A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic

Abstract

From the beginning, the moving image and narrative film have played an integral if still under-theorized role in both documenting and creating hip-hop culture; enough so that I think an argument can be made that it is a forgotten “fifth” element of hip-hop (Rose, 1994; Chang, 2006). Cinema, primarily through genres like the musical and subgenres like the biopic, construct fantasies about creativity and labor that many hip-hop films invoke (Altman, 1989; Feuer, 1993; Dyer, 2002; Cohan, 2005; Knight, 2002; Custen, 1992; Bingham, 2010 Berger, 2014). Elements of these genres can be found throughout the history of hip-hop films and I will especially focus on the biopic to draw attention to the way these films — like much of hip-hop culture — demonstrates its complicated relationship to creative labor. As a genre, the biopic (or biographical film) is a creature of the Hollywood studio system. It is a genre that enjoyed an incredible amount of popularity after World War II with an emphasis on narratives of upward social mobility and self-reflexivity about the studio system itself (Vidal, 2014; Bingham, 2010; Custen 1992). For the purposes of this essay I am interested in a particularly self-reflexive version of the biopic that emerged out the Hollywood musical after WWII. As Rick Altman writes, films like Jolson Sings Again (1949), Singing in the Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953) purposefully foreground the cinematic means and materials of production — the actual stars, cinematic conventions and technologies of the studio system — in order to reaffirm Hollywood’s ability to “more convincingly” reproduce the creative self (Altman, 1989, p. 252).