Muzing New Hoods, Making New Identities Film, Hip-Hop Culture, and Jazz Music

Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.

Callaloo, Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 309-320 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/cal.2002.0040

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MUZING NEW HOODS, MAKING NEW IDENTITIES Film, Hip-Hop Culture, and Jazz Music

by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.

We make our lives in identifications with the texts around us everyday.

Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film Music

The medium of film has communicated, shaped, reproduced and challenged various notions of black subjectivity in 20th century America since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation appeared in 1915. Writing in 1949, Ralph Ellison argued that Birth of a Nation “forged the twin screen image of the Negro as bestial rapist and grinning, eye- rolling clown—stereotypes that are still with us today” (Ellison 275). Such depictions in cinema had already existed in print media; and they have persisted in all mass- mediated contexts in varying degrees throughout the century. Film, however, has provided a most salient medium for the visual representation of African American subjects. If, as Manthia Diawara has argued, the camera is, “the most important invention of modern time,” then it becomes an even more powerful tool when its technology is combined with the powers of music. Indeed, when filmmakers combine cinematic images and musical gestures they unite two of our most compelling modes of perception: the visual and the aural.

Below I consider two films produced during the Age of Hip Hop: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and Theodore Witcher’s Love Jones (1997).1 On an immediate level, I am interested how music shapes the way we perceive these cinematic narratives individually; how music informs the way audiences experience their characters, locations, and plots. But I am also making a larger argument for how the musical scores of these films are sites for the negotiation of personal identity and self- fashioning on the one hand, and the making and negotiation of group identity, on the other. Both of these activities inform “meaning” in important ways. Jazz music, in these films generally serves as a foil to hip hop music, which the directors use as the primary musical index for the black “authentic” subject. While the use of jazz in these three films may be comparatively minor, a discussion of it is instructive about the developing meanings of various black musical styles.

Below, I address several questions with regard to this cinematic function of music in hip-hop film. What role does musical discourse play in cinematic representation? If one of the primary thrusts of black cultural production has been the resistance to

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and countering of negative black stereotypes forwarded since Birth of a Nation, how does the musical score of the film participate in this agenda? How does the score, in fact, score or artistically (re)invent a black cinematic nation? The musical scores of Do the Right Thing and Love Jones provides excellent examples of the fluidity and contestation embedded in the notion “black identity,” a topic that had become such a compelling one for theoretical, political, and artistic reflection in the late 20th century. Before moving to the music in these films, I need to address an important topic raised in most discussions of them: the degree to which they accurately portray an “authentic” black cultural experience.

Keeping it Reel: Diversity, Authenticity, and the Hip-Hop Muze

Hip hop culture has taken on the profile of a cottage industry because of aggressive corporate commodification. The postindustrial decline of United States urban cen- ters, a downward turn that ironically spawned hip hop’s developments, has been co- opted by corporate America and represented as a glossy, yet gritty complex of music idioms, sports imagery, fashion statements, racial themes, danger, and pleasure. While history shows us the persistence of the exploitation of African American culture in the United States, hip hop represents an exemplary case in this regard. As the historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes, “few employment opportunities for African- Americans and a white consumer market eager to be entertained by the Other, blacks have historically occupied a central place in the popular culture industry” (Kelley 46). Kelley argues further that

Nike, Reebok, L.A. Gear, and other athletic shoe conglomerates have profited enormously from postindustrial decline. TV com- mercials and print ads romanticize the crumbling urban spaces in which African American youth must play, and in so doing they have created a vast market for overpriced sneakers. These televisual representations of “street ball” are quite remarkable; marked by chain-link fences, concrete playgrounds, bent and rusted netless hoops, graffiti-scrawled walls, and empty build- ings, they have created a world where young black males do nothing but play. (44)

The omnipresence of such imagery in the media has made a strong impact on notions of “authenticity” in African American culture. And moreover, music and musical practices continue to play a crucial role in the creation, re-negotiation, and critique of the authenticity trope.

The intersection of hip hop musical practices and film serves as a cogent example. Hollywood in the early 1990s presented young fans with films like New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood, Strictly Business, and Juice, among others. Taken together, these films have helped to create a highly recognizable hip-hop mode of representing a one dimension-

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al black youth culture. As filmmaker Spike Lee notes, these “inner-city homeboy revues” created a world in which “all black people lived in ghettos, did crack and rapped” (quoted in Gates 12). As thematic heirs of the 1970s blaxploitation genre of film, the 1990s’ version has been dubbed “rapsploitation” or as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has labeled it, “guiltploitation.” Gates uses the latter term to characterize what he sees as a key message underlying many of these films: ambiguity about upward mobility. His observations about class status and black mobility are worth noting:

The politics of black identity, and the determined quest to recon- cile upward mobility with cultural “authenticity,” is a central preoccupation of these films. If genuine black culture is the culture of the streets, a point on which the blaxploitation films were clear, how can you climb the corporate ladder without being a traitor to your race? What happens when homeboy leaves home? A new genre—guiltsploitation—is born. (Gates 12)

Gates sees this trend as directly linked to the attitudes and backgrounds of the filmmakers. Rapsplotiation of the early 1990s occurred, in part, because of an emer- gence of young, black, college-educated, and middle class directors. Gates argues that these autuers did not choose to close “the gulf between the real black people behind the camera and the characters they’ve assembled in front of it” (Gates 13).

Beyond this underlying class status tension, critics have also raised questions with respect to gender issues in these films. Feminist critics such as Valerie Smith, Michele Wallace, bell hooks, Wahneema Lubiana, and Jacquie Jones, among others, have noted that the perceived “realness” of the rapsploitation film genre is also real hostile to black women. But the class-based and feminist critiques of these films are some- times difficult to articulate because of the compelling nature of the film experience itself and what Smith has identified as a documentary impulse. Michele Wallace, for example, admitted: “The first time I say John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood [1991], I was completely swept away by the drama and the tragedy. It was like watching the last act of Hamlet or Titus Andronicus for the first time. When I left the theater, I was crying for all the dead black men in my family”(Wallace 123). Upon subsequent viewings, however, Wallace noticed the strain of misogyny running throughout much of the film. She perceived that Boyz and other films like it seemed to be saying that the dismal social conditions depicted in these films were due to character flaws in the women.

Valerie Smith has argued that a documentary impulse authenticates these films with claims that they represent the “real.” They achieve this documentary aura through an uncritical use of various aural and visual markers of “real” black living conditions, reproducing stereotypical ideas about African-Americans. The bound- aries separating fact and fiction, truth and artistic invention become blurred. Smith notes that critics, reviewers, and press kits assure audiences that these black male directors were “endangered species” themselves and are thus “in positions of author- ity relative to their material” (Smith 58).

While the importance of film cannot be dismissed, we should be careful to recognize the difference between cinematic entertainment and the “truth” of lived

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experience. There does not exist a one-to-one homology between lived experience and representations of such in film. At the same time, we should keep in mind that the same social energy that sustains ideologies like misogyny and other forms of discrim- ination also circulates in the narratives of these films. In other words, these directors didn’t invent the misogyny, but they help to reproduce it. In this sense, they—perhaps unconsciously—kept it real, as the saying goes.

Writer Lisa Kennedy has argued that the complex of money, narrative, and pleasure bound up in film experiences makes them “extraordinarily powerful.” Film, she writes, is how America looks at itself.” Nonetheless, she warns us against confusing the “individual vision” of an artist like a filmmaker with “the” collective reality of a group of people. Despite this warning, the dialogic interplay among “real” lived experience and film narratives (and for that matter, television shows news programs, independent documentaries, print media, and music) remains an impor- tant fact of late-twentieth century life. In the case of film, “the real lives of people are substantiated by their reel lives” (Kennedy 110).

And as I will argue over the next few pages, the nexus of “reel life” and music and musical practices have import on the topic of black music and meaning. What interests me here is not so much the critique of monolithic representations of black class status and life expectations represented in these films. (As we shall see, the film Love Jones does this more than adequately.) Nor do I want to question Hollywood’s capital driven fixation on exploiting this topic. Rather, I want to explore film as one way to enter into an analysis of the intersection of black identity and musical practice. As writers, directors, producers, and composers work together to create convincing characters and story worlds for audiences, they do so with the help of musical codes that circulate and in some ways create cultural knowledge, in the present case, about how “blackness” is experienced in the social world at that historical moment in question.

What’s the Score? Functions of Music in Film

Before turning to the specific films in question, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of how music in cinema works generally. Broadly speaking, music works to enhance the storyworld of the film; it deepens the audience’s experience of the narrative and adds continuity to the film’s scene by scene progression, providing what Claudia Gorbman calls the “bath of affect” (Gorbman 6). Anahid Kassabian argues that the study of music in film should not be an afterthought to what might be considered the more important areas of plot and characterization: “Music draws filmgoers into a film’s world, measure by measure. It is . . . at least as significant as the visual and narrative components that have dominated film studies. It conditions identification processes, the encounters between film texts and filmgoers’ psyches” (Kassabian 1).

The music in contemporary Hollywood films divide into two broad categories. The first is the composed score, which consists of music written specifically for the film. The second type is the compiled score: songs collected from sources that often preexisted the film. According to a Kassabian, these two modes of musical address are