Hip-hop is entering a nostalgia period. Many of the genre’s biggest stars are middle-aged, and the “classic hip-hop” format is the hottest new thing going in terrestrial radio. Similarly to how John Lennon, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain continue dominating rock platforms decades after their deaths, hip-hop fans remain fixated on deceased rappers like Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E and Notorious BIG. This has spilled into the realm of film; the 2009 Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious cost only $20m to make, but doubled that amount in worldwide gross. This helped ensure the greenlighting of the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton, due out in August, as well as a Tupac biopic, which will be directed by John Singleton and starts production in June.
Expectations for these films should be tempered. After all, like the modestly received Notorious, the NWA and Tupac projects are being made under the watchful eye of the subjects’ mothers and close collaborators. (Shakur’s mother, Afeni, had a protracted court battle with the movie’s production company over creative control.) Their producers have every incentive to lionize their subjects, potentially at the expense of a compelling story. But the flicks nonetheless represent an exciting trend, and a wave of hip-hop-inspired films that may reach the genre’s previous peak of the early 90s.
The early to mid-1980s saw a wave of memorable, low-budget, time-capsule hip-hop-influenced films like Downtown 81, Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove and the Los Angeles-set Breakin’ and Enterin’ documentary, which inspired the Hollywood film Breakin’. But the hip-hop films that truly captured the public’s imagination kicked off in 1989 with Do the Right Thing, segueing into a series of combustible 90s films with strong gangsta rap influences. Particularly impactful were New Jack City and Boyz N the Hood, released within months of each other in 1991.
Hollywood briefly couldn’t get enough gritty urban stories with a hip-hop soundtrack: 1992’s Juice featured Tupac in his first starring role, and he was so absorbed into loose-cannon Harlem high school student Bishop that, as noted by his one-time friend Biggie Smalls, the character ultimately took over his life. Roles in Poetic Justice and Above the Rim further elevated Tupac’s star. Meanwhile, the South Central-set Menace II Society was a sleeper hit, and, from the end of the decade, Hype Williams’s shiny-suit-era film Belly and the RZA-scored Ghost Dog are considered classics by many. Parody movies CB4, Fear of a Black Hat and Don’t Be a Menace are all hilarious, as are many of Master P’s productions – though not always on purpose. But perhaps the most enduring of these 90s rap films (silly or straight) is Friday, Ice Cube’s writing debut, a bona fide classic that set out to show the lighter side of inner-city life and made both Cube and Chris Tucker into Hollywood franchises.
The 2000s saw some noteworthy entries into the field – including 8 Mile, Hustle & Flow and Dave Chappelle’s Block Party – and demonstrated the enduring appeal of rappers turned actors like Will Smith, Ludacris, Queen Latifah, Mark Wahlberg, Andre 3000, Common and others. But following 8 Mile’s success, the 2005 50 Cent vehicle Get Rich or Die Tryin’ slowed the momentum for mainstream rap films, earning a miserable 16% Rotten Tomatoes rating and barely earning back its $40m budget.
Things are quickly turning around. High-profile television biopics on artists like TLC and Aaliyah were widely watched (though the latter received dismal reviews). And a number of small documentaries from recent years have been rapturously received, including Beats Rhymes & Life, about A Tribe Called Quest, and Ice-T’s Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap. These demonstrate an appetite for nerdy, intelligent genre films, none of which sound more exciting than Raekwon and Ghostface’s upcoming Only Built 4 Cuban Linx documentary, called The Purple Tape Files, which they recently announced at Sundance. The Utah film festival also saw the premiere of Dope, a promising drama featuring A$AP Rocky. The Ol’ Dirty Bastard biopic Dirty White Boy, starring The Wire’s Michael K Williams, remains in the works. (There is apparently no father to Williams’s style, either.)
Now that both major studios and indie film-makers are devoting their attentions to hip-hop, another golden era of rap films could well be in the making. At the very least, so long as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles continue making movies without Vanilla Ice, we should be good.
