Introduction: Hip-Hop Cinema as a Lens of Contemporary Black Realities

Abstract

Introduction:Hip-Hop Cinema as a Lens of Contemporary Black Realities Regina N. Bradley (bio) The focus for this Close-Up on hip-hop cinema examines how hip-hop culture and its aesthetics manifest on film. For nearly half a century, hip-hop has served as a mouthpiece for exploring the marginalized experiences of black and brown people in the United States and abroad. Hip-hop was more than a popular cultural expression. It served as a context for complicating and recognizing a transition into a post–civil rights movement era. More specifically, hip-hop expressed the messiness of the generational angsts about race, class, and identity that were left unresolved from the movement. For the most part, America's embrace of hip-hop has been its musicality and its associated aesthetics. The focus on lyricism and production, very much integral to understanding the agency behind hip-hop's message, leaves much room for considering the other elements of hip-hop cultural production such as its visual narratives. I am not referencing the music videos that accompanied the music, though some videos such as Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" (intentionally) resemble outtakes from Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing (1989). As hip-hop crossed over into mainstream American popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, its influence also reached across community and cultural boundaries. It would be remiss to not point out that hip-hop's growing popularity paralleled its increasing profitability. Hip-hop's growing influence on American popular culture needed to simultaneously amplify its beginnings in urban working-class black and brown communities while making room to present a narrative that was alluring and profitable to a mainstream white audience. For the purpose of the examinations that follow, we focus on hip-hop cinema as a mainstream and commercial phenomenon, as well as the visualization of hip-hop's cultural identities, aesthetics, and iconography that signify hip-hop's influence on the American popular imagination. Some of these identities and aesthetics are immediately recognizable because of their presence in hip-hop music: the focus on working-class; predominantly [End Page 141] black communities in urban areas; the inner tension of a young black man attempting to establish self agency while balancing the needs and desires of his community; and an urban soundtrack of hip-hop music and its preceding music genres such as funk or soul, often sonic markers of generational and cultural differences of masculine expression between characters and plot. The inclusion of previous eras' popular black music is significant in establishing not only a cultural trajectory from which hip-hop emerges but also the importance of black identities as non-linear and frequently in conversation with each other. Kenton Rambsy's intriguing essay focuses on Jay-Z's album American Gangster, a soundtrack for the 2007 film starring Denzel Washington about 1960s and 1970s drug kingpin Frank Lucas. Rambsy utilizes the literary method of analysis known as textual mining to explore Jay-Z's use of the American Gangster film to produce not only a hip-hop soundtrack but also to map out the impact of the film on his emceeing. Additionally, hip-hop cinema also highlights hip-hop performers, whether in front of the camera as actors or behind it like the cinematic career of rappers like Ice Cube, who is examined as both an actor and as a producer in this collection of essays. Brandon J. Manning explores the presence of vulnerable black masculinity in Ice Cube's first screenplay, Friday (dir. F. Gary Gray, 1995). Manning interrogates Ice Cube's positioning and balancing of inner-city black men's interiority and emotional baggage using humor. Adam Haupt's essay interrogates representations of the profitability of hip-hop narratives within white-supremacist constructs as seen in the biopic Straight Outta Compton. Overall, hip-hop cinema is a visual interrogation of how hip-hop sustains and also challenges articulations of post-civil rights black experiences. Further, it is important to provide a brief chronological overview of how hip-hop cinema created space for itself in popular culture. Hip-hop cinema made space to articulate the frustrations and challenges of urban black life...