Payneful Truths: Rage Against the Screen: Hip-Hop Takes Aim at Hollywood, Again

“Hollywood Divorce”—the most star-studded track on Outkast’s latest album “Idlewild”—is equal parts love song and stinging indictment of the film industry.

Over a glacial instrumental track, Lil’ Wayne spits venom at Hollywood for coming “through my neighborhood with cameras on,” but not being there for tragedies like Hurricane Katrina, which claimed the rapper’s Louisiana home, leaving him nothing but “a darn country song” in return.

Then, Andre 3000 outlines the pattern of Hollywood’s betrayals, detailing how “all the fresh styles always start off as a fresh little hood thing,” and by the time each trend “reaches Hollywood it’s over.”

Taking aim at the white media is hardly a new theme for hip-hop; countless records (rightly) decry the fame and money Elvis Presley—and countless other entertainers—have gained from their recontextualization of African-American art forms.

Trailblazers in many respects, Public Enemy first drew rap attention to the racism and greed of Hollywood back in 1990 with their song “Burn, Hollywood, Burn,” featuring N.W.A.’s Ice Cube and old-school legend Big Daddy Kane.

In the song, a sampled white voice asks rapper Flavor Flav how he feels about playing “a controversial Negro,” a “servant who shuffles and sings.” He refuses indignantly, and accepts instead Ice Cube’s offer to go watch the 1973 blaxploitation classic “‘Black Caesar’ back at the crib.”

In his verse, Kane extols Spike Lee as a model of how the black community can “make our own movies,” instead of being reduced to playing “butlers, maids, slaves and hoes” in Hollywood films. He disparages the success of films like “Driving Miss Daisie,” the story of a dutiful black chauffeur in the American South. Lee repaid the favor to his hip-hop fans by featuring Public Enemy’s song “Fight the Power” in his 1989 classic “Do The Right Thing.”

Arguably, gangster rappers have become some of the most conspicuous consumers of Hollywood myth; their whole genre is shot through with mob flick clichés and jargon. Movies like “Scarface” and “New Jack City” left an indelible mark on a generation of rappers struggling to find the vocabulary to describe their own landscape of urban violence; in the introduction to “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav actually recites several lines from “Scarface” verbatim.

The Wu-Tang Clan, while arguably the most cinematic rap crew ever to rock a mic, drew most of their influence not from Hollywood, but from Hong Kong. The group grew up on cheap kung-fu double features, bringing a martial lyrical ethic (and a bevy of dialogue samples) back to their headquarters in the legendary temple of “Shaolin” (Staten Island). As the film world became such a source of inspiration for hip-hop masters, it was only a matter of time before rappers ended up on the big screen.

In the end, it seems that Hollywood isn’t racist enough to turn down a new revenue stream. Beyond the obvious slew of movies about rap culture in the past several decades—“Wild Style,” “8 Mile,” “ATL,” “Hustle and Flow”—rappers are transitioning into screen stars with ever-increasing frequency.

After years languishing below the popular consciousness, Flavor Flav reemerged several years ago in the hit reality show “The Surreal Life,” and was successful enough there to land his own reality dating show, “Flavor of Love.”

These days, even Ice T—notorious for his ever-so-slightly controversial song “Cop Killer”—plays a police officer on television’s “Law and Order.” In a more sordid twist, both T and Snoop Dogg have taken their pimpin’ personas all the way to the bank, with their own lines of pornographic films.

Only years after denouncing films that “exploit the color,” Ice Cube has turned into a bona fide Hollywood star. His work, since his debut in “Boyz N Tha Hood,” has included the Gulf War epic “Three Kings,” and South Central L.A. comedy “Friday,” and has fulfilled the promise of his once-youthful outrage.

But does every black actor have to be a Sidney Poitier or a Paul Robeson? Does every black filmmaker have to be a Spike Lee?

Perhaps the most telling sign of Hollywood’s evolving relationship with race is that black actors, even rappers like Ice Cube, are breaking out of the “black film” category more frequently. Freed from the responsibility to single-handedly represent their race, black entertainers are free to fill roles of their choosing, no matter how innovative or trite they may be.

Hating the movies may have been cool in the ’90s, but it’s significant that “Hollywood Divorce” is on the soundtrack of a Universal Studios creation. At this point, rappers like Outkast have assimilated into the mainstream film world such that a “fight the power” mentality no longer makes sense. Instead, Andre ends the song by deciding that Hollywood’s constant appropriation of countercultural forms is ultimately tolerable; he and his hip-hop comrades will just “go on and make new shit.”

—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu.