Between 1983 and 1985 no fewer than nine hip hop-oriented musical films were released in the United States, including Wild Style, Beat Street, Body Rock, Breakin’, Breakin’ 2, Breakin’ Through, Rappin’, Krush Groove, and Delivery Boys. Although they have been all but forgotten in most historical discussions concerning the development of the musical genre, many aspects of these films are, in fact, overwhelmingly consistent with the thematic contours and narrative structures of the classical-era musical, a form that emerged in the late 1920s. The American musical film genre includes “star” vehicles like The Jazz Singer (1927), which established an enduring backstage narrative, all-black cast folk musicals, such as Hearts in Dixie, and Top Hat and Swing Time (1936), eloquent romantic comedies in which heterosexual union is central to both the film’s plot and musical numbers. Hip hop musicals emerged in the aftermath of significant challenges to the genre that have been loosely gathered by historians under the banner of the postclassical musical. These films renewed some classical-era generic elements, while directly challenging others as they navigated contemporary urban settings, social anxieties, and political struggle through the conventional iconography of Hollywood musical cinema. This chapter has four main concerns: to demonstrate the diverse ideological, thematic, and stylistic aspects of the hip hop musical; to show how the hip hop musical directly engaged with aspects of the classical musical film genre; to reveal the extent to which the racialized history of urban transformation impinged upon the representation of community and social action in the film narratives; and to reconstruct a history of the postclassical musical that includes a space for this initial hip hop-oriented cinema.
All hip hop musicals deal with themes of urban space, race, youth culture, and performance, but I do not want to suggest that this is an ideologically coherent group of films. Hip hop musical cinema offers diverse criticisms and celebrations of American social values, while adopting myriad positions regarding approaches to communal activism and the individual’s path towards success through music and dance performance.1 Not only were these films significantly varied in terms of the degree to which hip hop functions as a progressive and political performance strategy, but their production histories ranged from independent art cinema to exploitation fare. The entire corpus of the hip hop musical thus represents an array of ideological positions, and within particular texts themselves we find multiple social and political attitudes. These films might be understood to “reflect” the social and political currents of their historical moment, yet they do so in ways that are contradictory, ambiguous, and potentially even liberating for various members of historically oppressed groups within the United States, such as women and people of color. What is so apparent in examining the entire corpus of hip hop cinema is, in fact, the differences between films in terms of their social and political elements (or lack thereof), filming techniques, and actual presentation of hip hop culture through the cinematic lens.
Crucially, these films also rely on the various facets of hip hop culture to structure the cinematic text in different ways. For the purpose of this discussion, I have organized the corpus into two categories: the true hip hop musical and the surface hip hop musical. The first category—the true hip hop musical—which includes Wild Style, Beat Street, Rappin’, and Krush Groove, utilizes the interrelated set of cultural and social practices within hip hop as the organizing principle of the film. They also feature identifiable inner city locales, offer sympathetic portraits of the community inhabitants, and all but Krush Groove make a point of revealing the poverty of ghetto life. These films also show how the collective neighborhood body comes together in unconventional ways through the various facets of hip hop culture, while stressing the democratic nature of this process whereby everyone participates in music and dance performance.
Films such as Wild Style, Beat Street, and Krush Groove were the product of filmmakers and producers who were personally invested in the lives of urban communities of color. For instance, Wild Style’s director, Charlie Ahearn, was a constant presence in the South Bronx community for years before the film was finally released. Wild Style chronicles the romance of two Latino South Bronx graffiti writers—Rose, who works with a crew that paints legal murals, and Raymond (Zoro), an “outlaw” writer who works alone “bombing” train cars at night. As Ahearn gathered material for this romantic and creative docudrama of the South Bronx community, he painted graffiti with its stars, went to clubs in the neighborhood, and enlisted local residents to appear in the film and work on its soundtrack and artistic production.2 Moreover, as Ahearn sought to capture the emergence of hip hop culture in New York City on film, he became part of its artistic process and transformation. After the director photographed graffiti writers at work, club events, as well as other local happenings, he produced a series of slide shows that were projected at local venues, while MCs rapped over the unfolding narrative. Ahearn recalls this experience at a party space named The Ecstasy Garage:
I would bring two sheets and hang them on the wall behind the DJ and project slides that I was snapping in the yards and the clubs. I would edit them like a storyboard, adding some shots taken the week before at the Ecstasy. It was like projecting a rough version of the movie. Busy Bee would be on the mic. He’d see himself up huge on the screen and would get the crowd to yell, “Hey Busy Bee, ho!” One night Phase2, who was an originator of early subway art and was designing the most beautiful party flyers, brought some slides from the early ’70s of his incredible train pieces and of him posing in front of some of his bubble-style paintings. I popped them into the carousel and they became part “of the movie.”3
Hip hop is a collaborative form that privileges the integration of different artistic mediums, and Ahearn’s documentary imagery became part of an energetic, multimedia cultural performance that reinforced the collaborative, direct, and improvisational nature of hip hop culture.
Beat Street, a semi-independently produced film directed by Stan Lathan, features the exploits of two fictional South Bronx brothers, Kenny (Guy Davis) and Lee (Robert Taylor), who are heavily enmeshed within the hip hop culture of their community. The older brother, Kenny, embarks on a romantic affair with a wealthy Manhattan girl named Tracy (Rae Dawn Chong), while Lee, played by real-life breakdance prodigy Taylor, boogies his way into police custody. Lathan’s film also explored the subculture of graffiti writers, and even romanticized this practice through its depiction of Ramon (Jon Chardiet), a fictional Puerto Rican writer. Ramon, who dreams of tagging a pristine subway car, ultimately dies while attempting to apprehend Spit (Bill Anagnos), a rival writer who has been destroying his work throughout the film. Beat Street’s producer, Harry Belafonte, was not as directly involved in hip hop culture as Ahearn, but he was a committed civil rights activist and vocal critic of the Reagan administration.4 Belafonte also grew up in Harlem and dedicated his film to the people of the South Bronx.5 He undoubtedly had a political vision of hip hop as a revolutionary tool, and much has been made of his subsequent influence on Cuba’s burgeoning rap culture at the turn of the millennium.6
Krush Groove was directed by notable African American filmmaker Michael Schultz. He had previously made two important films about the black urban experience in the 1970s—Cooley High (1975) and the funk musical Car Wash (1976)—while also maintaining a steady presence in television directing. This hip hop musical was a fictionalized account of the life of record producer Russell Simmons (renamed Russell Walker in the film and played by Blair Underwood), his relationship with Run-D.M.C., Kurtis Blow, and other luminaries in the world of rap music, and the Def Jam record label. In the midst of money troubles, musical rivalries, disagreements, and familial strife a competition emerges between Walker and his brother Run (of Run-D.M.C.) for the affections of club performer Shelia E. The film was co-produced by Simmons, and as such he had some input into the narrative and casting. Krush Groove was released by Warner Bros. and made a respectable $11 million at the U.S. box office. While Schultz has worked on a wide variety of subjects, his output reveals a consistent interest in evoking a sympathetic and complex account of the African American experience, which is undoubtedly evident in this film.
Rappin’, directed by Joel Silberg, was an entry in the Cannon Group’s cycle of hip hop-oriented exploitation extravaganzas. It featured John Rappinhood (Mario Van Peebles)—an ex-con who returns to his inner city Pittsburgh community to protect it from nefarious real estate developers and rival thugs. While saving the Hill District from peril, Rappinhood also jump-starts his musical career and wins the affections of his longtime love interest Dixie (Tasia Valenza).
The second category of hip hop musical films—the surface hip hop musical—includes the two other films belonging to Cannon’s hip hop run, Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2, as well as Delivery Boys, Body Rock, and Breakin’ Through. These films make references to select aspects of hip hop culture and feature breakdancers or practitioners of “street dance” as central characters. What sets them apart from the true hip hop musical is the way in which the emphasis shifts from exposing the social conditions of inner city life to highlighting choreographed numbers and brightly costumed performers. These films relinquish (or at least reduce) the centrality of graffiti as a clandestine practice, rapping as a communal exercise, and the art of DJing in favor of utilizing the energy and visual interest to be found in breakdancing. The surface hip hop musical also evokes a far less specific image of the inner city ghetto, almost never featuring explicit images of recognizable urban locales.
Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2, along with Rappin’, were produced in a furious bid to exploit the news media’s intense interest in hip hop culture. Breakin’, released in May 1984, was the first and most financially successful mainstream breakdance-oriented feature film. The sequel followed with moderate success just a few months later. Historically, Thomas Doherty notes that the term exploitation was utilized by the motion picture industry at mid-century to refer to films that aimed to exploit a particular audience (usually teenagers), had a second-rate budget, and included “controversial, bizarre, or timely subject matter amenable to wild promotion.”7 Cannon has closely followed the model of early exploitation cinema and the company has profited from turning out cheaply made films structured around a variety of fads appealing to a youth demographic.8
Breakin’ was directed by Joel Silberg, while Sam Firstenberg made Breakin’ 2. In the first film, professionally trained upper-middle-class jazz dancer Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) teams up with “street dancers” Ozone (Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quinones) and Turbo (Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers) to bring urban dance forms within the purview of institutional performance. The trio battles the resistant forces of academic dance culture as well as other “street dance” crews on their journey towards performance success. Breakin’ 2 reworked subject matter from its predecessor, such as interracial and cross class desire. However, it also explored broadly defined themes of urban gentrification and communal empowerment as the group organizes a fundraiser in order to prevent the destruction of Miracles, a neighborhood dance center. Even though breakdancing is referenced in the title of the Breakin’ series, it is always described as street dance within the films while rapping, graffiti writing, and DJing are either completely obliterated or relegated to peripheral roles. The breaker moves to center stage in these two productions, but the dancer’s tie to hip hop culture more generally is severed as a result of the films’ refusal to name either breakdancing or hip hop within the narrative. This dislocation between the practice of breakdancing and the other performance traditions of hip hop are characteristic of the surface hip hop musical.
Evidently, spectators found the initial glimpses of an emergent black and Latino folk culture exciting and pleasurable given that a film with relatively low production values such as Breakin’ became the eighteenth highest grossing film of the year.9 It returned over $38 million at the box office, edging out such productions as The Terminator and Clint Eastwood’s City Heat.10 That Breakin’ cracked the top twenty might astonish viewers today, but as Robert Sklar has noted, historically (between the 1930s and the 1970s) the yearly top earning pictures also tended to be films which garnered industry awards and praise, whereas during the 1980s there was no longer a correlation between the highest earners and perceptions and distinctions of “quality” within the film world itself.11 Many hip hop musicals made a tidy profit but none repeated the financial success of Hollywood’s first attempt at exploiting the nation’s increasing interest in hip hop culture.
Body Rock was a New World Pictures release that featured soap opera star Lorenzo Lamas, who had recently emerged as a “heartthrob” on the primetime hit series Falcon Crest. In the film, Lamas portrays Chilly D, a poor unemployed New York youth who is part of a hip hop crew. His crew dances at the underground nightclub Rhythm Nation until Chilly is lured into the decadent world of wealthy patrons who install him as the MC at a swank new dance club. Chilly leaves his friends and would-be girlfriend from the old neighborhood. Next, he is divested of his newfound fame and fortune after rebuking the affections of his male patron. The posh club steals the name Body Rock and attempts to assemble a new group of performers under the same moniker. Angry at this turn of events, Chilly and his old gang get even by crashing the unveiling of the new Body Rock and taking over the show. Following its debut at Cannes, Body Rock was poorly received; it netted two Razzie nominations (for worst original song and worst actor), performed dismally at the box office, and director Marcelo Epstein was never to helm another feature film.
The made-for-Disney Channel film Breakin’ Through cleverly avoided any references to specific social problems while still loosely conforming to the structure of the hip hop musical. Like Breakin’ and several other films I discuss, Breakin’ Through staged an artistic “showdown” between the “legitimate” theatrical world and street dance. The film brings two performance spaces—the stage and the street—together through the genre conventions of the Hollywood musical. However, this generic twist does not contain any critical edge but rather defuses all of the radical possibilities inherent within hip hop musical cinema. With the exception of the opening sequence, the film alternates between two settings. In the first instance, we witness street dancers in tightly framed shots that reveal little of the surrounding urban environment. The rest of the film takes place in the rehearsal space of a theatrical dance company as they prepare for the opening of a new musical show. When a choreographer attempts to bring the breakdancers into the space of the theater, friction develops between the street crew, headed by an Italian youth named Ripsaw, and the rest of the professionally trained dancers in the production. A happy finale is achieved when the choreographer utilizes these tensions and appropriates them for the subject matter and formal arrangement of the final show. Thus, the class conflict inherent in the acrimonious relation between different dance traditions in the film is neutralized with the final scene. The film completely aestheticizes the “real” inequity and conflict that is at the heart of the true hip hop musical—the tension produced by the meeting of two different performance spaces or traditions, which signify two different socioeconomic populations. It also attempted to avoid the association between hip hop and the empowerment of black and Latino youth by casting a black actor, Broadway veteran Ben Vereen, to represent institutional dance. Breakin’ Through further separated hip hop culture from any specific community or racial group by featuring an ethnically mixed street dance crew and locating practitioners of hip hop culture in an insulated space, which had no connection to any larger community or actual urban environment.
Delivery Boys is perhaps the most unique hip hop musical explored in this book. Not only was it a cheaply made exploitation film targeted towards a juvenile audience, it also transformed the subgenre into a complete farce. Promotional material for the film emphasized its blatant aspirations towards juvenile sex comedy status rather than its relationship to hip hop culture. Images on posters and VHS covers for Delivery Boys (fig. 1.1) featured not breakdancing or graffiti, but an interior bedroom scene suggestive of sex (red bra hanging casually over the bed frame) and partying (room in general disarray, open pizza box from the night before)—advertising strategies that had proved successful in promoting earlier teen sex films like Animal House (1978), Losin’ It (1983), and Meatballs II (1984).
The film features a multiethnic (Jewish, Italian, and Puerto Rican) hip hop crew named the Delivery Boys, most of whom also deliver pizza for Ben’s, a local restaurant. The plot of the film focuses on their desire to perform in the Brooklyn Bridge Break Dance Contest, which promises a prize of ten thousand dollars to the winning crew. However, the Devil Dogs, a rival dance team, attempt to prevent the Delivery Boy’s entry into the competition through a series of absurd scenarios, in which the hapless breakers are lured into “dangerous” situations on their pizza delivery route. For instance, delivery boy Max (Josh Marcano) is sent to an uptown apartment for a delivery only to be seduced by Elizabeth (Kelly Nichols), an older girl who then keeps him in her room by installing a vicious guard dog outside her door. In order to avoid detection by the girl’s father, Max dons a wig and dress and attempts to sneak out of the apartment. He successfully escapes and performs at the breakdance contest while still in drag. In the end, all of the Delivery Boys arrive at the competition only to have the dance showdown turn into a literal battle. There is no progressive, political, or even remotely critical aspect to this film; it relies on bathroom humor and absurd scenarios to keep the narrative afloat. The film’s director, Ken Handler, also suffered the same fate as the director of Body Rock with this film effectively ending his career.
Fig. 1.1. Delivery Boys (1984) poster.
From this point on, I will use either the terms “true hip hop musical” and “surface hip hop musical” to refer to this group of films. Additionally, the more general “hip hop musical” will be used to denote instances when both the true and the surface hip hop musical are referenced. These terms do not imply value judgments on the quality of the films but rather suggest important differences within the range of musicals that adopted various aspects of hip hop culture during the 1980s. While it can be generally stated that the true hip hop musical is overtly political in its content because it insists on the visibility of urban conditions—poverty, dilapidated housing, and crime—there are some instances in which particular features of the surface hip hop musical also contain potentially radical social critiques in their narrative structure. However, the reduction of location shooting in the surface hip hop musical tends to diminish its radical possibilities because social conditions are rarely connected to images of actual, recognizable urban neighborhoods. The use of location shooting and the “documentary impulse” in the true hip hop musical will be more fully elaborated in relation to Wild Style in the following chapter.
The divisions used here are meant to organize material for the reader and to reveal similarities and differences within the films. These categories prove useful in many instances, but the corpus of films discussed in this book is also viewed as a multifaceted, ambiguous, and often contradictory set of material. I adopt such a structure so as to avoid organizing these productions in terms of a linear progression, with Wild Style as the first genuine representation of hip hop culture in a feature film, followed by other hip hop musicals that increasingly exploit an authentic cultural form, eventually resulting in films conceived by corporate interests for the sole purpose of exploiting the youth market’s interest in African American and Latino urban music and dance. This is something I want to resist, since it does not help to accurately explain the historical circumstances that facilitated the diffusion of an emergent urban ethos from the margins to the center of cultural representation. For instance, writing in 1984, Gene Siskel noted that
after the success of Flashdance, corporate Hollywood began filling its dance card in earnest. Breakin’, made cheaply and quickly by the exploitation-oriented Cannon Film Group to beat the competition, opened three weeks ago and already has grossed $22 million, making it hugely profitable. A sequel with the same cast, called Electric Boogaloo, is due to be released in record time—September. Beat Street, from Orion Pictures, opens June 8, and is getting a media buildup that suggests it may even outgross Breakin’… Breakdancing movies are cheap to make. They don’t need stars; you can’t see an actor’s face anyway when he’s spinning on his head. Breakdancing movies simply need a strong, self-realization storyline, easy-to-relate-to characters, and fabulous dancing. Much more expensive than the movie is the obligatory TV ad campaign.12
Siskel accurately remarks that some breakdancing films were the product of youth market-oriented film companies looking to exploit a seemingly new dance craze. Later in the article, Siskel makes reference to issues of racial inclusiveness within these films, although he never addresses the ways in which breakdance, and hip hop in general, function as fluid vectors of cultural interaction. He does notice, though, that Beat Street, unlike Breakin’, does not contain a white character in a central role, and remarks that “it will be interesting to see if that hurts Beat Street at the box office. By comparison, Breakin’ was packaged more as a commercial vehicle, because its central character is a young white waitress who learns to breakdance from a black and a Puerto Rican youth in sunny Southern California.”13 But there is no attempt to explain how this white character intervenes in, or is incorporated into, the world of black and Latino performance on screen, or how race figures into the history and structure of American musical cinema in general—issues that will be fully explored in what follows.
The hip hop films with which this book is concerned satisfy the most basic film industry definition of the musical genre articulated by Rick Altman in his important work The American Film Musical: “a film with music, that is, with music that emanates from what I will call the diegesis, the fictional world created by the film (as opposed to Hollywood’s typical background music, which instead comes from nowhere).”14 They also correspond to, or are in dialogue with, several musical subgenres, such as the fairy tale musical, the show musical, and the folk musical. Altman has also argued that classical-era Hollywood musical films frequently relied upon conservative elements, such as communal harmony and heterosexual pairing, to form the main strands of narrative progression.
For example, the parallelism between triumphant heterosexual courtship and success in the entertainment world is a hallmark of the Hollywood show musical.15 From Depression-era Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, such as Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and Dames (1934), to the elaborate unmasking of cinematic production in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the show musical is constructed around both the creation of a romantic couple and a successful final performance.16 Class differences, meddling families, and chance mishaps may stall or frustrate the pair’s successful coupling until the concluding moments of the film but eventually the couple’s tensions are resolved and the viewer’s desire for romantic fulfillment is satisfied through a final victorious show or performance in which the male and female leads are ultimately revealed as an amorous pair.
The hip hop musical, though, exploits the conservative plot structures and narrative elements of classical film in order to comment upon contemporary urban conditions, often with very radical and subversive results. It nearly always features a potential heterosexual pairing and the amorous trajectory of this couple becomes completely entangled with the world of music, dance, and performance as the film progresses.17 Incarnations of the film musical featuring aspects of hip hop culture usually equate this generic romantic musical ending with the potential to bring different city spaces or performance environments together. In some examples, very specific urban imagery is evoked through the consistent use of location shooting. For instance, in Wild Style the concluding performance involves the staging of a rap concert featuring uptown (the Bronx) talent in a downtown space (the Lower East Side) in the spirit of both communal celebration and exposure of local talent.
In Beat Street, the two would-be lovers come from different socioeconomic classes, symbolized by their place of residence, the South Bronx—a poor inner city neighborhood characterized by dereliction and crime, and the wealthiest regions of upper Manhattan bordering Central Park. After the death of his friend Ramon, Kenny organizes a party to celebrate the fallen graffiti artist’s life. The event is Kenny’s big chance at stardom as a DJ, and his decision to create a “hip hop wake” is initially viewed by his friends as a potentially disastrous career move. This final performance extravaganza presided over by Kenny is a triumph which both connects him to his South Bronx community and cements his ability to maneuver outside of it in the entertainment world. In fact, the final images of the film reveal Kenny on stage performing with the wife of the deceased Ramon on one side and his love interest/music producer on the other. He straddles the forces of communal integration (represented by Ramon’s wife) and the ability to transcend the limitations of inner city life through a romantic link to Tracey, his wealthy upper Manhattan girlfriend. The final performance sequence magically erases any contradictions regarding the ability to succeed outside of the neighborhood, as well as underscores the importance of using music and dance to nurture the community. In this film, the link between romantic partnering and success in the entertainment world is even more emphatically stated because Kenny’s love interest is a powerful figure in the “legitimate” music world. In Breakin’, Breakin’ 2, and Breakin’ Through, the two potential lovers come from different ethnic and racial backgrounds. The Breakin’ series also emphasizes the vastly different socioeconomic realms occupied by the two leads. Further, Breakin’, Breakin’ 2, Beat Street, and Breakin’ Through, like so many successful Hollywood fairy tale musicals, including Love Me Tonight (1932) and Top Hat, use romantic pairing to symbolize the blending and merging of opposites. Unlike these earlier precedents, however, the hip hop musical’s romantic pairings always signify contemporary socioeconomic inequities and tensions.
The final show or performance number in Rappin’ also works to bridge the relationship between local performance traditions and success beyond the community. This number brings these themes together as Rappinhood dances through the streets while rapping with the entire community and his girl, Dixie, at his side. In the concluding moments of this film, a white music producer, Dixie’s boss, suddenly appears with contract in hand. Previously, the producer’s repeated attempts to get the rapper to sign a recording deal were rebuffed by Rappinhood, but during this final attempt the producer is met with a smile and a willing future star. Rappinhood signs on the dotted line, assuring his success in the commercial rap industry after having just single-handedly saved his community from destruction. The film makes a point of emphasizing his signature on the contract, and thus his guarantee of commercial success, by cutting to a close-up as he pens his name in very large black letters across the document. Interestingly, this close-up recalls what has been left out of the hip hop scene in this film, the act of graffiti writing. Rappin’ downplayed the importance of graffiti writing and reduced the multiple and interconnected performance aspects of hip hop culture, instead focusing on Rappinhood’s rise towards stardom. The hip hop practitioner’s signature is penned on a corporate document instead of a neighborhood wall but the film reassures us that Rappinhood will not leave his community behind, though, as they contribute to the final number in this scene by singing along with the star.
According to Altman, the final production number within the show musical assumes the quality of a commodity whether or not it follows the usual pattern of the backstage musical, which almost always culminates in a polished and professional theatrical show produced for a paying audience.18 He notes that “the show musical is a white-collar genre, consistently showing only upper echelon production personnel and performers, while masking the blue-collar work of production.”19 While this may be true for many musicals of the classical era, by the 1980s the genre had undergone significant changes, and several hip hop musicals remarkably end with a show or final number that is emphatically not a commodity, or at least not one that conforms to middle-class expectations of entertainment. The final shows of both Beat Street and Breakin’ 2, for instance, are fundraisers. As noted above, the concluding number in Rappin’ takes place in the street as the entire community performs together to symbolize their triumph over the forces of corporate greed and gentrification. Krush Groove envisions the final show as an impromptu rap number performed by the Fat Boys, Run-D.M.C., Shelia E., and Kurtis Blow at the legendary South Bronx club Disco Fever, while the final rap concert of Charlie Ahearn’s independent art film Wild Style is a free event produced for the community, by the community.
Music and dance performance circulates in the realm of the everyday in nearly all hip hop musicals. Thus, the final show of the hip hop musical in several instances works against the production of a middle-class commodity, instead functioning to undo the thrust of the traditional show musical that “perpetuates a romantic mythology whereby creativity is vested in the hands of the few.”20 Nonetheless, in other examples—those that work toward reconciling the spaces of the street and the academy within dance performance such as Breakin’ Through and Breakin’—we witness a concluding number that comes closer to Altman’s articulation of the final show musical performance as middle-class commodity. They both include highly choreographed finales that take place in large theatrical venues intended for paying audiences.
The traditional parameters of the show musical are opened up far beyond the conventional theatrical proscenium in these hip hop-centered films. When the musical’s traditional resolution—a juxtaposition of successful public performance with the romantic union of the two leads—is used to conclude the hip hop musical, it frequently transgresses the historically conservative features associated with the classical-era show musical. This is achieved through the former’s emphasis on emergent and inchoate urban youth performance, as well as its broad and inclusive racial spectrum. A hip hop–oriented finale that is explicitly concerned with illuminating contemporary urban relations replaces the classical musical’s emphasis on familial and communal harmony within white middle-class America, and the mechanics of producing bourgeois entertainment.
The hip hop musical also centers on communal performance, spontaneous song and dance, and the talents of the untrained amateur, all facets of the traditional American folk musical. This may seem an obvious point, but even though the various practices of hip hop within these films have been described by academics as folk culture, a direct relation to the folk musical has been left unexamined—a surprising oversight considering several important early Hollywood musicals featuring a predominantly African American cast are, in fact, folk musicals. The hip hop musical resists the semantic demands of the folk musical as a setting that stages the recollection of the American past as an idealized state (early black-cast musicals did not necessarily take place in the Old South; nevertheless, they usually reflected the stereotypes about black rural communities that were perpetuated in this era) but emphatically retains the folk musical’s emphasis on collective interaction through performance.
A less obvious but still relevant relationship exists between the hip hop musical Wild Style and the fairy tale musical. Emerging from a European stage tradition, the fairy tale musical is based on the Viennese operetta, a form that privileges sexual intrigue as its central theme.21 The plots of early Hollywood musicals influenced by the Viennese tradition often took up the theme of class transcendence, which was frequently facilitated through an elaborate play of mistaken identity that allowed “the characters on stage to play out their hidden desires.”22 This is specifically relevant to two of the productions discussed in this book, Wild Style, as mentioned above, and Flashdance, films that will be examined in depth in Chapters 2 and 4, respectively. In these musicals, the employment of a secret identity in relation to the musical plot is radically reoriented in ways that foreground a link between race, class, gender, and performance culture in the urban milieu. For instance, the revelation of a secret identity in Wild Style is staged to dramatize the difficulty of balancing personal success with communal and familial obligations, while the device is used in Flashdance to call attention to audience expectations regarding gender, race, and class within a working-class environ.
I am not the first to argue for a subversive element present within the musical genre. Matthew Tinkcom has recently challenged a primary focus on narrative progression in Hollywood musical film, suggesting that, in the case of musicals made by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Freed Unit, potentially subversive elements were introduced into the films via the mise-en-scène. An emphasis on artifice, costume, and pure spectacle, rather than plot and dialogue, he proposes, undermined the apparently conservative and heteronormative features of Yolanda and the Thief (1945) and The Pirate. His reading calls attention to the number of homosexual men who labored in the Freed Unit, working together to create the unique style of visual excess associated with MGM musical films of this period. The look of these mainstream films was highly influential, yet their visual codes have now been reclaimed by academics as “camp,” a queer subcultural aesthetic.23 On the one hand, the classical musical genre insists upon heteronormativity and conservative notions of community and family, and on the other, its structure allows for highly transgressive sexual “play” within the text. Apparent dualities within musical film in this instance highlight the contested nature of the genre, and while subversive elements are arguably present in a number of classical musical films they are usually brought within the purview of rigid sexual codes. Such dissident elements in the hip hop musical are undoubtedly enabled by a mise en scène that frequently gestures toward contemporary urban transformations and social struggle as well as a cinematic practice that engages deliberate “play” with established generic conventions.
The majority of hip hop musicals combine elements from all three categories of the Hollywood musical genre. Aspects of the fairy tale musical, such as class boundaries and conflicting value systems, are nearly always resolved at the end of the hip hop musical through a feature of the show musical, a final stage production that equates performance success with romantic paring. Thus, a structural aspect of the show musical allows for the “merging of cultural values once defined as mutually exclusive,” a thematic feature of the fairy tale musical.24 Whereas Altman predominantly defines the American musical as a form that privileges distinct subgen-eric categories, the postclassical hip hop musical insists on blending and recombining elements of all three types of musical film. It is tempting, therefore, to discuss the mixture, recombination, and transformation of classical-era musical elements in the hip hop musical in terms of postmodernism. The postmodern is recognized as a historical shift emerging in the 1960s (dates vary somewhat across disciplines) in which cultural products are no longer defined by their particular singular qualities. Rather, they are concerned with plurality and the conjunction of different styles, eras, and methods following a crisis of faith in a culture’s predominant master narratives (e.g., high modernism in both art and architecture, the classical Hollywood film, etc.). Many accounts of postmodernism argue that this era and its cultural products are marked by a distinct depoliticization as historical elements are integrated into new forms.25 The hip hop musical, in truth, reveals a contrary operation at work. As elements of the classical Hollywood musical are resurrected in these films, they allow for a uniquely politicized viewpoint of contemporary urban life to emerge. This reversal is only possible because the films materialize at a singular moment in which the urban environment is in flux. The specific cinematic imagery found in these musicals (photography of inner city decay and its accompanying urban youth, the emergent practice of graffiti art, etc.) and the new generic iconography it introduced (the diffusion of violence into dance, the creation of multiracial dance and artistic spaces, and the absence of a traditional nuclear family) symbolized a national economic crisis that was rapidly changing the contours of American urban centers as inner city problems grew in tandem with suburban sprawl.
When the hip hop musical emerged during the early 1980s, the inner city ghetto in general, and the South Bronx in particular, were emblems of domestic ruin and dysfunctional urban governance.26 Haunting images of the region’s perishing housing stock were revealed to the nation on the front page of the New York Times, following President Carter’s initial visit to the South Bronx in 1977.27 As the president surveyed the wasted urban vista of Charlotte Street—one of the most dilapidated segments of the borough—he grimly stated to the secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, “See which areas can still be salvaged.”28 The great towers of rubble and debris rising up from the street in both Wild Style and Beat Street several years later reminded spectators that poverty, a preponderance of damaged housing, and myriad social problems threatening the stability of the family structure were still affecting South Bronx residents and diverse urban ghettos to a far greater degree than other types of communities.
President Carter’s highly publicized visit to Charlotte Street was undoubtedly an attempt to assuage the government’s perceived neglect of African American communities and social problems. Less than two months before Carter’s visit, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., a reporter for the Washington Post, had called on the president to visit black New York neighborhoods as a sign of commitment to African American urban citizens.29 In a lengthy criticism of the Carter administration’s first six months in the White House, Jordan writes,
It is not enough simply to pursue aggregate policies that increase the number of jobs or homes, for example, without targeting those policies to ensure that Blacks and other disadvantaged minorities get their fair share of those jobs and homes. Alongside such basic policy steps, the President and his administration could make those symbolic gestures that are vital ingredients of national leadership. In his actions and rhetoric, the President can demonstrate his concern for America’s poor and her minorities. The symbolic acts of his first days in office signaled to the nation the new administration’s openness and its more populist style. So, too, can the President send signals to the urban poor. One such signal, costing no more than the fuel for Air Force One, would be to visit deprived urban neighborhoods. A President who went to Clinton, Mass., and Yazoo City, Miss., should also walk the mean streets of the South Bronx or Brooklyn’s Bushwick section to assure people of his concern and of his determination to help them change their lives.30
The South Bronx’s legacy as a symbol of national bureaucratic neglect and insensitivity to urban communities of color continued for the next two decades. Indeed, presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan also visited Charlotte Street in 1980 in an attempt to show that Carter did not fulfill his initial promise of salvaging and restructuring the area.31 Jesse Jackson, too, visited the area in 1984 during his bid for Democratic presidential nominee to again stress the continued governmental neglect of the region.32
Visualizing these particular urban spaces within the hip hop musical could have been construed as a risky undertaking by the film’s financial backers. The mainstream news media routinely and excessively showcased the black and Latino spaces of the South Bronx and Pittsburgh’s Hill District as nothing but violent crime and drug-riddled neighborhoods worthy of demolition rather than rehabilitation. For instance, an article from the Washington Post declared of the South Bronx in 1979 that
if you add up that area’s problems—the many blocks of vacant lots and vandalized buildings; the high percentages of people on welfare and out of work; the drugs, the crime, the flight of jobs and hope—it’s hard to see how any project that can be paid for can make much of a dent. To put it another way, the urban strategy that is currently popular, shoring up existing neighborhoods, won’t work where there is no real neighborhood left to save.33
Lee Lescaze, writing for the Washington Post in the same year, refers to the South Bronx as “a moonscape of block after block leveled by arson and virtually uncontrolled crime.”34 The wrath of rampant arson and subsequent depopulation in the South Bronx prompted Ronald Reagan to famously compare the neighborhood in 1980 to the devastation caused by the Blitz during World War II.35
Interestingly, the most prominent national symbol of urban squalor and despair in the 1980’s had previously signified prosperity and hope for white immigrant New Yorkers in the early twentieth century. The South Bronx had been a destination for aspiring Jewish New Yorkers looking to escape the slum tenement neighborhoods of Manhattan during the 1920s and ’30s.36 Yet, even while ethnic whites were moving into the Bronx in search of a better life, plans were already afoot for the area’s degeneration. Plans to construct a roadway system that would connect Manhattan to the outer boroughs were initiated by the New York Regional Plan Association in 1929.37 The fruition of these efforts, resulting in the construction of modern highways such as the Cross-Bronx Expressway designed by Robert Moses, would eventually cut through the heart of neighborhoods like the South Bronx, leaving a wake of rubble, displaced tenants, and destroyed communities.38 Marshall Berman’s poetic description of this massive project, recounted from the very center of the construction belt, emphasizes the birth of a newly formed landscape rising up out of the ground with a terrifying grandeur:
For ten years, through the late 1950s and early 1960s, the center of the Bronx was pounded and blasted and smashed. My friends and I would stand on the parapet of the Grand Concourse, where 174th Street had been, and survey the work’s progress—the immense steam shovels and bulldozers and timber and steel beams, the hundreds of workers in their variously colored hard hats, the giant cranes reaching far above the Bronx’s tallest roofs, the dynamite blasts and tremors, the wild, jagged crags of rock newly torn, the vistas of devastation stretching for miles to the east and west as far as the eye could see—and marvel to see our ordinary nice neighborhood transformed into sublime, spectacular ruins.39
White residents fled the South Bronx in tandem with the erection of the Expressway at mid-century, and as their numbers significantly dwindled over the years, black and Latino families began to move into the area.40 These new residents inherited a mutilated urban landscape left in the wake of the highway’s construction.
As the images of Wild Style and Beat Street reveal, by the early 1980s a great deal of New York City’s low income housing structures were dilapidated, abandoned, or simply no longer appropriate spaces for domestic dwellings. This problem had in fact surfaced in the late 1960s and the city responded by concluding that rent control laws were to blame since they prevented landlords from raising rents sufficiently to continue adequate maintenance regimens.41 Following from this, the municipal government amended rent control laws and in 1970 initiated the Maximum Base Rent system, which guaranteed mandatory yearly increases.42 As a result of these drastic changes to New York municipal law, a large-scale grassroots tenant movement gained momentum throughout the city. The movement was somewhat fractured and ad-hoc, incorporating groups from different income levels and ethnic affiliations, including black and Latino neighborhoods. Over the years, participants and community activists rehabilitated abandoned structures, initiated rent strikes, and fought rent decontrol.43
When Jimmy Carter visited the Bronx in 1977, he was exposed to the shocking images of inner city decay but he also witnessed the results of a Sweat Equity rehabilitation project.44 This type of urban program allowed tenants to perform the physical labor of regenerating a building in exchange for a unit within the apartment complex. The visibility of ruined residential streets following the New York Times’ coverage of Carter’s visit sparked a renewal in funding to different neighborhood organizations working to combat urban decay.45 The city invested large amounts of capital in neighborhood regeneration projects such as the DAMP (Division of Alternative Management Program) initiative within the municipal housing agency, and overall made a concerted effort to help tenants organize cooperative housing ownership systems.46
Unfortunately, the flourishing urban renewal efforts of the late ’70s lost most of their funding in the early ’80s when the Reagan administration redirected the capital reserved for these projects.47 As a result, the New York City Sweat Equity program ended in 1980, and there was a severe reduction in the availability of monetary aid for neighborhood regeneration projects throughout the city. When government sponsored rehabilitation programs were reduced or terminated, tenants were forced to either return to grassroots avenues of activism that circumvented state and city channels or compete with each other for shrinking funding opportunities offered by municipal agencies.
The hip hop musical emphasizes the public spaces of communal exchange and civic activism within the South Bronx and other historically black neighborhoods, including the front stoop and the residential street. This practice draws upon a long tradition of African American literature and film that uses the city as “a metaphor for African American experience.”48 Paula Massood, among others, remarks that “the hood” has represented both a dystopic and utopic trope in African American film and literary production, functioning as a signifier that allows hitherto invisible spaces of urban life to reveal themselves.49 The city, with its racially demarcated boundaries, is evoked in the work of early black twentieth century novelists through the careful delineation of specific sites of play, work and torment, identified by street names, popular dance hall addresses, restaurants, and industrial spaces. For instance, the second chapter of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, an important work of the Harlem Renaissance, opens with:
Jake was paid off. He changed a pound note he had brought with him. He had fifty-nine dollars. From South Ferry he took an express subway train for Harlem. Jake drank three Martini cocktails with cherries in them. The price, he noticed, had gone up from ten to twenty-five cents. He went to Bank’s and had a Maryland fried-chicken feed—a big one with candied sweet potatoes. He left his suitcase behind the counter of a saloon on Lennox Avenue. He went for a promenade on Seventh Avenue between One Hundred and Thirty-fifth and One Hundred and Fortieth Streets. He thrilled to Harlem. His blood was hot. His eyes were alert as he sniffed the street like a hound. Seventh Avenue was nice, a little too nice that night. Jake turned off on Lennox Avenue.50
McKay makes use of very specific urban markers throughout the novel. In this work, the reader is literally able to follow “step-by-step” the character’s journey through the streets of New York City.
A number of scholars have remarked upon the ways in which the hip hop cinema of the late ’80s and early ’90s, variously termed “New Black Realism,” “New Jack Cinema,” or “rapsploitation” film, carries out the same tradition through the evocation of particular urban locales.51 What has not been addressed is the way in which Wild Style and a host of other hip hop-oriented musicals appearing before the rise of ghetto-centric “New Black Realism” underscore the urgency of representing the actual contemporary topography of urban communities of color. The entertainment editor for the Afro-American, Ida Peters, made much of the fact that Beat Street was filmed entirely on location in New York City, and featured places that would have been notable and meaningful for contemporary communities of color “including an actual abandoned tenement building in the South Bronx, the Harlem campus of C.C.N.Y, and several subway stations.”52 She goes on to remark that “the popular Roxy dance club, which was the first Manhattan discotheque to spotlight hip hop music and break dancing, is the site of a climactic breaker battle.”53
Wild Style also attests to the importance of specific urban locations by employing lengthy panning shots to emphasize the vastness of urban ruin in the South Bronx, and it utilized recognizable and meaningful inner city locations such as the Dixie Club, a famous party spot in the 1970s often presided over by “the godfather of hip hop,” Grandmaster Flash, a local grocery store named Connie’s Superette, and the immense expanse of the New York City subway system. Ahearn also made use of locations that had a particularly poignant meaning for specific individuals from the hip hop community. He notes that a pivotal scene in the film, the “Basketball Throwdown,” was shot in a local Bronx park at Valentine and 183rd Street, the spot where Grandmaster Caz, who performs on the title track of the film “had played ball … as a kid, and had rocked that spot as one half of the DJ crew Casanova Fly and Disco Wiz the night the lights went out for the big blackout of 1977.”54 Krush Groove also made use of Upper Manhattan and South Bronx locations such as the Marble Hill Projects and Sal Abbatiello’s legendary hip hop club Disco Fever.
Remarkably, Beat Street even gestures towards the innovative strategies of New York City’s Sweat Equity movement. The film not only documented the devastation of the South Bronx and its deteriorating infrastructure, it also explored the effects of homelessness, poverty, and inadequate housing when Ramon the graffiti artist, his girlfriend, and their young baby are forced to take up residence in an abandoned housing unit. This space is initially unfit for habitation but Ramon’s friends use their skills to obtain heat and light, and transform the ruined interior into a cozy domestic dwelling.
Like Beat Street, Rappin’, a musical that tackles gentrification and dereliction in Pittsburgh’s communities of color, also makes housing problems and urban blight a principal strand of its narrative trajectory. Pittsburgh’s Hill District never became a national spectacle and symbol of urban poverty on the same level as the South Bronx, yet it too was an impoverished black neighborhood that experienced a simultaneous decline in housing stock. While Ahearn was filming Wild Style amid the devastated urban ruins of the South Bronx, the Hill District was experiencing a similar crisis. William Robbins, a reporter for the New York Times writes of Pittsburgh:
It is a city of neighborhoods and most, like its blue-collar South Side community and the Italian neighborhood around Larimer Avenue, are stable. But the city is losing more housing than it gains … Arthur Edmunds, executive director of the Urban League here, noted that it was the Hill District, a black inner city ghetto, that had suffered most from deterioration and that doubling up of families in black homes was increasing.55
Despite the appearance of dilapidated buildings and poverty plaguing the neighborhood in the 1980s, a middle class of vendors and professionals living in high quality dwellings characterized the Hill District community in the mid-nineteenth century.56 Successive waves of immigration brought new ethnic and racial groups to the area, changing the character of the district as an influx of working-class Jewish, Irish, and black Americans brought their traditions and values to the community. According to the WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh, the area transitioned from predominantly white middle-class respectability (evidenced as late as 1887) to working-class poverty and immorality in the twentieth century. This document was part of the New Deal-era Federal Writers Project, and was the product of different authors throughout the 1930s. They write the following (and one can only assume that these observations are based on evidence gathered some time in the 1930s):
On the Hill, 25,000 or almost half of the Negro people of Pittsburgh now try to live, fighting poverty, squalor, disease, crime, vice—every human handicap. Here thrive saloons and speakeasies, gambling houses and pawn shops, pool rooms, dope dens, houses of prostitution and assignation. The Hill is the symbol of the worst that a fiercely industrial city like Pittsburgh can do to human beings.57
At this time, it was recognized that black citizens in this area were threatened by inadequate housing, and the authors go on to describe the actual physical spaces of the neighborhood, remarking that “its dominant note is squalor.”58 They observe that
narrow streets are lined with tawdry houses, dingy red, their scarred doorways and tottering porches often reached by crumbling wooden steps. Roofs sag. Walls lean. Window frames are rotted and patched. … No street on the Hill runs level for more than a quarter of a mile. Dozens of them, many of which are dirt and ash, gullied by open sewers, climb almost perpendicular. … Along the Hill streetcars side-swipe parked automobiles and trucks, and wait for the driver to push or pry loose his vehicle. Curbs are broken, cobbles dislodged. … Doorways and curbs are littered with paper; discarded boxes and crates inconvenience the pedestrian. A dead cat may be crushed against a curb. A man may lie bleeding in the angle of a house wall.59
Clearly, city space itself—the ramshackle structures and broken roads—are articulated as a threat to the bodily well-being of neighborhood residents. The Hill resident is endangered not only by the “moral ills” of working-class culture, but also by the physical hazards of poor industrial urban infrastructure. Even the streetcar, a service usually understood as a boon to poorer city residents, is described as a dangerous and potentially harmful menace to the urban pedestrian. The home, too, is ultimately depicted as a place that brings not salvation and comfort but physical harm.
Fifty years later, Rappin’ showcases the poverty of neighborhood residents and inadequate housing as deleterious aspects of life in the Hill District. Through the conventions of the musical film, the community is able to unite in unique ways in order to overcome the danger inherent in their meager conditions. For instance, when nefarious real estate developers attempt to prevent heat from being delivered to the dilapidated structures, the neighborhood devises a plan to steal oil and heat their homes. Only through cooperative action can the community survive and keep its physical spaces safe for everyone (the neighborhood prostitute lures the gas man into her apartment while his fuel is pilfered by the residents). Rappinhood also performs many of the musical numbers with the neglected buildings and urban wasteland as a backdrop, further underscoring the constant struggle to infuse the impoverished landscape with positive energy.
While the Hill District has been a problematic site of urban development for numerous decades, and a neighborhood with a rich and varied immigrant history, 1985 marked the opening of the first subway system for the city of Pittsburgh, and the years 1977–88 saw the implementation of the Renaissance II redevelopment project. This undertaking was a large-scale, public-private revamping of major urban areas, including several Hill neighborhoods. These major changes created a new set of problems for the residents of one of the historically poorest communities in the city. Even though the initial Renaissance project (1945–69) and its sequel sought to improve public life, urban historians argue that they also “disrupted neighborhoods and uprooted sizable numbers of people.”60 Gentrification, and the encroachment of white corporate interests into a historically black neighborhood—both problems that have plagued the actual Hill District—materialize as important themes in Rappin’.
Fig. 1.2. John Rappinhood (Mario Van Peebles) and his neighborhood entourage rap and dance through the streets of Pittsburgh in Rappin’ (1985); also pictured: Tasia Valenza. Courtesy of Photofest.
To be sure, the moments in which Mario van Peebles executes his rather inadequate rapping abilities while dancing through devastated Hill District neighborhoods have provoked many groans. Nevertheless, the film makes a very provocative statement regarding the power that the inner-city performer actually wields in relation to urban space. Most importantly, Rappin’ unequivocally suggests that the voice and body of Rappinhood as performer acts as a catalyst for community action that portends very real change in the ownership and control of city space. This is most explicitly revealed in the courtroom sequence that occurs near the end of the film. In this scene, Rappin’ shows us that the neighborhood voice, configured as a communal rap, can overcome not only problems of domestic inadequacy, such as cramped or decrepit housing, but can even challenge the law. Here, in the penultimate musical number of the film, Rappinhood enters a zoning meeting held to decide the fate of his neighborhood. The board rules against the local residents until Rappinhood begins his tale of communal values overcoming corporate greed. This number is a condemnation of Reagan-era capitalist values, and throughout Rappinhood repeatedly points his finger at the black executive Cedric, a lackey of the white-owned developing firm that attempts to destroy the neighborhood. As the courtroom audience (the neighborhood residents whose homes are under threat of demolition) becomes more unruly, they break into song and dance with Rappinhood. In fact, the song is so infectious, even the apparently hidebound board cannot resist the beat, and they join in the number as well.61 After this exuberant outburst, the details of the zoning issues are magically erased. The film suggests through this series of events that the very act of participation by the board in the musical number seals the deal for the neighborhood residents. Only when the community comes together in performance, and deviates from the traditional channels of legal procedure, can they maneuver successfully in capitalist America.
This event in the film represents an inversion of performance traditions and social hierarchies. Civic officials are initially “performers” in the play of bureaucrat affairs as they orchestrate the course of events at the outset of the meeting. However, the audience gradually takes control of the space, and increasingly dictates the trajectory of the meeting, while the bureaucrats are eventually transformed into spectators. As this occurs, tenant and prostitute assert authority over city official and civic leader. When audience becomes performer and vice versa, social hierarchy follows suit and this spontaneous outburst reveals the ways in which the communal performance of hip hop just might activate and orchestrate social and political change. It is for this reason that the entire courthouse film sequence is a carnivalesque series of inversions.62 Hip hop culture encourages and facilitates these reversals because the entire performance strategy is built upon the elevation of the quotidian and the forbidden to the status of artistic performance. Colloquial speech is transformed into rapping, and graffiti art emerges from a practice viewed by mainstream society as vandalism.
Interestingly, in 1985 the sensationalistic New York Post published an odious counterpart to this cinematic account of hip hop performance within the legal system. The title of the article, “Jailhouse Rock for Break Dance Muggers,” suggests that mugging and dancing were related activities. But the text actually reveals that the accused teens were purportedly breakdancing in the courthouse during a trial in response to the alleged mugging of a 55-year-old man: “A group of laughing young punks callously break-danced in a Queens court corridor while a jury deliberated mugging charges against them.”63 The article goes on to note that “several relatives of the defendants who were sitting in the state Supreme Court in Jamaica also became disruptive and one of them, a woman, had to be subdued.”64 Here, breakdancing within the space of the judicial system is deemed callous—a display of the alleged criminals’ insensitivity and lack of respect for authority—while the “disruptive” actions of relatives in the courthouse audience are disorderly and inappropriate. Most egregiously, the title attempts to link breaking in the street with criminal activity. The panacea of performance so enthusiastically rendered in Rappin’ becomes a negative and inflammatory aspect of the Post article, even overshadowing the details of the initial crime. This news story reveals how conservative media sources attempted to demonize hip hop and expressions of youth culture in the 1980s. It also reads as an attempt to pathologize racially “Other” emotive gestures; in particular, the article sought to revive the trope of the unruly black audience—represented by the accused teen’s relatives—in need of subdual.
Numerous examples from the history of the New York City tenant movement attest to the difficulty of waging successful neighborhood lobbying efforts in the service of staving off abandonment and tenant displacement.65 Typically, the official channels of political discourse were closed off to fragmented tenant organizations. However, when these groups organized unconventional means of attack such as rent strikes, Sweat Equity programs, and the squatter movement, they were often very effective. Further, when they consolidated their efforts across city blocks and municipal regions to form large cohesive political entities such as the New York State Tenants Legislative Coalition, they were able to challenge rent decontrol and redefine lease contracts in Albany. Rappin’ engages with the ethos of communal cohesion and unconventional activism that has characterized the largest and most visible American tenant activism in recent memory, and it moves musical performance and youth culture to the forefront of these transformative processes.
If Wild Style and Beat Street document the burnt-out tenements and razed city blocks of the South Bronx, and Rappin’ emphasizes the inadequate housing conditions of Pittsburgh’s communities of color, Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2 make only vague references to actual urban spaces, and the city literally disappears from view in the first of the two Cannon films. Most of the breakdancing scenes occur on the Venice Beach boardwalk, and when jazz dancer Kelly supposedly ventures into the “hood” to visit Turbo and Ozone, her breakdancing mentors, very little of the surrounding neighborhood is actually shown. The camera sticks to tight shots of the breakers’ home as it shows us a garage front converted into a bachelor pad for the two young dancers. Occasionally, a few children are glimpsed on a porch across the street, and a short sequence features Turbo teaching kids to dance in front of his home. Aside from this, however, there are no further attempts to link the performers to their neighborhhood. Thus, even when the breakers do dance in the street in Breakin’, it is not connected to any empowering social forces. The film clearly does not uphold the communal values of the folk musical. Even though it features breakdance and shares many features with several true hip hop musicals, the presence of a larger community is only very lightly sketched.
When the familiar iconography of inner-city neighborhoods—chain-link fences, abandoned cars, brick walls—finally does emerge in the film, it is in the form of the commodity, a final stage show with high production values and professional dancers. This final number is introduced with a shot of a looming marquee that boasts the “street names” of the film’s three lead dancers, Turbo, Ozone, and Special K (Kelly). As we transition to the stage number entitled “Street People,” performers leap out of battered garbage cans and dance on prop cars. The street dancers have clearly “made it” within the world of professional dance as their urban monikers preside over the exterior spaces of the theater. This incorporation into mainstream culture, however, is only predicated upon a complete theatrical simulation of the city that cleaves it from any tangible contemporary urban problems and returns it to the commodity form of the classical show musical.
The entire plot of Breakin’ 2 is concerned, unlike its predecessor Breakin’, with the relation between dance, neighborhood solidarity, and collective action. There is far more imagery of city streets and community members in Breakin’ 2 than in the original, and the narrative is directly connected to community empowerment through dance and performance. Even though the characters in the film never refer to hip hop culture by name, and displays of electric boogie and breakdancing are all simply described as street dance, the film does attempt to politicize the act of dance and performance as it relates to the fight for urban spaces.
The finale of Breakin’ 2, however, comes together in a contradictory way that undoes some of the radical potential to be found earlier in the narrative. In this concluding neighborhood concert, the entire community unites for a performance, a charity show that is intended to save an important local resource, the Miracles dance center. Ozone dances atop the building under a sign that reads “Save Our Streets.” The meaning of this phrase is somewhat ambiguous; it could be read as an appeal to improve the overall environment of the community, but it might also be understood as a plea to “save the streets” from idle youth as busy dancing young men might be less likely to commit crimes. Ozone then leads the community to a city zoning meeting (in a very similar manner to the scene described in Rappin’), yet their performance fails to convince the powers that be to save the neighborhood center from obliteration. Ozone and the rest of the group stage the show anyway to try to raise the money needed to repair the center and rescue the building from the hands of the developers. The film retains the familiar “let’s put on a show” feature of the backstage musical, but the final extravaganza also allows for a somewhat ambivalent statement regarding communal empowerment through performance. Whereas the power of performance is all that is needed to save the community in Rappin’, the “kids” in Breakin’ 2 fall short of collecting the finances needed to save their beloved Miracles. However, in the final moments of the film, help arrives in the form of white wealthy conservative patrons, Kelly’s parents, who have had their hearts softened by the sheer will and determination exhibited by the neighborhood kids to hang onto their community center. The parents are coded earlier in the film as very conservative Republicans who disapprove of Kelly’s friends from “the street,” yet in the end the father is convinced to pull out his checkbook and provide the missing funds to retain the neighborhood building.
This sudden act of generosity could be read as an attempt to show that poor communities must still rely on wealthy donors making charitable donations out of a sense of moral duty. The conclusion of Breakin’ 2 rings uncomfortably close to a demonstration of what is popularly known as the “trickle down” theory—Reagan-era economic policies that supported large tax breaks for the wealthy in the specious hopes of encouraging philanthropic endeavors, and further stimulating economic growth for the middle and lower classes.66 As we know, this did not occur, and most of Reagan’s economic platform worked towards absolving the government of responsibility for supporting its poorer citizens, arguing that capitalism was inherently self-regulating in terms of ensuring a redistribution of goods from rich to poor.67 If this film is somewhat more progressive than the first Breakin’ because it shows music and dance performance as a politicized communal activity that threatens the normative power structures of capitalist gentrification, the finale seriously undercuts the film’s initial articulation of these activities as a real challenge to mainstream culture and the interests of corporate capitalism.
Fig. 1.3. Ozone (Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quinones) atop the Miracles Dance Center in Breakin’ 2 (1984). Courtesy of Photofest.
In a parallel strategy to Breakin’, the specificity of actual urban locations is almost completely obscured in Body Rock. This film made no attempt to accurately portray hip hop culture, nor did it reveal hip hop as a communal form of bonding. It also attached no significance to the actual spaces of New York City, and cinematic references to specific geographical urban locations are vague. Body Rock, however, does stress the poverty and dire social conditions of the main character, Chilly D. It emphasizes the extremely poor state of his home, and the only member of Chilly D’s family to appear in the film is an uncaring bedridden mother. Even though images of interior domestic squalor appear in Body Rock, poverty is articulated as a personal obstacle to overcome and does not emerge as a systemic problem attached to other urban conditions. In comparison to other hip hop-oriented musicals, this film clearly shows little interest in addressing the issues and social problems that were affecting the communities of color who actually produced the images and sounds of hip hop culture.
Fast Forward, as noted in the previous chapter, is not technically a hip hop musical since none of the main dancers are hip hop practitioners but its appropriation of hip hop culture as a tool to revitalize more traditional forms of dance is worth noting. The energy of inner-city neighborhoods and street culture are not contrasted to the lure of fame, money, and conventional avenues of artistic success, the usual formula for the hip hop musical. Instead, this film features a group of racially mixed teenagers from Sandusky, Ohio, who venture to New York for a commercially sponsored national dance contest. When the teens arrive in the big city they are stunned by images of street breakdancers strutting their stuff in Columbus Circle. Eventually the group realizes that they need a new direction to infuse their dance routines and win the contest, and their style is reinvigorated through the adoption of breakdance moves observed in the street and in a number of club sequences.
As with the Breakin’ series, the terms “breakdancing” and “hip hop” are completely avoided. All forms of hip hop culture are left off screen in Fast Forward, with the exception of one rival breakdance crew that serves as both nemesis and inspiration to the small-town kids. The terms of opposition that must be resolved in this film no longer emerge from the contemporary problems of urban life and impoverished inner city communities. Instead, Fast Forward is built around the contrast between small-town values and an urban environment that is characterized as both full of opportunities and riven with dangerous elements.
Any connection between racial identity, artistic production, and communal empowerment is lacking in this film, largely because New York City is reduced to the spatial parameters of Manhattan, with a brief sojourn into the upper-class milieu of Long Island garden parties. The two boroughs of New York City where hip hop culture actually emerged—Queens and the Bronx—do not materialize in Fast Forward. Thus, the appearance of a breakdancing crew performing for an uptown crowd in the middle of Manhattan does not reference the transformation of hip hop culture as it straddled geographical boundaries between communities of color in the outer boroughs and the mainstream cultural institutions, corporate events, and largely white crowds of tourists that Manhattan had to offer.
Fast Forward further erodes the progressive political and social aspects characteristic of the true hip hop musical because the film’s main characters leave their community behind, severing the link between collective performance and communal empowerment so pervasive in most hip hop musicals. Moreover, the film privileges individual success over the concerns of the community, and reduces breakdancing to a set of skills adopted solely for the purpose of getting ahead in the world of showbiz, or utilized by a dance crew to make money in uptown Manhattan. The New York breakdance crew featured in Fast Forward is also not attached to any particular community, and none of the characters are even given names. Their only function in the film is to demonstrate to the group of determined small-town kids that they are out of touch with current dance fashion as they challenge them to a competition at the Zoo nightclub. The dancers from Ohio simply adopt some of the style of this crew, and use it to win an industry sponsored talent show, the Annual Shoot Out Contest. With the help of “real” urban street dance, small-town values and raw talent are able to triumph in the big city. The kids also get a helping hand from a wealthy white upper-class socialite who provides the final thrust of determination to send the Ohio teens on to victory.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that the three least “authentic” depictions of hip hop culture in the hip hop musical, Breakin’ Through, Body Rock, and Delivery Boys, also greatly reduced the presence of black and Latino characters in their narratives.68 Even though Body Rock featured Latino actor Lorenzo Lamas, the rest of his crew and legion of fans supposedly interested in hip hop culture are predominantly white. As the hip hop musical loses its racial and ethnic specificity, and attempts to draw a decidedly paler audience, the depiction of particular urban spaces and the connective understanding between those geographical regions and contemporary social problems is completely lost.
As a point of comparison, it is redolent that when the hip hop musical was resurrected in the early 1990s as a vehicle for Vanilla Ice (Robert Matthew Van Winckle)—the whitest rapper in history—mainstream cinema again failed to depict the actual geographic spaces of the city or have people of color at the center of the narrative. Cool as Ice (1991) stars Vanilla Ice as Johnny, the leader of an otherwise all-black motorcycle hip hop gang. While out cruising the highway, the gang is forced to stop in a small California town in order to fix mechanical problems with one of their motorcycles. This event sets in motion a predictable narrative trajectory in which the outlandishly dressed, free-roaming, but essentially “good” Johnny tries to win the affections of studious and conservative would-be college student Kathy, all the while fighting the conformist forces of the town, including dimwitted parents and Kathy’s domineering boyfriend. The city from which the gang originates is never visualized in the film and is instead signified by an urban nightclub where Vanilla Ice performs. In the club numbers which bookend Cool as Ice, the city is completely elided and in its place we are shown a highly stylized dance performance in which a white rapper assumes both the role of star performer, and later on, the narrative center of action. Not only is Johnny the star of the nightclub, the romantic lead, and the head of the motorcycle gang, but members of the posse who obviously do come from urban communities of color are all but forgotten once the gang is forced to take up residence in the suburban periphery. City space in this later film is transformed into, and signified by, the performance of the white star and his ability to win over the residents of a small town—Johnny is the city.69
Furthermore, when Johnny attempts to woo his girl in a rather awkward romantic musical number, this is set against a backdrop of empty lots and homes under construction. If mainstream Hollywood attempted to avoid altogether illustrating the urban space of hip hop culture in this film, then it could find no suitable substantive site to fill this void. White suburbia might be a series of empty lots, but it is a space of construction, not destruction and neglect. The complete elision of African American city spaces in Cool As Ice is all the more striking given that this film emerges in the very midst of New Black Realism’s insistence upon the visibility of urban communities of color. Released just a few months after John Singleton’s visually explosive Boyz in the Hood—a gritty and remarkable depiction of the black community in South Central Los Angeles—Cool As Ice absurdly forces a white mainstream blonde, baby-faced entertainer to bear the burden of representing the ghetto-centric spaces that structured the narrative movement of contemporary hip hop cinema.
Even though I have primarily been concerned with the visualization of inner city neighborhoods in the hip hop musical, it is worth mentioning that the image of the urban skyline plays an important role in this cinema as well. To draw on examples from films previously discussed in this section, Wild Style, Rappin’, and Beat Street all incorporate an image of the city skyline to symbolically denote the “world out there” and the dream of literally making it out of the ghetto. In Wild Style, Raymond stares out of the window of an apartment belonging to a wealthy art dealer at a view of the Manhattan skyline at night. The city lights inspire him to paint an image on canvas, the initial step towards both the commodification of his work and potential flight from the South Bronx. Towards the end of Rappin’, John Rappinhood and his love interest, Dixie, stand on an elevated platform while the skyline of Pittsburgh appears as muted blues and grays in the distance. She attempts to convince him to rap professionally, a move which surely entails leaving his Hill District neighborhood behind. And in Beat Street, the city plays a spectacular role in the stage set of the final rap wake for graffiti artist Ramon. Set between two walls onto which images of the inner city and Ramon’s graffiti are projected, a glittering Manhattan vista is the central backdrop of Kenny’s hip hop show, his final performance extravaganza in which community and commercial success are both referenced. The heroes of the true hip hop musical are always firmly rooted in the spaces of their neighborhoods—breaking and rapping in its streets, and painting on its walls. When they travel to urban commercial centers, however, or when the narrative suggests a movement towards commercial success, the city appears literally as a picture to behold, a looming outline of buildings and car parks. This abstract image of the city floats in an unreal space, but it is a representation which suggests the possibility of an entirely other existence for our hip hop heroes, the promise of transcending community boundaries through artistic success.
Several historians have attempted to understand the unique character of musicals made subsequent to the breakdown of the classical Hollywood system. This research, from a diverse range of scholars, including Jane Feuer, J. P. Telotte, James Hay, and Dave Kehr, has all but excluded hip hop musicals from the history of the postclassical era.70 These scholars largely refuse to acknowledge the restructuring of racialized urban spaces inaugurated by the plethora of hip hop musicals in the first part of this decade, and they also overlook the racial dimensions of other postclassical musicals such as Flashdance and Dirty Dancing. Telotte curiously includes the Prince vehicle Purple Rain (1984) and The Wiz (1978), a black-cast adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, in his discussion, without linking them to the history of black-cast musical film and the position of black performers in the Hollywood machine. He also mentions the way in which The Buddy Holly Story (1978) restages Holly’s first gig at the Apollo as a harmonious meeting between blacks and whites. Feuer, for her part, discusses Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) and the racial issues present in John Waters’s Hairspray (1988). She has also commented on the difficulty of applying certain aspects of genre theory to American post-1960s musical films.71 For example, musicals made in the 1970s and ’80s such as Nashville (1975) and All that Jazz—produced following the breakup of the studio system and the genre’s golden age—critically appropriated studio-era themes, songs, and characters in order to deconstruct the mythmaking machine of the American musical. James Hay also argues that the “postmodern music men” of the “deconstructionist” postclassical musical
are unable to orchestrate narrative resolution in their films because they are hopelessly driven by libidinal impulses. … They do not perform full, rounded roles as did their precursors, but rather complex characters whose darker natures are foregrounded and discourage intense audience identification or admiration.72
Indeed, the 1980s began with one of the fullest expressions of this intense critical treatment of the musical genre in Pennies From Heaven, a relentlessly dark film starring Steve Martin as an unsuccessful sheet music salesman who cannot achieve an ideal romantic relationship or a triumphant career related to performance, much less bring the two together.
In contrast, the subsequent wave of successful teen-oriented musical films from this decade promoted a distinctly different version of the genre. Feuer argues that many post-studio-era teen musicals of this period also conserved very traditional aspects of the genre and used historical quotation and conventional musical structures in order to reconstruct rather than deconstruct the genre.73 The primary thrust of the teen “reconstructionist musical,” as described by Feuer, is the resurrection of features from the classical musical such as narrative resolution, communal integration, and romantic coupling.74 A film in this group is Flashdance, which concerns the romance of a working-class dancer and a wealthy business owner. The issue of class inequity is initially suggested by the disparity of the two leads’ financial means, but this is magically erased through their eventual amorous union. Such a plot very closely follows the fairy tale musical pattern of the early classical sound-era as in the films of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, produced in the 1930s, especially Love Me Tonight. As with its earlier prototypes, Flashdance divests the theme of class relations of any political content and even reverts to disturbingly regressive notions of class mobility and gender.75 Footloose and Dirty Dancing follow the traditional musical structure even more closely by bringing together two ill-suited lovers through the power of music and dance. They both provide a final stage show in which romantic pairing and sexual energy are displayed through dance and musical performance, while also bringing the community together, transcending generational boundaries in the former and class boundaries in the latter.
Critics such as Telotte and Kehr have argued that the postclassical musical undoes one of the most consistent features of the classical musical, the integration between music and dance performance and plot advancement or thematic development within the film’s structure.76 The term “integration,” an important part of the critical analysis of Hollywood musicals, suggests that performance numbers are inserted into the cinematic narrative on a relational axis to the plot or theme of the text. John Mueller notes that this can occur in a multitude of ways, from numbers which “contribute to the spirit or theme” of the film to those that directly “advance the plot by their content.”77 Of course, a musical performance may do both, and conversely it may also be completely irrelevant to the overall narrative development of the film. Classical-era musical film articulated the transcendent powers of music and dance as a realm of escape from the tedium of everyday life. Richard Dyer has described this thematic impulse of the classical Hollywood musical as a utopian configuration that is directed toward our desire for entertainment as an alternative and even superior reality to the one our contemporary quotidian interactions and social organization can facilitate.78
Telotte suggests that the postclassical musical emphatically inscribes limitations around the expressive power of performance by keeping the transcendent aspects of music and dance within the boundaries of conventional performance spaces.79 Like the earliest show musicals, the post-classical musical film utilizes realistic spaces of entertainment—such as theaters, strip clubs, discos, and organized dances—to provide the narrative justification for the inclusion of music and dance numbers.80 The hip hop musical film does follow this pattern and we witness breakdancers, DJs, and rappers performing at nightclubs, parties, and other theatrical venues. Parallel to the movement of hip hop culture into “proscenium-oriented” spaces, however, spontaneous breakdancing and rapping numbers consistently occur on the street and emerge from everyday encounters, too. Both types of musical performances generally reinforce a broad thematic concern of the narrative, but it is the latter that have more potential to reference communal cohesion and activism. As the utopian thrust of the musical genre navigates the spaces of performance culture in the true hip hop musical and some surface hip hop musicals, it offers an alternate and progressive vision of political change and communal relations. Although films such as Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove, Breakin’ 2, and Rappin’ might be said to use the “reconstructionist” framework of the musical, I argue that they turned the genre’s hitherto conservative narrative structures towards a uniquely political, and in some cases, subversive form of cinema.
Fig. 1.4. Run-D.M.C. onstage in Krush Groove (1985). Courtesy of Photofest.
Fig. 1.5. The Fat Boys take to the stage in Krush Groove (1985): Mark “Prince Markie Dee” Morales, Darren “The Human Beat Box” Robinson, Damon “Kool Rock-ski” Wimbley. Courtesy of Photofest.
Fig. 1.6. Busy Bee performs at the East River Park Amphitheater in Wild Style (1983). Courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.
Hip hop musical cinema challenges Telotte’s assumption that musical films from this era are “intent on reminding us that distinct boundaries separate musical activity from the ‘real’ world.”81 In fact, hip hop musicals radically counter his claim because they are structured around the impossible separation between music, dance, and the “real” world. These films insist that collective music and dance performance is an integral feature of quotidian life in the inner city neighborhood. For example, as I discuss more fully in Chapter 2, integrated musical numbers from Wild Style, the “Stoop Rap,” and the “Basketball Throwdown” derive from everyday encounters in public spaces. Krush Groove also primarily uses actual concert spaces and recording studios to stage its numbers, but even this film features an integrated number in which teen rappers, the Fat Boys, take over their high school through the sheer power of musical energy. Musical and dance expression completely transcend the proscenium in these films because hip hop is explicitly about the interrelation between the everyday and collective public performance. These types of experiences permit the immediate pleasures of cooperative interaction between different groups of people and the potential attainment of future stardom outside of the community for hip hop artists.
Such encounters, which facilitate a pleasurable transcendence of barriers marked by race, class, and geography through performance, indicate a return to the utopian promise of the classical musical film in which the boundaries between musical expression and the everyday are indistinguishable. As if speaking directly to Wild Style’s unique reworking of this utopian premise of the musical film, Ahearn has referred to his hip hop opus as “a projection of our dreams.”82 He notes that
there was nothing out there that showed all these artists together in one scene. It was only later that people began to look at it as some sort of documentary. But at first we were just projecting what we wanted it to be. It was our wildest dream of what could happen.83
Ahearn is speaking here specifically about Wild Style’s final concert scene. Even when the stage returns to provide a “realistic” space for musical performance, this venue still ties such expression to utopian desires. And, as noted earlier, the disused Lower East Side amphitheater symbolized the promise of newly organized city spaces that would permit more fluid interactions between different communities, an opportunity rife with the possibility of attaining “stardom” and a life outside of inner-city neighborhoods.
Kehr, in his 1984 discussion of the “new musical,” suggests that the “implied rejection of the spectacle and artifice of the MGM-Broadway tradition” is exemplified in the teen-oriented films Flashdance and Foot-loose.84 His work, unfortunately, does not take into account the range of hip hop musicals flooding the screens at this moment, with the exception of noting the use of breakdance in Flashdance and Beat Street, but he is acutely aware of the ways in which the postclassical musical, and indeed nearly all musicals, must pander to the tastes of popular music.85 He also writes perceptively of the ways in which the demands of rock music posed numerous problems for the musical form.86 Kehr notes that “rock dancing” is “too private, too self-directed” in terms of the demands of the musical genre, and that “its gestural range is too small to make a visual impression.”87 In light of Kehr’s intriguing remarks about rock dancing on film in the early 1980s, it is curious that his only reference to the hip hop musical is reduced to a few lines in which he notes that the use of breakdance in Beat Street might be welcomed because it “draws on more theatrical traditions.”88 About the editing style in Flashdance, he also suggests that “if break dancing hadn’t existed, the montage style would have invented it.”89 Kehr intimates that breakdance is important for its formal properties only, and downplays the significance of hip hop as a unique practice based around the expression of a communal identity. His conflation of montage and breakdance is particularly specious because he proposes that break-dance fragments the space of performance through abrupt movements and isolated gestures. I argue the opposite here. Breaking may lend itself towards a formal rupturing and deconstruction of cinematic space but the dance practice works towards achieving unity between all parts of the dancer and between different performers. Furthermore, it is usually a collective activity that encourages the interaction of a large group of people. Its tendency towards jerky, fragmented gestures does not imply a private world of dance whereby the individual is solipsistically absorbed in his or her movements. Since breakdance crews battle with each other, the dancer must have one eye on the competition (and the audience) at all times in case they “sabotage” his or her performance by jumping into the dance circle and mocking or challenging their last move.
These new hip hop–oriented performers of the postclassical era are also significant because they mark a transformation of the musical genre’s male lead. Richard Dyer has argued that
whites in musicals have a rapturous relationship with their environment. This may be confined to the utopian moments of the numbers, but then they are the reason why we go to see musicals. The potentially colonialist nature of this is suggested not only by the way whites stride down streets as if they own them (which in a certain sense they do) and burst all over other locales (which they don’t), but also in the way the cultures of the colonized, as perceived by whites, are incorporated into the fabric of the numbers’ music and dance.90
This apparent domination over the parameters of cinematic space is largely achieved through the classical “music man’s” seemingly omnipotent control over the physical world through both song and dance. For example, when Dick Powell sings his affections for Ruby Keeler in Dames, his ardently amorous verse triggers the transformation of subway ads into the face of his beloved during the number “I Only Have Eyes For You.” In other words, Powell’s barely veiled sexual desires, which are expressed through song, are so powerful that they actually appear to alter the physical space that he and his darling occupy. Many of Gene Kelly’s and Fred Astaire’s dance numbers are also exemplary of this process, including Astaire’s “Shoes With Wings On,” a special effects extravaganza in which shoes dance on their own from The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), and his “ceiling dance” in Royal Wedding (1951). In the latter number, Astaire’s body is no longer subject to the normative rules of gravity as he dances up the sides of walls and on to the ceiling. Gene Kelly transcends the threshold of realism in Anchors Aweigh (1945) when he engages in a dance number with Jerry the mouse, an animated character. In all of these examples, the normative parameters and rules of cinematic space are challenged and significantly altered through the dance performances of male lead characters.
Historically, the transformative potential of song and dance unquestioningly accorded to white actors has habitually been denied to African Americans and other performers of color in Hollywood musicals. As noted in the introduction, these entertainers have consistently been relegated to apolitical timeless rural settings in all-black Hollywood musicals, usually an idealized Southern past where blacks “knew their place,” racially speaking, while their expressive power has been restricted to “legitimate” spaces of performance such as dinner clubs and dance halls. Such settings routinely mitigated the possibility of making a claim on space through the act of performance for African American entertainers.91 In a related theme, James Snead has discussed the infantilization of Bill Robinson in numerous Shirley Temple films. Robinson, an adult black male, is paired with a white child in such films as The Little Colonel (1935) and The Littlest Rebel (1935), and this completely defuses the sexual energy of couple dances within the musical film, thus providing a non-threatening link between blacks and whites through cinematic performance.92 If Gene Kelly and other white male stars of musical film transcend the proscenium of the stage and unleash the transformative power of music and dance in all facets of life, black performers in particular have been relegated to depoliticized evocations of rural all-black ghettos, the confines of the theatrical stage, or to the desexualized space of childhood.93
The hip hop musical explicitly confronts the historical constraints that have burdened performers of color in Hollywood cinema. In Breakin’ 2, Turbo appropriates the classical-era “music man’s” control of physical space and amorous influence as he moonwalks, spins, pops and locks up the walls and onto the ceiling of his home—a direct tribute to the aforementioned gravity-defying “ceiling dance” number that Astaire made famous more than three decades prior in Royal Wedding. A beautiful young girl appears to watch the final moments of Turbo’s exhilarating routine and he confidently dances towards her to receive an affectionate embrace, underscoring the relationship between the dancer’s ability to manipulate space and romantic success. In the first Breakin’, Turbo also references another Fred Astaire number in Royal Wedding in which he dances with a coatrack. Instead of a coatrack, Turbo picks up a broom as heads out of his place of employment to sweep the front sidewalk. The camera is tightly focused on his body as he dances and manipulates the broom in a skillful and comical manner while his ghetto blaster provides diegetic beats to keep him moving. His broom stands up on its own and even levitates when Turbo commands it to rise from the ground with some exaggerated hand gestures. This new “music man” combines work with “play,” assuming command of his spatial environment. The background of a graffiti-covered wall and a few shots of passing cars in the sequence even remind us of the urban terrain that is otherwise largely absent from Breakin’. Turbo is invested with the power of traditional white male stars of the musical film because he asserts ownership over private and public space and seems to have control over objects (namely, his broom). Although Turbo’s control over space through dance is never connected to contemporary communal problems or social issues in the first film, it nevertheless significantly reorients the racial dynamics of the Hollywood musical genre and, importantly, it is connected to such issues in the sequel. Some hip hop musicals of the 1980s, particularly Wild Style and Rappin’, overturn the racial power relations of the Hollywood musical by reinventing the “music man” or “music men” as a group of black and Latino youth who “stride down streets as if they own them.” They are set firmly in the present, often in recognizable urban spaces. The new hip hop “music man” transcends a variety of social and physical spaces during his escapades within the city and negotiates these different sites via the performance styles to be drawn from hip hop culture. Through graffiti, rapping, DJing, and breaking, the hip hop “music man” inserts his subjectivity into a number of social and political spaces, which ultimately brings about diverse forms of individual or collective empowerment.
The hip hop “music man” also rejects both types of new “music men” theorized in current histories of the postclassical musical: Arthur Parker, Steve Martin’s ineffectual and miserable sheet music salesman who spectacularly fails to transform the world around him in Pennies From Heaven, and Dirty Dancing’s magnetic Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). As Feuer has noted, Dirty Dancing represents a conservative reconstruction of the musical genre, featuring elements of the fairy tale, show, and folk musical—including an alluring “music man” who fulfills a traditional generic role. The film, set in 1963, explores the cross-class relationship (an element of the fairy tale musical) between Johnny, a working-class dance instructor for an upstate New York resort, and Baby Houseman, an idealistic upper-middle-class Jewish girl. Dirty Dancing utilizes a folk audience and the appeal of the “amateur” performer, and features a final show number. While Feuer accurately characterizes the blending of subgenres within Dirty Dancing, she does not cut to the heart of the matter, so to speak. The narrative is about sexual awakening and desire. Baby, the film’s conservative young Jewish “princess,” is intrigued by Johnny and his ability to move, dance, and do what he pleases. When Baby first observes the erotic dance rituals of the working-class staff at Kellerman’s resort while delivering watermelons to the kitchen, she is transfixed by a mass of bodies moving, gyrating, and “dirty dancing” to the Contours’ original Motown hit “Do You Love Me.” Not only is the scene of forbidden dance and unfettered sexual expression set to diegetic popular black music but the sequence also prominently features at least one African American couple “dirty dancing” until Johnny boogies through the door and becomes the center of narrative action. Baby takes on the role of spectator during this number as she gazes upon the rhythmic bodies paired with arched backs and glistening skin. In fact, it is clear that her sexual “awakening” commences the moment that she opens the door to this forbidden party. As she looks on with a transfixed gaze (a watermelon still clutched in her arms) at the raucous scene before her, she asks a resort employee, “Where’d they learn to do this?” He quickly answers, “I don’t know. Kids are doing it in the basement back home.” This offhand statement regarding the link between sexuality and dance squarely locates its origins with teenagers, popular music, and spaces of leisure outside the purview of regulated social encounters and parental surveillance. One suspects that such a relationship is also directly linked to the racial permeability of working-class social spaces since we are introduced here to black dancers in this otherwise nearly all-white resort, and the scene is set to a Motown beat. After her initial encounter with the erotic possibilities offered by “dirty dancing,” Baby learns to dance and consummates her affair with Johnny.
Dirty Dancing’s final stage number features a partner routine that expresses the fairy tale musical’s cross-class desire between Johnny and his lover Baby. This performance, though, transcends the confines of the proscenium as Johnny leaps from the stage and beckons a willing audience—including upper-middle-class resort guests and working-class employees—to participate in the show. The peripheral black dancers return once again in the final show as the audience of white middle-class patrons begins to dance with each other and eventually the resort staff. Johnny’s erotic appeal is undoubtedly linked to African American sexuality and music, however repressed within the film’s narrative. Although Dirty Dancing’s finale gestures towards the powerful political dimensions of dance, and works to destabilize the boundary between performer and spectator, it is nonetheless contained within a space of fantasy and leisure—the vacation resort. Johnny remains a new “music man” who resurrects all of the erasures, repressions, and elisions associated with classical-era musical film, and the transformative power of music and dance is ultimately linked to white romantic desire rather than communal empowerment or politically progressive social relations. Alternatively, the hip hop “music man” appropriates the transformative potential of Gene Kelly’s irrepressible verve and often redirects this energy towards political goals that are attached to specific urban spaces, communities, and ethnic and racial identities. The actions and potential of the hip hop “music man” in Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove, and Rappin’ appear even more radical when considering the ways in which this element of the genre was being reinvented and refashioned towards conciliatory and conservative ends in other contemporaneous youth-oriented musical films (like Dirty Dancing). When traditional aspects of the folk musical film, such as an emphasis upon community integration and expression, coalesced around contemporary impoverished urban neighborhoods in the early 1980s the notion of the “reconstructionist” teen musical as a conservative narrative force is considerably troubled.
My analysis here suggests that performance is overwhelmingly politicized in the first cycle of hip hop musicals through a variety of strategies that play with the expectations of the musical genre and the filming of urban spaces. The integrity of Rappin’ and the Breakin’ films is, however, undermined by the economic necessities of exploitation-oriented cinema. As I have stated previously, the inner city ghetto at this moment was a considerable site of contestation, and visualizing these urban spaces outside of negative news reportage was a gamble for film production companies hoping to draw a mainstream audience. David Zito, co-producer and co-screenwriter of Breakin’, laments that the film “did not live up to its potential.”94 He goes on to state, “I did go out and research the culture, the hip-hop scene and quickly realized that it was anything but a fad. I tried to stress that point as much as possible. Unfortunately, it didn’t find its way into the movie. It’s a shame, but Hollywood has a way of devouring culture.”95 Even though the first Breakin’ was a financial success without stressing the politicized aspects of hip hop culture, Cannon Films released a sequel that significantly enhanced this aspect of communal music and dance.
As we compare the various ideological currents in this diverse group of films, from the independently produced Wild Style to the exploitation flicks released by Cannon, it becomes apparent that a great deal was invested in the cinematic representation of the inner city at this time. From the images of urban decay and abandoned housing stock in Beat Street and Wild Style, to the outright obliteration of the city in Breakin’ Through and Breakin’, the hip hop musical reveals how black and Latino performance was consistently entangled with the production of urban identity as it negotiated contemporary issues such as the perils of gentrification and incessantly negative news coverage of inner-city communities of color.
Poverty and material devastation in the inner city was an unfortunate reality, as was the disproportionate news coverage of neighborhoods like the South Bronx in particular. Craig Watkins argues that during this decade the recently entrenched power of the New Right sought to gain control over all areas of representation that threatened the power of white middle-class Americans.96 Such hegemonic representations, Michel de Certeau argues, literally flatten and colonize “real” places.97 Indeed, the news coverage of predominantly black and Latino urban neighborhoods in the 1980s might be said to “map” over the actual everyday practice of space that formed the “real” conditions of existence for those communities. Like the maps of the early modern period to which de Certeau refers, news reportage compresses space while also functioning to “eliminate little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it.”98 In other words, the effects of poverty, unemployment, and arson are revealed or expressed in condensed form but the conditions that produced the effects remain hidden to the viewer, and the circumstances of everyday life in the inner city, in both positive and negative forms, are reduced to data, statistical evidence, and dramatically composed images.
As a point of contrast, hip hop musicals such as Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove, and Rappin’ foreground the public interventions of hip hop culture, and in some cases even make visible hegemonic power structures facilitating urban blight and poverty, in order to remap the criminal backdrops and alien topographies evoked in newspapers, television reports, and sensationalist Hollywood productions such as Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981). The effect of giving voice and narrative (in the format of the feature film) to these communities who were silenced by the mainstream media evoked a variety of responses. In June of 1983, Harlan Jacobson, a critic for Film Comment, prefaced his interview with Ahearn by the following:
There’s something delirious about the camera as reporter, taking one into foreign waters, or behind enemy lines, or penetrating political curtains where the shape of the country on some schooldays map is the only image one has. True of China until 1972, true of Afghanistan until 1979, probably still true of Albania, and definitely true of the South Bronx today, twenty minutes from this typewriter.99
The temporal displacement may only be twenty minutes away for Jacobson, but it is the equivalent of a trip halfway around the world to the South Bronx of Beat Street, Wild Style, and Krush Groove. While the immense popularity of rap today has somewhat diminished the “Otherness” of such notorious and legendary hip hop locations as the aforementioned South Bronx and Queensbridge, as well as South Central Los Angeles’ Compton, a review of Beat Street reveals the absolutely “foreign” territory these films introduced at this time. Jim Welsh, writing in 1984, avowed that “Beat Street is an agreeable picture once one gets over the culture shock, overflowing with a tremendous energy and inventiveness.”100 Jeff Millar, reporting for the Houston Chronicle, was even stronger in formulating his feelings of alienation in the face of hip hop culture and images of inner city urban life. “I am far, far away from the demographic ground zero of Krush Groove (rated R), far enough away that I felt I was watching an ethnographic film at the Rice Media Center.”101 “Ethnographic film,” “culture shock,” a trip “behind enemy lines”—these are strong words for productions that have acquired such a patina of benign mediocrity. As the true hip hop musical attempted to reveal the contemporary problems faced by inner city neighborhoods, as well as the creative means developed to combat such tribulations, it undeniably struggled to reclaim the images of urban devastation co-opted by mainstream media. The responses to these films demonstrate the ways in which such imagery immediately called to mind a foreign presence in the midst of one’s own borders—neighborhoods that had been evoked as unknowable and alien in press descriptions and photography—but whose environs and inhabitants were now also being revealed as energetic and dynamic in their transformation to feature film musicals.102
Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove, and Rappin’ attempted to reorient negative news reportage of the inner city and “remap” its spaces by not only focusing on the innovative street culture that was redefining these neighborhoods, but also by resurrecting the traditional “music man” as a struggling black or Latino youth who, through his hip hop skills, was able to overcome social problems and connect in positive ways with his community. The hip hop musical repeatedly shows the communal audience, and the ways in which performance is completed by the spectator, when he or she becomes an active participant in the show. In many cases, this event is explicitly politicized, as in the penultimate performance of Rappin’ where a communal rap forces a city zoning board to allow the impoverished residents of the Hill District in Pittsburgh to keep their homes.
For de Certeau, merely walking in the urban environment is a “spatial acting-out,” an appropriation of space that may be considered as analogous to “what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”103 He even speaks of the individual style of the urban pedestrian as a personalization of the act of appropriating space. Style, or the unique way in which one engages in hip hop culture—a signature “freeze” at the end of a dance routine, or a particular flourish in one’s graffiti writing—is crucial to the language of hip hop because it asserts the distinctiveness of the individual even as it works towards an expression of communal solidarity and identity. Within the hip hop musicals of the 1980s, the consumer and producer of cultural capital are one and the same, and assertions of unique identity or style work to strengthen bonds rather than further stratify the social order. As these new “music men” and other communal participants set out to redefine the contours of their lived experience through music and dance, the hip hop musical frequently brings not only contemporary urban settings to the forefront of the musical film, but also makes the economic and political inequity of American culture pivotal to its story. Although Breakin’ Through, Body Rock, and Delivery Boys utilize the structure of the hip hop musical to banal or even possibly nefarious ends, the need to purge specific urban locations and communities of color from these films to make them acceptable subject matter for Disney (Breakin’ Through) and the twelve-and-under set (Delivery Boys) only emphasizes how powerful and contentious images of alternating urban blight or its political and social renewal actually were.
