The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2022 has been revealed, and it’s a diverse one. Eminem, Duran Duran, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo, and Carly Simon all got the call to the Hall in the Performer category. Judas Priest and producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis will be inducted under the Musical Excellence category, while Harry Belafonte and Elizabeth Cotten will go in under the Early Influence category.
Legendary lawyer Allen Grubman, Interscope founder/producer/engineer/Beats One founder Jimmy Iovine and Sylvia Robinson will be inducted under the Ahmet Ertegun category, which honors non-performing industry professionals who have had a major influence on the creative development and growth of rock and music that has impacted youth culture.
For the first time in Rock Hall history, six female acts will be inducted together. This year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony will take place on Nov. 5 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
“This diverse group of inductees each had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture and helped change the course of rock & roll,” said John Sykes, chairman of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Their music moved generations and influenced so many artists that followed.”
Rage Against the Machine (and the New York Dolls) didn’t make it … again. But, we did see it coming. As previously reported, Parton initially removed herself from consideration for this year’s Rock Hall class because she said she didn’t consider herself a rock artist, but later changed her mind and said she’d accept the award if offered.
The ceremony will air at a later date (as usual) on HBO and stream on HBO Max, along with a radio simulcast on SiriusXM’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Radio channel 310 and SiriusXM’s Volume channel 106.
Snoop Dogg and Eminem have teamed for a new single, “From the D 2 the LBC,” accompanied by a video in which they transform from human into animated Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT characters. The veteran rappers performed the track live for the first time last night (June 23) during ApeFest at New York’s Pier 17.
Although Snoop previously appeared in tandem with Dr. Dre, Nate Dogg and Xzibit on “Bitch Please II” from Eminem’s 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP, this is the first time the two artists have released a song with just the two of them. Snoop, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blige also performed together earlier this year as part of the Super Bowl halftime show.
The “From the D 2 the LBC” video appears to tease the upcoming release of Eminem’s Curtain Call 2, a sequel to his 2005 greatest hits package Curtain Call — The Hits. That album has sold more than 10 million copies in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
“From the D 2 the LBC” continues a busy month for Eminem, who also released another new song, “The King and I,” from the soundtrack to the Baz Luhrmann film Elvis.
As for Snoop, he has a handful of summer concert appearances on his schedule, including the Cincinnati Music Festival in late July and at the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota in early August.
As expected, Eminem will release his second greatest hits collection, Curtain Call 2, on Aug. 5 through Shady Records/Aftermath Entertainment/Interscope Records. The album is comprised of music Eminem has brought forth since the first Curtain Call volume in 2005, including key solo tracks from 2009’s Relapse and onwards, side projects, guest appearances and film soundtrack contributions.
In addition to a standard release, Curtain Call 2 will be available in a limited edition boxed set. Both can be pre-ordered through Eminem’s Web site.
The announcement follows Eminem’s most recent release, “From the D 2 the LBC,” featuring Snoop Dogg. Eminem premiered the track June 23 at the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT event Ape Fest, alongside James Larese-directed animated video. A week earlier, Eminem released “The King and I” featuring Cee-Lo Green from the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Both new songs are included on Curtain Call 2, as well as one previously unreleased track.
Eminem will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s performer category on Nov. 5 at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater.
Eminem, Duran Duran, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie and Carly Simon Lead Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2022
Eminem and Snoop Dogg took a trip through the proverbial metaverse during their MTV Video Music Awards performance of “From the D 2 the LBC” tonight (Aug. 28). Much like in the song’s recent music video, the veteran rappers transformed from human into animated Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT characters.
This time out, the segment began with Eminem and Snoop relaxing on a couch while the latter puffed on a comically oversized joint. The fumes apparently sent Eminem hurtling into a virtual world, where he and Snoop flew through midair from great heights and commandeered a weaponized flying car. The real artists finished the song in front of the similarly real VMAs audience at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
It was an “All Night Long” affair as music elite gathered for the 37th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last night (Nov. 5) at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theatre. In addition to Lionel Richie, the diverse new class included Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, Pat Benatar, Carly Simon, Eminem, and the Eurythmics. Honorary awards were also given to Judas Priest, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Elizabeth Cotten, and Jimmy Iovine, among others.
Though there were some sad moments, such as original Duran Duran guitarist Andy Taylor revealing his battle with stage 4 prostate cancer, there was also plenty of celebration and surprise guest appearances. The ceremony will air on HBO and HBO Max on Nov. 19.
After being introduced by Lenny Kravitz, Richie broke out into a medley of hits including “Hello,” the Commodores classic “Easy,” and a crowd singalong version of “All Night Long.” Dave Grohl joined for “Easy,” continuing his bromance with the “American Idol” host who also starred in the Foo Fighters movie “Studio 666.”
Dolly Parton, who initially rebuffed her nomination and said she was not “rock-worthy,” shined in her moment. The country icon was joined by Zac Brown on guitar to debut a new song from the forthcoming rock album she vowed to record if she was inducted. Singers P!nk and Brandi Carlile supported Parton during a performance of “Coat of Many Colors,” while Brown returned with Sheryl Crow for “9 to 5.” An all-star cast joined for a show-topping finale of “Jolene,” including Carlile, Crow, Annie Lennox, P!nk, Benatar, Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon, and even Judas Priest’s Rob Halford.
Rapper Eminem was inducted by early mentor and longtime collaborator Dr. Dre, who recalled the first time they met in his studio and began recording Em’s hit “My Name Is.” Eminem opened his performance with that song, then brought out guest stars Steven Tyler (for a live recreation of the “Dream On” sample in “Sing for the Moment”) and pop titan Ed (reprising Dido’s parts on “Stan”).
Though Carly Simon didn’t attend the ceremony while grieving over the loss of her two sisters a day apart last month, Sara Bareilles filled in admirably, inducting Simon and also performing “Nobody Does It Better” and “You’re So Vain,” the latter helped by Olivia Rodrigo.
Other guests included The Edge inducting the Eurythmics, Crow inducting Pat Benatar, Janet Jackson introducing Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and Alice Cooper feting Judas Priest. The heavy metal icons, celebrating 50 years in the biz, also performed with original guitarist K.K. Downing for the first time since he left the band in 2011. Early drummer Les Binks also joined.
The ceremony ended with a tribute to the late Jerry Lee Lewis, with Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp performing Lewis’ classic hit “Great Balls of Fire.”
It’s been a while since Nandi Bushell shared a cover. Six months to be precise. But yes, the 12-year-old sensation took on Eminem’s “Rap God.” The timing was perfect, with the rapper being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last night.
“Working on my speed and consistency,” Bushell wrote. Though judging by the video, she has no problem keeping up with the pace of Eminem’s spitfire vocals on the track. Bushell said the choice of song was inspired by HAL, drummer for Japanese rock act CVLTE, who posted his take on “Rap God” to YouTube in March. She also shared that she’s continuing to work on her own music.
Bushell recently spoke with SPIN about the material, including the single “Into the Shadows” which was released Sept. 30, a song written for her musician dad who has been faced with health challenges recently. Her first formal release of original works comes after a few years of posting viral covers on YouTube (taking on Jimi Hendrix, Billie Eilish, Muse, and Led Zeppelin, among others) that have been behind a quick rise to fame.
Nandi Bushell has received support from some of rock’s biggest stars. In 2020, Dave Grohl participated in an extended drum-off challenge with Bushell. In 2021 he invited her on stage at the Forum to play drums on “Everlong” and in September, she played on “Learning to Fly” at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert in London. Tom Morello is also a fan. His son Roman joined forces with Bushell on “The Children Will Rise Up.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
Ed Sheeran Releasing Second Album With The National's Aaron Dessner
In something of a reprise of their November 2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony collaboration, Eminem made an unannounced hometown appearance last night (July 15) during Ed Sheeran’s concert at Detroit’s Ford Field.
Eighteen songs into the show, Sheeran told the audience he’d rehearsed Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” earlier in the day and then began playing it solo with the caveat, “we’ll see how it goes.” Halfway through, the rapper himself appeared from the side of the stage to join in on the fun.
After finishing “Lose Yourself,” Sheeran admitted Eminem “was gonna come out and do one song, but I said, you can’t come out in Detroit and just do one song. Do you want another song?” The pair then launched into “Stan,” with Sheeran handling the vocal parts originally sampled from “Dido” on the 2000 track about a mentally unstable fan.
“Detroit, I missed you!,” Eminem said before exiting, a reference to the fact that the artist has rarely performed live since the conclusion of his 2019 Rapture tour. His latest album, Music To Be Murdered By, was released in 2020, although he brought forth three new songs on the 2022 greatest hits set Curtain Call 2.
Prior to their team-up on “Stan” at the Rock Hall induction, Sheeran sang on the song “River” from Eminem’s 2017 album Revival, while Eminem dropped by on “Remember the Name” from Sheeran’s 2019 collection No.6 Collaborations Project.
Sheeran’s tour in support of his latest album, Subtract, resumes next weekend in Nashville.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
We usually think that the biggest threats will arrive from overseas or outer space. Not true. The psychological studies are in, and hip hop is gonna give you herpes. From the discipline that brought you eugenics, electroshock therapy, and the Oedipus complex comes a steady stream of conclusions that will get you throwing your over-ear noise-cancellers into a dumpster fire. It’s science people. Not against science, are you?
In 2006, in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, researchers from the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation conducted a study trying to find out whether young people’s drug use and violence were related to their listening to music containing messages of drug use and violence – and concluded that young people’s drug use and violence … were related to their listening to music containing messages of drug use and violence.
Attendees at a 2 Live Crew performance conduct their own studies in Miami in 1988. (Credit: Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images)
In their innovative and vaguely nasty studies, Barbara Krahé and Steffen Bieneck from the University of Potsdam conducted experiments where participants were first told to imagine they were relationship counsellors and then told to write an essay on a romantic conflict presented to them. Afterwards, an insider would give them prepared feedback about just how goddam shit their work was, how poor the advice, how bad the approach. The feedback was, according to the experimenters, “designed to create variability in the [participants’] level of anger.”
After this exquisite shaming, the experimenters played the participants either no music or mix tapes of either “pleasant music” or “aversive music.” The “pleasant music” comprised different classical pieces, like Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, at a volume of 55 dB (about the level of the average conversation). And what about the “aversive music”? These “consisted of a range of different hardcore and techno pieces (e.g., King Deuce)” played at around 60 dB (about the level of the average vacuum cleaner). In case you were just wondering “Who the fuck is ‘King Deuce’?” we’d reply “Nobody really knows.” And if you then asked “Did they name any other artists they used to wind people up?” we’d reply “No – just King Deuce.”
Says it all. T-shirt worn by a bouncer at a Georgian techno nightclub. (Credit: Claudia Thaler/picture alliance via Getty Images)Techno people in Berlin. A study suggests they might be less angry on Vivaldi. (Credit: Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The paper listing the evasive and aversive King Deuce is entitled “The Effect of Music-Induced Mood on Aggressive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior” – and it concludes that listening to “pleasant music” after getting inflammatory essay feedback “buffered” aggressive responses. That is, if a psychologist makes you angry via gaslighting, best they then play you classical music – and not King Deuce.
Kent State University’s Christy Barongan and Gordon C. Nagayama Hall’s influential study “The Influence of Misogynous Rap Music on Sexual Aggression Against Women” tried to investigate the impact of listening to “misogynous rap music” and then determine “the effects of cognitive distortions concerning women on sexually aggressive behavior in the laboratory.” (Few people really know the extent of just how sexually aggressive laboratories could be back in the ’90s.)
Rapper Brooke Candy performs at SXSW 2013. (Credit: Rick Kern via Getty Images)Eric B and Rakim hold guns, 1988. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images)
Twenty-seven men listened to “misogynous rap music” and twenty-seven listened to “neutral rap music.” Participants then viewed neutral, sexually violent, and assaultive film vignettes and chose one of the vignettes to show to a female “confederate” (meaning “co-participant,” not “pro-slaver”). Among those who were subjected to the “misogynous music condition,” 30% showed the female a nasty vignette compared to only 7% to those who weren’t subjected to the music: “These findings suggest that misogynous music facilitates sexually aggressive behavior.” (So, if you are interested in facilitating sexually aggressive behavior, misogynistic rap is an excellent choice.)
Tupac Shakur poses for a mug shot for the New York State Department of Corrections after his conviction for sexual abuse of a female fan. (Credit: Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images)
Similarly and more confusingly, in “Ambivalent Sexism and Misogynistic Rap Music: Does Exposure to Eminem Increase Sexism?” Michael D. Cobband William A. Boettcher the Third – both from the Department of Political Science at North Carolina State University – found out, in their first experiment, they didn’t discover anything at all – because their “measures … were unreliable.” In their second study, however, they discovered that – using the “ASI” (that “Ambivalent Sexism Inventory” – we’re certain you’re familiar with it) – that exposure to misogynistic rap music increased sexism in listeners. The more interesting conclusion was that listening to non misogynistic rap music also increased sexism. (It’s probably that damn beat. Makes you sexist. Everyone knows that.)
Desiigner celebrating his birthday in New York City. (Credit: Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images)Eminem with porn actress Tanya Mercado, who featured in his “Superman” video. (Credit: MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)
Can we continue? In “Converging Interracial Consequences of Exposure to Violent Rap Music on Stereotypical Attributions of Blacks,” James D. Johnson, Sophie Trawalter, and John F. Dividio “demonstrated” that exposure to violent rap music influences both white and Black attitudes towards Black people when compared to exposure to “nonviolent Black musicians” (they mean, we assume – and hope – nonviolent Black music). That is, people exposed to violent rap music tend to then think, as a result – among other things – that black people are lazier and less intelligent than other people. (Oddly, the experimenters don’t point out that such attributions tend to suggest that listening to the music during psychological experiments somehow makes listeners dumber.)
And finally, a study that shows that negative attitudes towards rap and hip-hop likely influences anti-Black attitudes and justifications for racism. In “Blame It on Hip-Hop: Anti-Rap Attitudes as a Proxy for Prejudice,” Christine Reyna and Mark Brandt showed how negative viewpoints about rap were closely associated with negative stereotypes and also with discrimination against black people, acted out both personally and politically. We might add that it may even influence research on the topic.
Of course, it has been argued for some time that hip hop exercises a dark influence over culture in ways that parallel the sorts of concerns people had with comics in the 1950s and “satanic” games like Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s. (Oddly, Eric Clapton’s only #1 US Billboard Single “I Shot the Sheriff” – a cover of a Bob Marley song – never attracted the same criticisms as Ice T’s “Cop Killer,” although studies have not been done in its links to the fact that Clapton’s song came out in 1974, a high point in the killing of police, not equaled until the events of September 11.)
Of course, another suspect here might be normalization of violence in the other grisly song of that year, Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting,” with its chilling refrain “Everybody was kung-fu fighting / Those kicks were fast as lightning.”
German singer Nadja Michael as Tosca gets shanky with Israeli singer Gison Saks as Baron Scarpia for Austria’s Lake Constance Summerfestival. (Credit: Johannes Simon via Getty Images)
We can only be thankful, then, that opera as a form of entertainment seems to be dying. In Puccini’s legendary opera Tosca, we see barbarities like stabbings, a dramatic suicide, firing squads, and violence against law enforcement. The dark second act concludes with the main character stabbing the chief of police to death, jeering at him, and screaming that she wants him to choke on his own blood. Tosca concludes with the hero committing suicide in a most spectacular fashion.
Hang on a minute …
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By 1984, hip-hop was in full force, but still in its infancy as far as narratives in cinema. Evolutionary movements in music have always moved more rapidly on the streets, where cultural gatekeeping erodes much faster than in either the film or music industries.
Hip-hop’s origin story — DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 Bronx dance party — channels a naturally visual mythos. In 1973, the world was still enthralled with disco, while Marvin Gaye, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Bruce Springsteen were all releasing landmark albums. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist transformed the notion of horror, while key figures in the New American Cinema movement like George Lucas and Sidney Lumet released iconic films. Bruce Lee and Jim Kelly would influence a generation thanks to Enter the Dragon, and the Blaxploitation cinema movement birthed by Melvin Van Peebles gave us Richard Roundtree, Pam Grier, Jim Brown, Tamara Dobson, and Ron O’Neal, whose iconography influenced future generations. The birth of hip-hop arrived in the midst of tremendous political turmoil, as the U.S. left Vietnam and the Watergate hearings began, and Roe v. Wade came before the Supreme Court, legalizing abortion.
The nebulous realities of hip-hop don’t allow for an easily definable genesis in cinema. What then, constitutes a “hip-hop film”? And how is it possible to discern the best or most notable, especially when taking into consideration products born for and by the culture, and those clearly produced by curious white counterparts?
Here’s hip-hop in film, over the last 30 years.
1983: Style Wars
It would be years before an inextricable symbiosis between hip-hop and cinema was born, and in early depictions the music played a supporting character.However, 1983 would be a watershed moment with the arrival of Run-DMC, while Ice-T popularized gangsta rap.
The first film to delve into the culture would be Tony Silver’s 1983 documentary Style Wars, which dealt primarily with breakdancing and graffiti, but provided a template for weaving rap into the soundtrack (including “The Message” from Grandmaster Flash and “Beat Bop” by Rammellzee and K-Rob).
Charlie Ahearn directed the first actual narrative film about hip-hop, Wild Style, released in late 1983, featuring graffiti artist Lee Quiñones and a whole slew of hip-hop trailblazers playing versions of themselves, including Fab 5 Freddy, Lady Pink, and the Rock Steady Crew, among others. Ahearn’s plot is a bit iffy but roughly circulates around a curious white journalist (who is introduced with a soundtrack cue of Blondie’s “Rapture”) taking an interest in the graffiti artists. A year later, director Stan Lathan would release Beat Street starring Rae Dawn Chong, about rival dance crews, the highlight of which is a high-energy dance-off that feels like a template for Gaspar Noe’s dance gonzo freakout Climax (2018).
The Mid-‘80s: Breakin’ and Rappin’
Whereas Beat Street feels more designed by the culture it depicted, 1984 was also the year of another generational-defining cult classic: Breakin’ from white director Joel Silberg, featuring legendary dance moments from Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quiñones and Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers, who form a breakdance trio with an unlikely white woman played by Lucinda Dickey.
The film’s success saw the release of an even more over-the-top sequel the same year, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Ice-T plays himself in both films, giving live performances. The success of these films would lead to something a bit more risible from Silberg: 1985’s Rappin’, starring Mario Van Peebles, dubbed over by Ice-T and Master Gee of the Sugarhill Gang (whose younger brother starred in the film).
These movies had dancers and graffiti taking precedence over the music. It took accomplished director Michael Schultz (Cooley High, The Last Dragon) to craft the first successful hip-hop musical, 1985’s Krush Groove, starring Blair Underwood and based loosely on the life of Russell Simmons at the onset of his Def Jam days. The narrative follows the creation of a hip-hop label, the energy and wit providing the spirit Silberg would copy in Rappin’ (including a cutesy, disastrously cheesy rap about eating). This first cycle of hip-hop titles exemplified the commonly-known four core tenets of hip-hop: DJing, rapping, graffiti painting, and breakdancing.
In these early movies, the cultural divide remains troublingly clear, with white Americans balking at a visibility demanded by a culture they had no intention of making room for. As evidenced in Style Wars, New York mayor Ed Koch, along with a handful of celebrities, including Irene Cara, sought to dissuade the city’s youth from defacing public property with graffiti, a campaign of shame referred to as the “War on Graffiti,” which saw Koch trying to implement the use of wild wolves in subway car yards. Police brutality, instead, ensued, leading to the death of graffiti artist Michael Stewart upon being arrested for tagging (the impetus for Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s now-famous painting “Defacement”).
The violence would spur the rise of Public Enemy.
Rumbling on the sidelines are the first women of hip-hop, such as Salt-N-Pepa and MC Lyte, confronting the glass ceiling of the still male-dominated industry and some less-than-welcoming masculine posturing. Fifteen-year-old Roxanne Shante was a trailblazer, though her talents were also demeaned by some of her male counterparts, rather than celebrated.
Late ‘80s to Early ‘90s
As the ‘80s came to a close, then, the relationship between hip-hop and film became increasingly defined by soundtrack, which stretched into the burst of Black auteurs and actors who would flourish through the ’90s. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), Ernest Dickerson’s Juice (1992), and the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society (1993) are all seminal soundtracks where music and cinema are harmonious. Lee employed Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” while Singleton utilized star Ice Cube and a whole list of notables, including 2 Live Crew, Tevin Campbell, Quincy Jones, Yolanda Whitaker, and Tony! Toni Toné! Notably, both titles premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
In this same era, new jack swing (also known as swingbeat), credited to Teddy Riley and combining elements of R&B and hip-hop, gave rise to another crop of musical artists whose work would proliferate soundtracks of the 1990s, including Full Force, and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis famously fostered the ascension of Janet Jackson. And it would be remiss to forget Mario Van Peebles’ spectacular debut, New Jack City (1991) amongst these soundtracks, which included — eclectically — Ice-T, Essence, Keith Sweat, and Johnny Gill.
Two of Tupac’s most significant early acting roles, in Juice (1992) and Above the Rim (1994), also featured exceptional soundtracks. Dickerson curated Cypress Hill, Naughty by Nature and Big Daddy Kane to bolster his iconic debut movie, while white director Jeff Pollack (who directed Booty Call in 1997) featured the Lady of Rage, Thug Life and Al B. Sure! And the House Party franchise starring Kid ‘n Play kicked off in 1990, their characters’ musical aspirations expanding by the 1991 sequel, where Iman plays a greedy record exec trying to take advantage of them.
F. Gary Gray directed an iconic juggernaut in 1995 with Friday, the soundtrack featuring the film’s star and scribe, Ice Cube, plus Cypress Hill. The success of this paved the way for a number of hip-hop adjacent comedies within the boom of Black independent cinema going on throughout the decade (although by the early 2000s, there was a growing and ridiculous resentment toward rap stars taking roles from “actors”).
One of the most neglected offerings from this period is Rusty Cundieff’s mockumentary, Fear of a Black Hat (perhaps overshadowed by Tamra Davis’ similar CB4 from the same year, featuring Chris Rock). Cundieff, who also directed Sprung and Tales from the Hood, stars as the member of a fictional hip-hip group, N.W.H., the subjects of a documentary being made by a journalist, Nina, played by Kasi Lemmons (who would go on to direct Eve’s Bayou in 1997, the first film directed by a Black woman to play in multiplex theaters).
Nina is a character well ahead of her time, and Cundieff doesn’t shy away from the troubling misogyny normalized in hip-hop’s early days (even Martha Wash gets an homage of vindication for her voice being credited to the thinner women starring in her videos).
On the lighter side of things would also be Paris Barclay’s 1996 comedy classic Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, with a soundtrack featuring Lil’ Kim, Jodeci, and Ghostface Killah.
As hip-hop infiltrated and assimilated, cultural critiques of misogyny and homophobia plagued its acceptability amongst white society. The infamous rivalry between East and West Coast rappers, resulting in the murders of Tupac Shakur (whose filmography prior to his death suggested he would become a transfiguring leading man in Hollywood) and the Notorious B.I.G. would close out a decade of strife and infamy, stymying the rise of hip-hop’s leading women, many who would also find success in cinema.
Their representation in ’90s cinema was limited, led by F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1996) as a groundbreaking standalone moment also featuring a distinguished soundtrack, with Queen Latifah making an iconic impression, jumping from Grammy winner (for “U.N.I.T.Y.” in 1995), to television personality in Living Single, to film star.
At the tail end of this Black cinematic renaissance is Hype Williams’ debut, Belly (1998), featuring Nas, DMX, and Method Man, while Malik Sayeed’s cinematography assisted in creating one of the most beautifully shot Neo-noirs of the 1990s. Meanwhile, RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan would bolster the significance of Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), starring Forest Whitaker.
The 2000s found hip-hop in film undergoing a transformation, and profitability dictated its output. Method Man and Redman headlined 2001’s How High, which followed in the footsteps of the ridiculous (and woefully dated) I Got the Hook Up (1998) featuring Master P.
The 2000s
In these early years of the new century, Mekhi Phifer was a connective tissue between all sorts of notable projects, both good and bad, starring in Charles Stone III’s Paid in Full, a film with one of the best soundtracks from these years (heavily featuring Jay-Z). Phifer would also star opposite Beyoncé in Robert Townsend’s greatest misfire, Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001), a made-for-television film which included Mos Def as one of the victims in its wreckage.
Hip-hop’s prowess would be victimized in the likes of Bille Woodruff’s nonsensical Honey (2003), which made a star out of Jessica Alba, who, not surprisingly, later vocalized her ignorance about the necessity of screenwriters. It was also the year someone thought it was a good idea to green light Malibu’s Most Wanted, with Jamie Kennedy as a rich white kid who thinks he’s Black, and whose father hires two Black actors to kidnap his son and scare him out of his dreams to be a rapper. On the other end of the spectrum of white contributions, Craig Brewer would direct one of the best films about hip-hop ever made with the rags-to-riches odyssey Hustle & Flow (2005), starring Terrence Howard in an Oscar-nominated performance as a Memphis pimp who decides to become a rapper, featuring Ludacris, Anthony Anderson, and a phenomenal Taraji P. Henson. The song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” took home an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
The early 2000s also saw hip-hop enter another cinematic phase with director Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile (2002), the fictionalized story of Eminem, starring the real Eminem (Marshall Mathers) set in 1995 Detroit. Critically acclaimed (and winning the Oscar for Best Original Song with “Lose Yourself”), it would open the door for a handful of others, to varying degrees of success.
Irish director Jim Sheridan surely wasn’t the greatest fit to head 50 Cent’s story in Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005), while George Tillman Jr.’s Notorious (2009) and Benny Boom’s All Eyez on Me (2017) were each a bit underwhelming in the depictions of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac, respectively. However, Roxanne Shante’s story in Michael Larnell’s Roxanne, Roxanne (2017) is a well-performed, enjoyable portrayal, featuring Chanté Adams and Nia Long.
However, the most significant hip-hop film of the last decade is F. Gary Gray’s runaway hit Straight Outta Compton, depicting the rise and fall of N.W.A. Despite its troubled production, a stellar cast led by Ice Cube’s son O’Shea Jackson Jr. (playing his own father), Corey Hawkins, Aldis Hodge, and Jason Mitchell, signaled a change in shifting attitudes regarding mainstream acceptance, though not without convenient blindspots. As usual, the degradation of Black women in hip-hop is avoided in Gray’s film, which suggests Straight Outta Compton should be shown as a double feature with Janice Cooke’s Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge, and Michel’le (2016), the latter narrating her own story of abuse at the hands of Dr. Dre and Suge Knight, both of whom she had children with.
2016 saw the short-lived Netflix series The Get Down from showrunner Baz Luhrmann, charting the origins of hip-hop through a group of teenagers, who are mentored by Grandmaster Flash (played by Mamoudou Athie). The cancellation of the series suggests Luhrmann’s (who directed the first episode) hyper-stylization and a penchant for schmaltz might have had more to do with its demise than interest in the subject matter, which remains ripe for reclamation.
The representation of women in hip-hop has, not surprisingly, been relegated to the sidelines until recently. Their proliferation as fictional characters is nearly as sparse as their biopics. But there are a few standouts.
One is RZA’s 2017 title Love Beats Rhymes, which deserves automatic credit for making lead star Azealia Banks seem sympathetic and appealing, given her public persona. It’s the story of a young woman learning to find her creativity, juxtaposing an age-old conflict between institutions which deride rap and praise poetry. Jill Scott gives a deliciously campy turn as a sexpot academic formatted as Banks’ enemy, smiling like the Cheshire Cat as she introduces Banks derisively as a “hip-hop poet.”
Shortly after, Radha Blank became a breakout in 2020 with her directorial debut, The Forty-Year-Old Version, playing a woman struggling with the same cultural divide between worlds: hip-hop vs. the white bread institution of the New York City theater scene. Television has allowed for more vivacious opportunities to showcase Black women, notably in Charles Stone III’s well-received CraxySexyCool: The TLC Story (featuring Keke Palmer, Lil Mama, and Drew Sidora), and 2021’s American Gangster Presents: Big 50 – The Delrhonda Hood Story, with Remy Ma playing the titular head of an infamous Detroit drug empire.
While women have rarely been given their due regarding their contributions to hip-hop, one of the major gifts the culture is receiving for its 50th birthday is the new four-part Netflix series Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop. A historical recuperation providing a timeline of Black women’s empowerment, this is a must-see exercise in their contributions to the movement. The series charts a timeline highlighting early figures from Sha-Rock to Roxanne Shanté to MC Lyte and Salt-N-Pepa, and conveys the explosion of women in hip-hop as pioneers.
The degradation of several key figures, such as Dee Barnes, who was assaulted by Dr. Dre, and Sister Souljah, demonized by President Bill Clinton, are important pit stops. Likewise, Drew Dixon, robbed of credit for uniting Method Man (with the help of P. Diddy) and Mary J. Blige on the Grammy-winning track “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By.” Yo-yo, Rah Digga, April Walker, and Queen Latifah discuss their early successes which bridged an evolution including Lauryn Hill, Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Eve, Trina, and Missy Elliott.
When juxtaposed with hip-hop documentaries from a previous era, such as Peter Spirer’s 1997 Rhyme & Reason, where women are afforded a truncated montage of mentions, it’s a testament to how much hip-hop has progressed. Queer hip-hop artists such as Chika and Young M.A reflect on their abilities to claim their authentic identities at the beginning of their career, made all the more significant when compared to the experiences of Queen Latifah and Da Brat.
As a culture with multifaceted origins, any tabulation of either its best or worst assets is impractical, as hip-hop burst outward from a few originating constellations. As the artform has changed and progressed, it’s informed and underscored music and cinema to a degree where its various elements are an irrevocable part of our creative DNA, and perhaps is a litmus test determining where we’ve been and where we’re going, as time marches on and hip-hop keeps flowing.
As we wish a happy 50th to the innumerable luminaries of hip-hop, a grand sentiment from the Queen of hip-hop soul, Mary J. Blige, perhaps says it best in her track “Just Fine”: “No time for moping around. Are you kidding? And no time for negative vibes ’cause I’m winning.”
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This article was originally written in 2004 and slightly edited now, primarily to prove that I’ve heard of AI.
In Philip Dick’s 1981 science fiction novel The Divine Invasion, the protagonist works for a space industrialist and is stationed, alone, on a remote, unlivable planet. To cope with the isolation, he plays over and over a worn collection of tapes of the music of an intergalactically famous female singer. Her haunting, seductive voice and complex lyrics keep him sane. He is obsessed with her – no, more than that, he’s addicted to her, panicking hysterically at one point when he thinks he has lost the tapes.
When he has finished his essentially menial work, he darkens his hermetically sealed pod, lies back, plays one of the tapes, closes his eyes and is transported to her magical universe as her ethereal presence fills the room. Not just her music but her existence is his refuge, her complicated, celebrated and fabulously successful life the mist into which he dissolves his grimness and tedium.
What he doesn’t know is that she doesn’t exist. In the ultimate in-studio production — and in perfect synch with us now waking up in a new AI world — not only her sound but her whole being has been manufactured. Her history, career, beauty and every minute experience that in aggregate form a life are synthetic. She has been created to profitably and efficiently satisfy a vast and ingrained consumer need, and she does so perfectly.
I have always thought Eminem is a little like this. I know he exists but, as the saying goes, if he didn’t, we’d have to invent him. And to a degree, we have. The person may be real but the figure that is Eminem, who is part outlaw, part record industry savior, is a mountain-high papier-mâché god tens of millions of hands have helped build. And what young person, especially a teenager, hasn’t at one time felt like they were marooned on another planet, alone in a loveless void, clinging to the gossamers of sanity expressed in a bodiless voice that miraculously understands, consoles, and soothes?
Photo credit: Paul Warner/WireImage (via Getty Images)
All successful pop music is the product of the few people who make it and the millions who pull it to themselves and shape it to their own particular desires. And collectively we needed Eminem to shatter our musical lethargy and to stir the stagnant pond of contemporary pop culture, so much of which is blandly mass-produced to be compatible with corporate sponsorship. But the Redeemer came cloaked in the aura of a devil, with the seductive charisma of an antichrist.
Except for a very few people who know him personally, the rest of us only know him as a projection, as we imagine him from what we hear in his lurid and violent songs or as we see him in his various identities in his videos. We watch him at the MTV awards, slumped in his seat, oddly subdued in a t-shirt and glasses, looking both bored and nervously alert, or spurting and convulsing on stage, stabbing at ghosts and screaming profanities at them. We have a collage image of him from photography: his round face that looks like a nun’s when he wears a bandana on his forehead and his sweatshirt-hood up; his fit, tattooed body that makes him look menacing and vulnerable, precocious and already weary. We feel we know him from all this and his incredibly frank music in which his private life is laid out like souvenirs in a tourist shop. Despite being the biggest pop star in the world, or perhaps precisely because of it, he feels to us like he’s our neighbor.
By all laws of statistical probability, we should never have heard of Marshall Bruce Mathers III. His parents were musicians, loosely and briefly, blessed with just enough talent to perform other people’s songs in hotel lobbies across the American Midwest. Their band was ironically named Daddy Warbucks, after the character in the musical Annie, who adopts and looks after the titular orphan, a stroke of beneficence Marshall must have wished for his entire childhood. They married when Debbie was 15 and her husband, whose name is generally not known or at least not spoken, was 22. Within two years Marshall was born and soon after the couple split up. Marshall’s father, who he never knew, moved to California. As a teenager, Marshall tried to contact him, but his letters were returned unread. When Marshall metamorphosed from his white-trash chrysalis into multimillionaire, platinum-selling rap star Eminem, his father apparently tried to reconnect, which Eminem rebuffed saying, understandably: “Fuck that motherfucker, man. Fuck him.”
Teenage, single mother Debbie and little Marshall knocked about between Kansas, Missouri (where he’d been born) and Detroit, where they settled on the impoverished East Side. Marshall was eleven and he and his mother were one of three white families in an otherwise totally black neighborhood, all of which later served as the spiritual and actual background of the movie 8 Mile.
Photo credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic (via Getty Images)
Race was not a big issue when he was younger, Eminem has said, but as he became an adolescent and in his late teens competed in freestyle rap competitions, where he was booed at the mic as invariably the only white contestant, it enveloped him and he saw that his black friends took a lot of heat for backing him up. (This loyalty he has constantly repaid, by the way, most significantly in his patronage of his crew, D12, the Dirty Dozen.)
His life was hard growing up, made more so by his volatile mother, who, he has famously said, was an alcohol and drug abuser who didn’t work but filed frivolous lawsuits in order to get paid off in settlement of them. She also threw him out more regularly than, let’s say, mothers usually reject their children. He failed ninth grade three times and dropped out. He was seventeen, the age other kids were graduating.
He worked menial jobs that paid minimum wage and his existence was about as dead end as the definition gets. All the while he persisted with his dream of making it as a rapper, his one burning, improbable passion. He finally moved out of his mother’s house and in with his high school girlfriend Kim, who he eventually married (and subsequently divorced) and with whom he has a daughter, Hailie. In 1996 he released an independent CD called Infinite. It was his shot at the brass ring, but it was a mediocre record and bombed quickly. He was twenty-four.
Before listening to his most recent singles, the last time I heard Eminem his disembodied voice was coming from the wall of the Superal supermarket outside of Chiusi in Italy. It was the song “Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile, his gunfire raps spraying the parking lot. In the dozens of times I’ve shopped there I’ve always noticed the canned music but never its origin. But Eminem grabs you. There’s an abrasiveness and urgency in his voice that’s disturbing and pleasurable, like scratching yourself. He swirls language around in his mouth and spits it out in elegant streams, like a demented wine taster who can’t stop himself.
It’s trite to say that an artist exploded but in Eminem’s case it’s eerily appropriate, not just to describe his transformation from broke, dissed, white rap-wannabe to the biggest musical star on Earth but also the jarring way he tore like shrapnel into the soft flesh of America’s smug self-image. In 1997, after finishing second at the Rap Olympics in Los Angeles, his demo tape, The Slim Shady EP, found its way to Dr. Dre, the then Don of rap producers, who signed him. He worked on several Dre projects before a year later releasing his major label debut, the Dre-produced The Slim Shady LP. It became the biggest-selling rap record ever at the time, selling over four and a half-million copies.
Even by rap’s jaded standards, Eminem’s tracks were misogynist, violent and homophobic. Surprisingly, they weren’t racist too, perhaps because he may see himself as a black man who has no problems with white people. But he filled that blank space with what must be a hip hop fantasy first: on “Kill You” he cheerfully sings about raping his mother.
As if the invention of Eminem hadn’t been enough to exorcise the wretched reality of his life, Marshall Mathers’ alter ego had created an alter ego, Slim Shady, his true dark side. Eminem thought of him, fittingly enough, on the toilet, and argued it was Shady, his fictional doppelganger, who hated gays, wanted to drug and rape an underage girl and urged a cuckholded husband to kill his unfaithful wife and her lover, whilst verbally bitch-slapping Dre for being hesitant about it.
Photo credit: Matthew Simmons/WireImage (via Getty Images)
The record incensed ultra conservatives and ultra liberals, who for once at least had something in common. Gay activist groups and church groups called for his music to be pulled from stores and banned from airplay, and for him not to be allowed to perform at the Grammys or the MTV Awards. The result of this furor was predictable: more sales of the CD and exponential expansion of his fame. His follow-up release The Marshall Mathers CD sold 18 million copies worldwide and was nominated for the Record of the Year Grammy. It didn’t win – the slightly less controversial Steely Dan did – but Eminem won Best Solo Rap Performance and Best Rap Album and, in an attempt to defuse his homophobic stigma, he performed his hit “Stan” with Elton John at the awards ceremony. It was a powerful enough symbolic act to break the political correctness fever. In 2003 he won an Oscar for “Best Original Song” for 8 Mile’s “Lose Yourself,” a movie in which – all protestations aside – he played himself, in his life story, under yet another assumed identity, Jimmy “Rabbit” Smith, Jr. The movie grossed over $100M in the U.S., a staggering success for a music movie starring a first time actor.
The Eminem Show, released in 2002, further fueled the fires of outrage impotently burning at the foot of the monolith Eminem had become. The album covered his incredibly turbulent year in which he was twice arrested on gun and assault charges (he was given suspended sentences), sued by his mother (the case was settled for $1,600), and divorced his wife. It’s a brilliant disc and the aural record of his car crash of a life at the time. On one track, he murders his wife and has his daughter help him dispose of the body. His real daughter Haille sings her part on the track. In an impromptu take-your-daughter-to-work day, Eminem snuck her into the studio, telling her mother he was taking her to Chuck E. Cheese.
Normally, rap stars have magnesium flare-like careers, suddenly, brilliantly lit, relatively quickly over. I think this is because a) there are few love songs and b) most rap is in some way or other the music of revolutions, and revolutions are either won or lost, they don’t go on forever. Rappers flame out as if gunned down in one of their own cop-killer fantasies. Sadly, they then become fashion designers.
Eminem is a mischievous, whirling dervish, wrestling real and imagined demons side by side. We can’t witness the struggle but we see the effects, like watching someone having a nightmare. He has already acknowledged that he can’t rap forever and has said he eventually wants to be an impresario like Dre. He has hinted that he’d be open to acting again. He has given no indication that he has any interest in starting a clothing line.
He also seems, in some way, to be just getting going. At least, he’s showing no signs of mellowing: As he releases his fourth album Encore, he’s already embroiled in a catfight with Michael Jackson, having depicted him as a spastic pedophile in the album’s first single and video “Just Lose It,” and a political battle with President Bush, unflatteringly portrayed in another video the Republicans don’t want aired. Or maybe he’s just stuck in his nightmare, still twisting in his sleep, locked in an impossible battle for his soul with the dark forces that drive him, while we watch, riveted.
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(@amirerbs) 
