The main question that I had when I read the article, and this is something that has been annoying me for a long time, is do we mean when we talk about such a thing as hip hop cinema? Personally, I think it is ridiculous to call a film like New Jack City or especially Sugar Hill a hip hop film. What is it that qualifies them as hip hop movies? To me, there are only rare examples of films that could be called a hip hop film, for example Beat Street, Wild Style or also 8 Mile. These are films where the narration focuses either on hip hop as a culture itself or a protagonist who comes from and lives in the culture, and hip hop as a culture, not a soundtrack is prominently featured throughout the film.
In contrast, what makes films such as New Jack City, Sugar Hill or Set It Off a hip hop film? One could say they feature black characters, as do hip hop songs and videos, and they have a hip hop soundtrack and often a rapper plays in the film too. But so does for example Bad Boys, and no one would think that this is a hip hop film, although it has the characters, the soundtrack and the rapper. So it must be something else. When looking at the plots of our example movies, it is obvious that they all tell the same story, the problems of the black ghetto and the characters' struggle to make it out of it by any means, and the fact that they are ultimately forced to become criminals. In contrast, the characters in Bad Boys are cops. So maybe that's it. One could argue that this qualifies those movies as hip hop cinema, since the struggle etc is also a vivid motif in a lot of hip hop songs.
But first of all, this is not representative of hip hop as a whole, those kind of stories belong to the gangsta rap subcategory, which is only a small part of rap music, and rap music again is only a small part of hip hop. Political or conscious rappers also address social problems, but deal with them in a very different way, offering solutions or pointing to whom they feel is responsible, rather than detailing the gangsta lifestyle. And there are dozens of other kinds of rap music. So the films do not deal with hip hop as a culture or social movement or anything, and it is essentially wrong to term those films hip hop films just because they deal with black inner-city issues. That is like saying 'The Wire' or 'Good Times' are hip hop TV series.
Hi, well the authors are pretty explicit in their definition (Craig Watkins and Beretta Smith Shomade). That being said, I don't think these films, as you rightfully pointed out, reflect all of hip-hop; neither does Wild Style. I brought one of the main actresses to campus last spring from that film, and you'd be surprised about her comments about that film as a hip hop film. Anyway, perhaps the question is what does a discussion of the genre allow us to do, and in what ways must we think beyond it (as with all genres) in order to take the conversation farther. Your post does take us farther, and thank you for that, as well as for your commitment to serious engagement with the material. Part of serious engagement constitutes the important question of: "Not so fast, what else is there," which is something we should ask of everything we read.
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