The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge Companions to Music) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-02-28T03:00:00+00:00

A typology of characters in rapsploitation cinema

Movie characters in any genre are rarely multidimensional or complex. Rather, in service of a film’s plot, people in films are generally depicted as instantly recognizable archetypes: superheroes, bad boys, femmes fatales, business tycoons, mad scientists, sassy best friends, and manic pixie dream girls. This one-dimensional rendering makes movie characters fairly easy to categorize, but these archetypes also reveal something larger about the social, cultural, and political issues of the era in which the films were produced. For example, early Hollywood portrayals of African Americans as subservient butlers and maids enable critical viewers to better understand racial attitudes of that time. More recently, the stereotyping of Arabs as terrorists in contemporary Hollywood cinema exposes the fears and anxieties of post 9/11 America.10

Scrutiny of Rapsploitation cinema reveals a number of stock characters who illustrate these larger issues. In creating a typology of these characters, I analyzed fifty-three hip-hop themed films, paying particular attention to how characters directly involved in hip-hop culture were portrayed. The central attributes of these stock characters were signified through language, speech, dialect, clothing, body language, behavior, attitudes, ideology, cultural practices, and the production of cultural objects such as songs and live performances. These stock characters represent Weberian “ideal types,” rather than hard, fixed categories with no room for overlap.11 While most of the characters were one dimensional, they sometimes embodied more than one category.

Hip-hop’s multi-faceted crossover onto the big screen necessitated the creation of certain boundaries in creating this typology. Requisite was that the film included one or more lead characters whose involvement in hip-hop culture was foregrounded. Thus, films with a hip-hop “sensibility” but that were not about hip-hop culture (e.g. New Jack City, Boyz N the Hood, Baller Blockin) were not included. Also excluded were documentaries and the burgeoning genre of hip-hop themed pornography.12

My interest was to understand the various means by which hip-hoppers were portrayed on screen, the central characteristics of these archetypes, how these archetypes have changed over time, and the larger implications of these findings. I begin with a typology of archetypal characters and the central characteristics associated with each. I conclude by exploring the larger implications of these findings.

Bad girls are sexually insatiable females who emphasize their physical attributes and downplay other aspects of identity. Exemplars include Lil’ Kim in Notorious and Yanesha Kon in Play’d: A Hip Hop Story. Bad girls dress in provocative clothing, curse like sailors, and often appear nude on screen. Shug, a bad girl who sings over rap tracks in Hustle and Flow, is a pregnant prostitute. Many bad girls are punished for their wayward behavior. For example, in Notorious, Lil’ Kim is portrayed as a hysterical stalker who is physically and verbally assaulted by Biggie Smalls, who quickly dumps her and marries Faith Evans.

Commercial sellouts utilize hip-hop as a commodity rather than an artistic expression, even if that means compromising personal ideals. Exemplars include Wacky Dee in CB4, Ren and Ten in Brown Sugar, and Jaxx in Play’d: A Hip Hop Story.

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