 1982 feature film Wild Style, this relationship took the form of a near-documentary hip-hop show-and-tell; the same was true in Harry Belafonte's 1984 flick Beat Street, a noble piece of propaganda with a cheesy story line documenting the travails of a graffiti artist and his DJ pal (my sharpest memory is of their attempt to harpoon the elusive White Train). The motives turned more venal the following year when former studio assistants George Jackson and Doug McHenry teamed up with bootstrap hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons to make the commercially minded vehicle for the Fat Boys, Krush Groove. As Jackson plainly put it in an April 1996 interview with Premier magazine: "We knew this hip-hop shit was going to be big." Not that the greed sullied anything at this point in history. In much the same way that MTV once filled in for the 99 out of 100 commercial rock stations that couldn't or wouldn't do their goddamned jobs to help break "alternative music" (i.e., anything new), so Krush Groove acted like other early hip-hop films: it took over where urban contemporary radio dropped the ball, proclaiming the arrival of the last major new musical genre of the 20th century. At the time, the ends clearly justified the green.

Here at the end of the century, however, hip-hop is now a strong undercurrent in mainstream culture, and its relationship with the movies has likewise changed from occasional text to frequent subtext. These days, there aren't many movies about hip-hop, just a lot of movies that use hip-hop, a phenomenon made manifest in the profusion of hip-hop soundtracks generated by the wide range of pictures featuring African-Americans. At their honorable best, a few of these soundtracks still work in tandem with the films from which they spring in order to express some kind of vision thing. At their money-grubbing worst, however, most hip-hop soundtracks just prove what everyone already knows: the entertainment industry is, as Puffy would say, all about the Benjamins and nothing more.

Consider the recent soundtracks to Woo (Untertainment/Epic/Sony Music Soundtrax) and Caught Up (Noo Trybe). The former leans toward pop, as befits a movie advertised in the press release as "a wild-and-crazy ride through the tunnels of love;" the soundtrack for Caught Up, which seems to be some kind of prison action pic, naturally leans hard on the hardcore. Even so, both share some artists -- including MC Lyte, who actually scores memorable cuts on both albums -- and the exact same recipe: push a few name artists into duets that catch the eye if not the ear (together for the first time ever: Shaggy and KRS-One! DMX, the Lox, and Mase!), add a few strong outings by up-and-coming acts to try to pre-sell listeners on their forthcoming debut albums (the most noteworthy example on either album is Woo's lead single, "Money," a jamming rewrite of the O'Jays classic "For the Love of Money" by newcomer Charli Baltimore), then fill up the rest with, well, filler.

Of course, see-through formulas aren't the exclusive property of hip-hop producers. In the past couple years, this kind of rote soundtrack has become a major marketing tool across all of pop, an industry that's been struggling to find new ways to reach a mass market while its radio audience continues to segment. Hip-hop became part of this trend not because it "sold out," but because it perfected the art of sexy rebellion so well that it bought into the mainstream faster than any outlaw musical genre before it -- the blues, rock and roll, punk, you name it.

This paradox is embodied in that cool, hard, scary figure straight outta cinema -- the gangsta rapper. Most gangsta practitioners insist that their menace just comes from "being real," but the style behind their stance is as phony as it comes. If hip-hop at its best deconstructs Hollywood, gangsta rap proves how much the mirror opposite is also true -- namely, Hollywood constructs hip-hop. Aping McQueen and Eastwood, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Shaft, and especially Brando, De Niro, and Pacino in The Godfather, gangsta rappers cultivate a Hollywood sheen that sells to the masses like, well, Hollywood. Recently, that sheen has greased the success of the purest, baddest gangsta rap outfit in years -- Master P's No Limit Records -- as well as the return of that bloated gangsta don, Ice Cube. Both svengalis are currently riding high on two gangsta-related films and soundtracks, Cube's Player's Club (Heavyweight Records) and Master P's I Got the Hook Up (No Limit Records). Yet each is one of the most listenable records I've heard from either man. Neither has a single track as good as Woo's best cuts, but in a way, both seem more earnest. Part of it is just the variety provided by all those young up-and-comers (best in show: U.G.K.'s "Bump and Grill" on I Got the Hook Up); part of it is the deliberate attempt at some sort of thematic and stylistic cohesion -- that is, the shot at the vision thing, a move so well-rounded, it even finds room for surprising shows of sensitivity, like Brownstone's "Don't Play Me Wrong" on Player's Club and Master P's unexpectedly moving title track on Hook Up (but he still groans like a demented cow in heat).

Improvement is not transformation, however, and in the end neither album escapes the constraints of gangsta's dumb, muscle-bound machismo. The same holds true for a far more ambitious and exciting project, the Bulworth soundtrack (Interscope). As a diehard '60s-style leftist, Warren Beatty has always had a soft spot for beautiful loser tragedies in which the outlaw heroes falter before the Man, like Bonnie and Clyde, or Senator Bulworth himself. The Bulworth soundtrack, put together by an inter-industry team headed by executive music supervisor Karyn Rachtman, tries to prove every gangsta is a noble example of that doomed breed. It does as much with this myth as anyone ever has, stretching the gangsta form with contributions from men who don't wear gats, like the two male members of the Fugees, as well as from various members of the Wu-Tang Clan, the only gangsta-related crew to mess with gangsta's simplistic image with any daring and imagination. There's plenty of up-and-coming action, too: the promising newcomer Eve worms her way into your brain riding a squiggly guitar hook; the ear-grabbing Cannibus will be a post-gangsta superstar any day now; newcomers Nutta Butta uncover a relatively undisturbed disco classic to sample ("Le Freak," also the source of MC Lyte's killer cut on Woo). In the end, though, you wonder why they didn't invite some more women to balance all the testosterone. (And I don't mean another track like "Bitches Are Hustlers Too.") Why did they have to ask Ice Cube and Mack 10 on board? Why does the beat keep dragging so?

Not all hip-hop soundtracks are afflicted with this constriction. The Ride soundtrack -- a collection that barely made a ripple when it came out early this spring (was the movie even released?) -- shimmies out of it on a cloud of good grooves and puffed-up, Puff Daddy-style production, swinging smooth and fresh even when Onyx and Wu-Tang are out doomsaying each other on "The Worst." Elsewhere, the girlie choruses, greasy funk, and smooth keyboards make the bad-ass 'tude of the usual suspects -- Mack 10, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Redman -- easier to take, at least until some pure R&B act comes around to wash down their gruff. The up-and-coming R&B act Amari even try to face down their man and have the last word: "Why you wanna be a player, a baller, shot caller?/I got the key that'll make you wanna holler/Will you players ever learn?"

In a way, Public Enemy ask the same question on their admirable album cum soundtrack He Got Game (Def Jam), a disc that busts out of the gangsta constriction by tackling its basic myths straight up. Nowhere near as epic as the four career-defining albums PE released between '87 and '91, this reunion nevertheless befits aging mortals who now know enough to add a self-critical edge to their cultural diatribes. Of course, their analysis isn't always on (when was it ever?), but it's both widened and focused by the theme of the Spike Lee basketball film that inspired it -- namely, the role that the myth of superstardom plays in the machinery of ghetto suffering. Just as important, the music, about half of which is provided by the legendary Bomb Squad, generally matches this reflective edge with just enough invention and raw excitement to heighten the raps of Chuck D and Flavor Flav. Nowhere does this work better than on the masterful title track, with its Buffalo Springfield sample and loose, measured rap declaring, "It might feel good/Or sound a little something/But damn the game if it don't mean nothin'." It's a touch absolutist when you consider the soundtrack game gave this album its life. But unlike almost any other product here, it makes you feel that life is much more than a movie.