Posts Tagged Schoolly D

In the 60s and 70s, Lou Reed was legit down with the streets. But by the 80s he was punning about the dangers of strange candy. (Which makes him perhaps an innovator of proto-Modern J-pop. But focus.) Crack had just hit the streets. Social programs were being cut. Thousands were dying of AIDS. Lou had lost touch.

Luckily non-white people were also rapping.

Hold on. This is only about what it is. That’s the beauty of Ice-T’s documentary:

It’s also beautifully photographed. And it’s even better than this trailer if that’s not selling you. I don’t think it sold that many people went it came out but it’s there forever so you should check it out. I haven’t been into Hip-hop much in the last few years but I’ll always respect it as an artform. This even makes me take some people seriously I didn’t before, like Kanye. No Jay-Z in this thing, but they got Kanye. Even his best lines used to seem like throwaway jokes to me, but he can pull off a convincing acapella (if not freestyle). And it was funny hearing different stories contradict each other, I always like to hear KRS-One’s version of things.

I should probably get the DVD. I just watched it on Netflix and got the soundtrack. You can enjoy the soundtrack itself as a good mixtape album with some exclusive freestyles, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an intro to or overview of Rap like I would recommend the movie. I feel like the movie is really made for people who do not take Rap or Hip-hop culture seriously, but there’s so many movies about “Hip-hop culture” that really gloss over the Rap part. The doc proves it’s point pretty thoroughly but this soundtrack is a little random. There’s no chronology at all and of course they are limited by rights issues and I assume it’s Ice-T personal taste here, but it doesn’t include all of the freestyles in the movie, I would say the best ones are left out. (Wiki has a complete list of all the songs.)

My personal favorite inclusions are It Takes Two which was so huge when I was a kid but people forget that one outside of the East Coast I think and it doesn’t sound like anything else so it doesn’t fit into most history retellings. And P.S.K. by Schoolly D. Ice-T’s early stuff ripped off Schoolly pretty hard I thought, but he stayed underground so most people don’t even know that. That was cool of him to include.

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