Pitchfork author Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, bizarre tweets, style tendencies—and the rest that catches his consideration.
Final week, we acquired the trailer for Piece by Piece, a quasi-documentary that tells the story of Pharrell Williams’ life within the type of a… Lego film. That’s proper. The Lego Group is following The Lego Film 2: The Second Half with a cutesy, skin-crawling piece of hagiography. For one, it’s marketed as an “expertise that captures the magic and brilliance of Pharrell Williams’ artistic genius, one Lego brick at a time,” which simply means Pharrell’s story goes to be sterilized and hole. Possibly worse, Lego clearly is utilizing hip-hop as a strategy to maintain its model cool. Within the trailer, we see Lego depictions of Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, and extra, all collectible figurines that I wouldn’t be shocked to see hit the cabinets of toy shops by the film’s fall launch date. What else could be the purpose? As a result of we all know for certain that Lego isn’t abruptly inquisitive about preserving hip-hop tales. And, if they’re, I’ll be patiently ready to purchase a ticket for Rio Da Yung LEG-OG in IMAX.
On the identical day that I noticed the Piece by Piece trailer, I watched dream hampton’s absorbing new documentary It Was All a Dream. It gave me whiplash. The Detroit-raised author, critic, and filmmaker’s Black feminist perspective, and skepticism of rap’s standpoint, has been shaking up hip-hop since ’91, when her outraged article “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” about Dr. Dre’s violent assault on tv host Dee Barnes, was included in a difficulty of The Supply. Her longtime outspokenness and willingness to confront the misogyny of the style has typically wrongfully positioned her in opposition to music for which she holds an advanced love. It Was All a Dream, which has screened twice as a part of Tribeca Pageant and reveals yet another time on Saturday, June 15, at Village East by Angelika, speaks to the contradictions, albeit extra subtly than I ever anticipated from dream. Undergo her spectacular work, from her acidic evaluate of Maxwell’s Embrya within the Village Voice (she later apologized however I nonetheless adore it) to her fiery ode to Tupac to being the showrunner of Lifetime’s revealing Surviving R. Kelly, she’s not often been refined.
Comprised completely of archival video footage dream captured from 1993 to 1995 and narrated utilizing items she wrote all through that decade, It Was All a Dream is an intimate have a look at an period of hip-hop when the East Coast–West Coast rivalry was in its early days, gangsta rap had thrown the essence of the style into query, and the commercialization of rap was beginning to run rampant. All instructed by means of the eyes of a twentysomething dream as she drifts from studio periods to backseat automobile rides with just a few of the defining rappers of the period: Dre and Snoop, Mobb Deep, Lil’ Kim, Technique Man, Diddy, and Biggie. The juiciest footage is of Biggie, with whom she had a detailed relationship, so we get to see him joke round and chill, a aspect of him that’s misplaced together with his larger-than-life mythology.
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