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Hollywood too is feeling the rap beat. After Lauryn Hill passed on a role in The Cider-House Rules (an adaptation of the John Irving book), filmmakers cast hip-hop soul singer Erykah Badu. Ice Cube, who has appeared in such movies as Boyz N the Hood and Fridays, will soon star with George Clooney in the Gulf War thriller Three Kings. Queen Latifah, featured in the recent film Living Out Loud, is now set to be the host of a TV talk show. And the former Fresh Prince, Will Smith, has become one of the most in-demand actors around. Ice Cube--who performed a song with Public Enemy titled Burn Hollywood Burn in 1990--says Tinseltown wants rapper actors because "we add a sense of realism where sometimes a trained actor can't deliver that reality the way it needs to be done."
Warren Beatty, who directed and starred in Bulworth, a comedy about a Senator who becomes possessed by the spirit of hip-hop, became interested in the subject because "it seemed to have a similar protest energy to the Russian poets of the 1960s. The Russian poets reigned in Moscow almost like rock itself reigned in the U.S. Ultimately it seemed to me that hip-hop is where the voice of protest is going in the inner city and possibly far beyond because the culture has become so dominated by entertainment."
Even Tom Wolfe, who documented the counterculture in the '60s and greed in the '80s, found himself buying a stack of hip-hop records in order to understand Atlanta in the '90s for his best-selling book A Man in Full. In several sections of his novel, Wolfe offers his own sly parodies of today's rap styles: "How'm I spose a love her/ Catch her mackin' with the brothers," Wolfe writes in a passage. "Ram yo' booty! Ram yo' booty!" Most of the characters in A Man in Full are a bit frightened by rap's passion. It's Wolfe's view that "hip-hop music quite intentionally excludes people who are not in that world." That world, however, is growing.
Poetic language emerges out of the ruins of prose. --Jean-Paul Sartre, Art and Action
The hip-hop world began in the Bronx in 1971. Cindy Campbell needed a little back-to-school money, so she asked her brother Clive to throw a party. Back in Kingston, Jamaica, his hometown, Clive used to watch dance-hall revelers. He loved reggae, Bob Marley and Don Drummond and the Skatalites. He loved the big sound systems the deejays had, the way they'd "toast" in a singsong voice before each song. When he moved to the U.S. at age 13, he used to tear the speakers out of abandoned cars and hook them onto a stereo in his room.