The emergence of hip hop cinema in the early 1980s presented a unique marketing challenge for producers, exhibitors, and distributors. These films clearly belonged to the Hollywood musical genre, but they also introduced a startlingly new (and unavoidably political) lexicon of music, dance, and artistic expression focused on inner city communities. When Breakin’, Body Rock, Beat Street, and Prison Dancer (a low-budget hip hop-oriented film that was never completed) were introduced at Cannes in 1984, for instance, only the producers of Breakin’, according to Variety, promoted their film as a breakdancing flick, and were “willing to sell the pic as a genre film.”1 Stan Lathan, the director of Beat Street, noted of his production that “I hesitate to call it a break-dance movie, but for many reasons it is being billed as such.”2 Lathan goes on to remark that “it’s a story about kids trying to meet the challenges of manhood, and to make something of themselves as artists.”3 With Beat Street, Lathan attempted to introduce breakdance as merely one aspect of a music-centered coming of age story. When Wild Style opened at Cannes the previous year, promotional print material for the screenings featured a breaker dancing on his head against a blank white background. The accompanying text informed spectators that “Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style is a ‘hip hop’ romance set to the maximum cool beat of Breaking, Rapping, and Scratch-DJing.” With a breakdancer occupying the center of the image, the advertisement curiously avoided indicating the most significant subject matter that Wild Style offered to spectators: an inside look at the world of graffiti writers. The breakdancing aspects of early hip hop musicals were frequently emphasized over all other facets of the culture, yet some producers were quick to downplay any traces of hip hop and simply sell the film on the general appeal of the musical.4 Articles such as the aforementioned Variety piece, and another article from the Boston Globe that covered the “Cannes Breakdancing Films” from the same year, focus almost entirely on the dance aspect of these films. Such an emphasis on breaking overall is certainly understandable given that the “breakdance picture” could be easily associated with other musicals like Flashdance and Footloose that had more than proven the commercial viability of youth-oriented dance films.
As anxiety over the marketability of hip hop quickly waned, breakers, DJs, rappers, and graffiti artists appeared on screen in an astonishing variety of genres. To date more than seventy-five hip hop-themed feature films have been made since the earliest musical incursions into the performance culture. Ranging from horror flicks (Da Hip Hop Witch, 2000), opera adaptations (Carmen: A Hip Hopera, 2001), and lauded documentaries (Scratch, 2001; Rize, 2005) to a renewed interest in youth dance culture on screen (Save the Last Dance, 2001; You Got Served, 2004), it is apparent that a straightforward definition of hip hop cinema is difficult to articulate. American hip hop-oriented films continue to offer unique and complex intersections between established cinematic genres and a perpetually mutating performance culture.
The hip hop musical that flourished between 1983 and 1985 was a unique cycle of films that responded to contemporary political, social, and economic pressures coalescing around discourses of race, poverty, suburban decline, and urban blight through the format of the Hollywood musical genre. When hip hop culture, and the new “music man,” were inserted into the tradition of American musical cinema a familiar, yet paradoxically new, space of negotiation was fashioned. The resulting films renewed historical anxieties that inscribed the burden of social progress onto the bodies of performers of color, while at the same time conventional culture (including the African American press) debated the moral and artistic attributes of hip hop. Furthermore, singular films such as Krush Groove were forced to bear an inordinate burden of signification linked to concerns over the ostensible fragility of suburban communities fighting to distinguish themselves from contemporary urban peril. Schultz’s film, in particular, became synonymous with exposing both localized and more general racialized tensions when reports of youth violence during theatrical screenings surfaced in numerous newspapers. Ensuing discussions in the mainstream press exposed deeply rooted historical fears of “black engulfment” in relation to contemporary spaces of public entertainment, geographical distinctions between suburb and city, and the nature of racially discrete teen cultures.
When looking at the early development of hip hop film in the context of mainstream teen cinema, it is clear that the former offered an appealing alternative to the limited pleasures offered by mall culture and private social rituals in suburban centered teen movies. Such an alternative viewpoint directly engaged with the historical crisis of the black urban family in the 1980s. It celebrated new forms of filial relations and public rituals emerging through hip hop culture. These alternate familial and communal relationships depicted on screen showed that youth performance culture was a unique and powerful tool that could combat the assault on families in actual communities of color as a result of declining public assistance, decaying housing stock, and drug related violence.
As hip hop reinvents itself in both progressive and conservative forms through cinema, it continues to appropriate generic conventions in exceptional and unexpected ways. The American comedy Marci X (2003) deliberately played with audience expectations of genre by casting Lisa Kudrow (of Friends fame) as a Jewish American princess alongside black comedian Damon Wayans in a plot in which the titular Marci (Kudrow) must helm a rap record label. In case potential filmgoers missed the humor in featuring the ex-Friends star in a hip hop-oriented narrative, the tag line accompanying Marci X read “Hip Hop Meets Shop Till You Drop.” More recently, global hip hop cinema has been nurtured by the development of film festivals such as Hip Hop Odyssey and Black Soil International, among others, which are dedicated to examining the performance culture across different national contexts. This turn has resulted in refreshing and distinctive entries such as Microphone (2010), an Egyptian film centered on the underground music and art scene in Alexandria, and the low-budget Vietnamese production Saigon Electric (2011), which utilized the musical format to contrast traditional Asian ribbon dance with modern urban performance. The dynamic and protean nature of the first images and sounds of hip hop culture on film exemplified by the contrast between Delivery Boys and Wild Style continues to define contemporary cinema as hip hop becomes ensconced and even parodied in popular mainstream media while at the same time it finds new life in international cinemas.