Tag: hip hop

Movie Review: Hustle and Flow

The first time I heard about Hustle and Flow was when I was watching the 78th Academy Awards in 2006 and one of the songs in the film, “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” won an Oscar for Best Original Song. After that, I didn’t think about the film again, especially because I was too young at the time to see it. But fast forward to 2021 and I’m older and have seen enough R rated dramas to not mind seeing another one. Also, the movie received positive reviews from critics, so I wanted to see it.

It was definitely different from watching Zola. For those who haven’t seen Zola, it’s a dark comedy based on a true Twitter thread by a young Black woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King, who meets a fellow stripper while waitressing in Detroit and embarks with her on a wild road trip to Florida. The pimp in Hustle and Flow, played by Terrence Howard, ends up being a good guy who just wants to follow his dream of being a musician. Even though he doesn’t respect the women in his life, they still help him follow his musician dreams. The pimp in Zola, however, is anything but a good guy and doesn’t even become a good guy at any point during the film. In one scene of Hustle and Flow, D’Jay has Nola accompany him to a pawn shop where he is buying equipment for his recording studio, but the old white guy working there is unwilling to give him a discount for the expensive equipment. But then the guy ogles Nola and DJay arranges for her to have sex with him in exchange for the music equipment (this scene creeped me the fuck out, not gonna lie.) Nola then leaves the store and DJay threatens her with abusive language and she tells him she doesn’t want to hustle anymore, and wants something different in life even if she doesn’t know what that is. DJay then has Nola help him out in recording his rap album, and later on in the film when he is arrested for shooting up a bar he gives her his cassette tape and has her say aloud that she is in charge, meaning that she needs to take over his career while he is in prison. She is later scene getting out of a car wearing a business suit (which early on in the movie she told DJay she wanted to wear) and heels and walking to a radio station, and she seduces the DJ at the station to play DJay’s song “Whoop That Trick,” which he recorded at his home with Shug, Nola, Shelly, and Clyde. The song ends up being a hit and everyone rejoices.

Zola, however, paints a much grimmer picture. There are many scenes where Stefani, the white woman who coerces Zola to go on the trip with them, faces brutal treatment from her pimp, X (Colman Domingo acted the hell out of that role, and I’m glad I watched interviews of him talking about his character before watching the film, so I wouldn’t be scared shitless by his character.) When Zola first gets in the car, it seems they are all having a fun time, with X driving and all of them–X, Zola, Derek, and Stefani—rapping loudly to Migos’ “Hannah Montana.” However, within the first fifteen minutes of the film things go dark real quick, and we find out that X is actually more sinister than he appears. In one scene of the film (that has stayed stuck in my memory in the months after watching the movie) Stefani has sex with a client and ends up making less than she is worth, and Zola is furious with that, telling Stefani that “pussy is worth thousands.” Stefani tells her with false confidence that she doesn’t set the price for her services, and Zola has her update her profile and set a rate for her services. Stefani ends up making a ton of money that evening with multiple clients, but the next morning, when Stefani gives the money to X, he gets angry and tells Stefani to not let Zola get it in her head that her services are worth a lot of money, and that he is in charge when it comes to negotiating the rate of Stefani’s services. Stefani taps him quietly on the shoulder, and whispers in his ear if she can have some of the money (that she, not X, made through her own work), X tells her no and to be grateful that she has “food in her belly” and that he is providing her with these places to stay. Stefani lives in fear of X because he is absolutely an unpredictable character, and even though she projects this air of confidence around Zola, that X is just doing his job as her pimp and that she has no problems with him, it’s obvious that he uses fear and pumps himself up to intimidate Stefani and make her feel like she doesn’t have control over her life. In another scene, Stefani is forced into a client’s room and locked in a closet, and X, Zola and Derek run over to the room to get her. X shoots the guy who held her captive and they end up getting Stefani out of there, but in all honesty he’s not doing it because he like Stefani. He’s doing it because she makes him money, and if he loses her he will lose his cash flow, especially because Zola refuses to follow through with anything he does because she is a good bullshit detector and knows X is trying to intimidate her and make her lose her sense of self-worth. X doesn’t care about Stefani’s hopes and dreams, or even really about her career, unless it makes him money.

I am actually glad I watched Zola before watching Hustle and Flow. And I admit, I cannot compare the two movies to one another. While both movies are crime films, Hustle and Flow is a serious drama, and even though it has its tender moments and some funny moments of joy, it is at the end of the day a drama. Zola, however, is a dark comedy that has its funny moments, and it was an enjoyable film to watch (I think had I not read the Twitter thread before seeing the movie, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the film as much.) The film doesn’t of course poke fun at sex trafficking or dancers themselves. The comedy lies in the absurdity of Stefanie, Derek and X, and knowing that Zola already knows how trippy and wild these people are as she quietly observes their ridiculous behavior. In Hustle and Flow, DJay is the main character and the women he pimps (Shug, Nola, and Lexus) are supporting characters who help bolster his music career so that he can address his midlife crisis (not that that isn’t important or that DJay’s dreams didn’t matter. They certainly did, and as a musician myself the film was quite inspiring in that sense) while in Zola, the pimp is a supporting character and Zola’s narrative is front and center and she gets to tell it just as it happened. Zola actually gives the lived account of a woman who was coerced into this trip. Honestly, it wouldn’t be fair for me to reduce it to just a wild trip to Florida. It was human trafficking and Zola, a Black woman and dancer, was actually in real life coerced by a young white woman into the human trafficking business and she actually shared the trauma she dealt with on that trip on Twitter in 2015. In one scene, Zola is sitting by herself at the poolside of the hotel X has them stay at, and she is just trying to have some alone time to herself but then X interrupts her and forces her to come back inside so that she can accompany Stefanie to meet with clients. Zola then says that she came on the trip to dance (at the beginning, when she and Stefanie first meet they dance together at a strip club, make a ton of money and have a good time just being themselves and doing their work) but then X tells her that “they’re done with that” and that she is here so that she and Stefanie can make him money. In Hustle and Flow, we briefly see Lexus and other women working at the strip club, and DJay sending Nola off to meet with clients, but that’s pretty much it. We don’t actually see what the men do to these women, how they treat them. It’s pretty much focused on DJay, his old high school friend Clyde, and a white guy named Shelly who all work together to create an album and help launch DJay’s career. Nola, Lexus and Shug are there for support, and even though Shug sings the chorus on the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” she is still at the end of the day a supporting character who helped the main character succeed in his career.

And of course, that’s not a bad thing in itself. The movie is really about people making music together and enjoying the process of it. It actually reminded me of Begin Again in that sense, because in Begin Again Keira Knightley’s character, Gretta, and Mark Ruffalo’s character, Dan, create their own band from scratch, recruiting random musicians who aren’t signed to a record label and just want to make music together and have fun. It is an enriching process of music making for all of them. Of course, the way Gretta and Dan see the music making is different from how DJay views it. Dan and Gretta just want to enjoy life and making music together, and even when Gretta sells the music online for a small price, Dan doesn’t mind because they had fun on the album together. DJay, however, puts a lot of pressure on Shug when she is singing the vocals for the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” because he really wants his album to get noticed by big producers and in particular, a famous musician he looks up to called Skinny Black (played by real-life rapper Ludacris). They are not making the album for fun; they are having fun in the process, but they are not just making the album for laughs. DJay wants worldly success and acclaim because he came from nothing and is going through a point in his life where he doesn’t know what to do. Dan, however, is also going through a midlife crisis like DJay, but he was already working for a renowned record company for years so he had access to the resources in the music industry and all the connections. He has won many awards, while DJay is just getting started and has to start from scratch and has to work extremely hard to get noticed by the big record labels and radio stations, and of course, his idol Skinny Black, who ends up putting his career down and not supporting DJay in his dreams. Even though these two movies about music are totally different in their subject matter, they are about people following their dreams from scratch even when the going goes rough for them.

Here is the trailer for Hustle and Flow:

Hustle and Flow. 2005. Rated R for sex and drug content, pervasive language and some violence.

Book Review: On the Come Up

April 27, 2019

Categories: books

I just finished On the Come Up by Angie Thomas and think there needs to be a sequel to the book. It is that good. I read her novel The Hate U Give about a year ago and devoured it within a few days. For those who haven’t yet read the book, The Hate U Give is about a young Black woman named Starr who loses her childhood friend when a police officer kills him. Starr, over the course of the novel, learns to transform her grief into a call for everyone to protest racial profiling. This novel earned Angie Thomas a spot on The New York Times bestseller list and a movie starring Amandla Stenberg as Starr.

On the Come Up is also incredibly good. It is about a young Black woman named Brianna (nicknamed “Bri”) Jackson who lives with her mom and her brother after the murder of her father, who was a prominent rapper. Bri, like her family, is struggling to make ends meet while aspiring to be a famous rapper, but then her Aunt Pooh encourages her to enter a rapping battle to get a record deal with Supreme, a prominent rapper who was in competition with Bri’s dad. Bri enters the battle even though her mom and teachers want her to focus on studying for the ACT so she can get into college, and she ends up roasting her rival, Supreme’s son Milez. Her song goes viral and everyone at school now knows who she is, but the further immersed she gets in her career as a rapper, the deeper in trouble Bri gets with her family and friends. Jayda (nicknamed Jay), Bri’s mom, was able to recover from her substance abuse and get a job at the local church, but when she gets laid off, she struggles to provide for herself, Bri and her son, Trey. Bri’s fame becomes the talk of the community, and not in a good way. One day, two police officers profile Bri and accuse her of having drugs in her backpack when she actually has candy she is selling to make money. Everyone at the school sings Bri’s hit, but a lot of people criticize her because the lyrics seem to the public to glorify drug use, gun violence and money. Supreme tries to sell Bri out, but Bri eventually realizes how, in the end, the money and fame doesn’t matter if it jeopardizes your safety and the safety of your friends and family. She realizes that one can still be a rapper and not have to play into people’s mainstream ideas of who rappers are. In fact, rap can be used as a means of fostering community and addressing social injustice. This book really spoke to me, especially with Trey’s character. Trey went to college, got straight A’s in high school, and got a degree in psychology. However, he couldn’t find jobs in his field, so he got a job working at a pizza restaurant to support the family while looking for a better job and applying to graduate school. His grandfather pities him for having a college degree and working in food service, but Trey’s situation is a real reality that speaks to a lot of us millennials who get these college degrees but don’t have many opportunities after college to use these degrees in the real world. However, even though Trey doesn’t directly use his psychology degree in a job-market sense, he still uses it to his advantage when helping out Bri. In one scene, Bri cries because she is overwhelmed with the unwanted attention she is getting at school for getting her music out there, with her family’s financial situation, and with the death of her father. She gets on a radio show and calls out Hype, the interviewer, when he belittles her music and makes her out to be this violent person when she’s really just trying to survive, and she gets backlash from it. It is overwhelming, and she thinks she is weak from crying in front of Trey, but he tells her that crying doesn’t make you weak and that “admitting that you’re weak is one of the strongest things you can do.” (Thomas p. 362)

This made me think of the film Moonlight, which is about Chiron, a young Black gay man growing up at a time where no one other than a few people would accept him for who he is. In one scene, Chiron cries in the principal’s office because Kevin, the guy he fell in love with, beats him up after a homophobic school bully pressures him to do so. The principal tries to convince him that he should have told someone that he was being bullied, but Chiron tells her that she doesn’t know how hard it is for him to do that. In another scene, we see Juan, a drug dealer who supports Chiron when his mom doesn’t, break down and cry at the dinner table because Chiron is living this painful reality where kids at school are calling him slurs and his mom also neglects him at home, and he just doesn’t know what to tell this little kid when Juan himself is just trying to survive. This movie shows that crying is human, but that Hollywood hasn’t always been good about just letting Black individuals, especially Black men, have space to just release their pain through tears. I totally agree with Trey that crying doesn’t make you weak, even though our society has historically stigmatized the shedding of tears. Crying shows that you are willing to admit that something is wrong, and it is a powerful way to communicate. Of course, crying too much is not always a good thing (I’m an empath, trust me, I know.) So even though it seems Trey’s degree is useless, it actually helps him read people and know what they are going through. This is how I feel with philosophy and Africana Studies. As much as people love to bash philosophy majors, our degree really isn’t useless because regardless of whether you pursue economics, STEM, or the arts and humanities, you need a solid philosophy on which to base your studies, otherwise you’re just doing all this research with no purpose. Even when working all these different jobs not related to my major, I learned how to think and act like a philosopher. As a philosophy major I learned how to question everything: What is the purpose of being a creative? What is my purpose in life? Are there perks to being a perfectionist? I have applied philosophy to everything: when I listen to music, when I write, when I watch movies, when I go to my job every day, when I interact with my fellow human beings, when I perform music. I live philosophy every day even though I don’t get to sit in my dorm room and reread Descartes’ Meditations ten times like I did in college.

The Mask Stereotype

Even though my second degree, Africana Studies, didn’t get me a job working at the Smithsonian (I still need to just get a ticket and go visit the National Museum of African-American History), I have used my training as a philosophy major to think more deeply about the deep roots of Black pain in our country’s history and how we can continue to address these roots through music, writing and other mediums of expression. When Bri’s song becomes a hit, Supreme goads her to do more music with lyrics about gun violence, but after understanding the risk that producing this music has on her loved ones, Bri realizes that Supreme is using her as a pawn to beef up his already successful career. When she goes into the studio expecting to rap her own lyrics, Supreme says Dee-Nice, another rapper, already wrote the song for her. She reads the lyrics and finds that it’s the same subject matter she rapped about in her hit: possessing guns and killing other people in the community if they criticize her. James, an older white man who is friends with Supreme at the record label, only has this single perception of the Black community: problems. Everywhere problems. Drugs, gangs, violence, prison, unemployment. He doesn’t know rap’s potential to address the institutional inequality that caused these problems in the first place. But because James only cares about making a profit from Bri, he thinks that all she wants to rap about is “sassy black-girl shit” (Thomas 381) and that pigeonholing her will make the record label richer. However, as an outsider, Bri can see through their nonsense even though she has gained access to this rich powerful boys club of music producers, so she speaks to Supreme in private and tells him she’s got her own music and won’t rap what Dee-Nice wrote. Supreme tells her that she can’t worry about all that because she is in the music business and “this is about making money” because James has the money they don’t have to succeed in the business. In reality, if Bri were to keep making songs that didn’t personally speak to her, she would just keep getting paid less than a profit while James and Supreme enjoyed most of the money without really doing any of the hard work themselves (aka writing the music from their hearts.)

Bri says the moment when Supreme is threatening to end her career reminds her of when she went to the zoo, and these little kids were making faces at the animals in the exhibit and trying to get them to come up to the glass or make sounds, solely for the sake of entertainment. Even though these animals obviously didn’t pay attention to these kids, Bri remembers feeling bad for the animals, and after giving in to Supreme and rapping the song Dee-Nice wrote, she feels like she’s “in an exhibit, and there’s room full of people waiting for me to entertain them. I have to say what they want me to say. Be what they want me to hear.” (Thomas 384) There is a concept I learned about in one of my Africana Studies classes, and that was “putting on the mask,” or what happens when Black individuals feel like they are always performing for the public eye. Black individuals have diverse identities and experiences: straight, gay, trans, Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, biracial, multiracial, rich, poor, middle class, the list of identities goes on. However, race is about perceptio, and how people were brought up to view Blackness can condition how one wants to see Black people behave, and often these perceptions of Blackness are not very well-founded. James operates from a position where he feels it’s okay to belittle Bri, her dad and other Black citizens, because he promises her money and fame if she lets him say all these bigoted things about Black individuals. Instead of feeling like she can be free with her music, Bri feels trapped in the industry and is trying to hold onto her sense of self, but when her mom finds out what happened, she asks Bri who she really is and Bri can’t answer on the spot because she has other people telling her who she is. She realizes that she can still kill it as a female rapper without catering to macho bigwigs who couldn’t care less about her humanity.

This book reminded me so much of the film Dope. In the film Malcolm, Diggy and Jib are three high school “geeks” living in Inglewood who love ’90s hip-hop, want to go to college, and play in a punk band called Awreeoh. The school bullies pick on them for loving these things, and when a drug dealer named Dom invites Malcolm, Diggy and Jib to a party , Dom and the other partygoers at first make fun of them, but then when Malcolm finds out that Dom put a gun and cocaine in his backpack and Malcolm and his friends sell the cocaine on the black market, they suddenly become popular very fast. But when they get further enmeshed into the pickle of selling the cocaine, Malcolm’s ego gets in the way and I worried his friends were going to desert him. But Jib and Diggy stick with him through the whole thing even if it nearly costs them their future dreams. The friendship between Jib, Diggy and Malcolm reminded me of the friendship between Bri and her friends Sonny and Malik. They give each other the Wakanda handshake from the film Black Panther:

and they also love quoting Yoda from Star Wars. Their friendship is tight, and even when Bri’s hit goes viral and gets her backlash, they stick through with her all the way. I also liked how Bri and Malik never make Sonny feel different from them just because he is gay. Similarly, Jib and Malcolm love Diggy for who she is even when other people make fun of her for being a lesbian. As a queer POC, I was really happy that the rare gay characters were well-represented in Dope and On the Come Up.

While reading this book, I couldn’t help but plead in my mind: pleease let there be a movie for this. And sure enough, I Googled “on the come up movie” and Variety had just published a piece a couple of months ago about Fox purchasing the rights to produce the upcoming film based on the novel. I cannot begin to emphasize how important it is that we teach The Hate U Give and On the Come Up in our high school English classes (then again, I am lightyears removed from high school so I don’t know how the curriculum is nowadays.) We need to give kids of all races, especially young Black and Latinx kids, an opportunity to read books where they feel well-represented. I remember we read the occasional Gwendolyn Brooks poem for English class and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, but for the most part the books we read had few to no POC characters with rich backstories and character development, and a lot of the authors, frankly speaking, were dead white men. After taking Africana Studies and reading literature by writers such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nell Larsen, I at first got angry because I never got to read these writers in school, but then came to appreciate in the end my college education and understand how much of a privilege it was to have access to even just knowing these writers exist and that they published these deeply personal works for us to read. Not everyone knows these works exist, and English teachers who just have their students read The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Julius Caesar (8/10/21: not hating on these books, I enjoyed them as much as the next person) aren’t giving their students a chance to know that these narratives like those of Starr and Brianna exist. On the Come Up is especially powerful because it encourages kids who might want to be rappers or other musicians that, while it’s okay to make money from your art to pay your bills and put bread on the table, music should also speak to social inequalities and musicians not be afraid of speaking up when something is wrong or people are taking advantage of their well-being. Brianna later uses her music to address the sexism she has encountered as a female rapper and people’s expectations for her to be someone she isn’t. As a musician who doesn’t say much, Bri’s story was inspiring for me because as an introvert she uses music to express her anger. At this point, after watching so much news, it’s hard for me to express how overwhelming it is. I could just shut off and not think about it, but I feel inspired after reading On the Come Up to use my music to address racial injustice, climate change, sexism, domestic violence and other forms of injustice. I recently came across this powerful performance of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings by Cremaine Booker, and in the video description he dedicates the performance to the late Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two unarmed Black men who died at the hands of police in 2016. After seeing this performance I gained the confidence to use my music to address things that make me angry but that I didn’t have the words to express my anger about. I have seen orchestras on YouTube perform this beautiful solemn piece, but Cremaine’s was the first version I have seen that was directly dedicated to addressing social injustice.

Overall, excellent novel. I wouldn’t mind reading it again. Truly a blessing to read another work by Angie Thomas! 🙂

On the Come Up. Angie Thomas. 452 pp. 2019.