Hip Hop on Film by Kimberly Monteyne

Author:Kimberly Monteyne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

The “Intergenerational Gap”: Race and Family Structure

The urban musical of the 1980s worked to define hip hop culture in opposition to the consumer capitalism of mainstream teen cinema. These films maintained an ambivalent, if not contradictory, relation to their status as teen films in other ways as well. As Rapping notes, popular white-centered teen cinema of this era is predominantly focused on the world of teenagers, while the role of younger children and adults is usually minimized, ridiculed, or otherwise deemed incompatible with the teen universe.83 Hip hop musicals, by contrast, tend to incorporate “intergenerational” meetings between teens, children, and young adults far more frequently than mainstream teen cinema. Even though these films often feature a group of teens or young adults, the true hip hop musical emphasizes the links between different generations in a variety of ways. While both suburban-oriented teen cinema and inner-city musicals registered anxieties over the wane of traditional familial groupings, the latter films attempted to construct alternate social groupings, which functioned as surrogate filial structures.

These films include a broad spectrum of the population and often highlight harmonious relations between different age groups. Such an emphasis on alternate forms of social bonding undoubtedly speaks to the dramatic rise in divorce rates initiated in the 1970s, which peaked between the years 1979 and 1981 before beginning a slight but steady wane in 1985.84 This fact, in conjunction with a wide range of Reagan-era government initiatives, put minority families at risk in the ways detailed in the previous chapter. The family structure is a point of crisis found in several examples of urban cinema focused on communities of color during the 1980s and ’90s, including both “New Black Realism” and hip hop musicals. Many white-centered teen suburban films from the 1980s also explore themes of familial discord. However, the evocation of parent culture and the ways in which teens respond to familial disintegration in these two forms take on markedly divergent dimensions. Parents are either stupid, uncaring, or absent in the majority of innocuous suburban teen flicks from the 1980s (such as Sixteen Candles and Better Off Dead [1985]), while representations of grossly misguided parental guardianship are taken to the extreme in predominantly white-centered teen slashers (such as the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises). The bulk of these films envision a world in which parents and other forms of authority are acutely dangerous to the well-being of the younger generation. Yet teens in this middle-class environ still have comfortable bedrooms and other interior private spaces from which they can ward off the evil entities and spirits that their parents are helpless to protect them from. In contrast, young people in the true hip hop musical have no safe middle-class enclave in which to reconstruct social relations in the absence of traditional families. Instead, the public spaces of collective performance constructed around hip hop culture provide alternate milieus of familial bonding.

The representation of such an inclusive community suggests that the true hip hop musical is structurally different from mainstream white suburban “teenpics.

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