Attuned to Rap’s Power to Provoke

From its opening scene, “Black and White” sets out to provoke. Young boys on a midday romp happen upon a menage a trois in Central Park: A black man and two white women are, in street parlance, getting down while standing up--against a tree. For much longer than it needs to, the camera eyes the gropes and grinds, the flushed pink of schoolgirl flesh. Accompanying it all, an infectious rap makes cheeky reference to “daddy’s little girl.” A second, armed, black man stands a few feet away, keeping watch.

For a movie that deals with race, no more inflammatory beginning is imaginable, combining as this does the twin bugaboos of miscegenation and thuggish violence. It’s hard to watch it without wondering exactly what writer-director James Toback had in mind. Is this aesthetic strategy a slap across the face to make the viewer confront his own reactions? Or is he just getting his middle-aged, white-guy kicks?

It’s a legitimate question. The movie, which opened last week, is all about role playing--it’s full of white kids skittering over low-slung fences for midnight creeps on the wild side. Toback thinks he’s tripped upon a phenomenon of social import. Stepping up to that fence, he’s peered across, even spent quality time on the other side, and now he’s back to tell what he found.

Only thing is, the film may just be its own best example of the phenomenon it purports to explore. If so, it’s got lots of company in movie theaters. Just as white kids all over are trying gangsta looks and attitudes on for size--they reportedly make up 70% of the hip-hop record-buying public--white filmmakers have joined movie-making rappers such as Ice Cube and Master P in creating a style of movie--call it the New Jack Cinema--that soon will need its own section in video stores.

Toback joins Jim Jarmusch, whose wonderfully offbeat “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” is now in theaters, as the latest white filmmakers of an intellectual bent who have applied their talents to making movies that don’t just appropriate hip-hop’s sound and look, but also seek to approximate the music’s feel and structure.

Another current rap-infused movie is “Boiler Room,” which uses the gangsta conceit to explore the world of young, white stock traders (the narrator describes trading as “the white boy’s way of slinging crack rock”). And last year’s “White Boys” delved into the world of rural white kids who imitate the style of urban blacks.

These films join recent movies such as “Next Friday” and “Three Strikes” in further solidifying the hold that hip-hop--already the dominant force in pop music--now is establishing in moviedom. Films like “Black and White,” whatever its faults, may represent a maturation of a style of filmmaking that until now has been mostly limited by the narrow preoccupations of the music that spawned it.

Rap has had a presence in movies since “Krush Groove” in 1985. What’s different about a movie like “Ghost Dog” and, to some extent, “Boiler Room” and “Black and White,” is that these newer films don’t just dress themselves up with a rap score and hip-hop flava, nor do they simply transfer the brash, stylish appeal of gangsta rap to crime stories the way that “Belly” (1998) and “New Jack City” (1991) did.

Rather, they combine rap’s subject matter, flair and collage (sampling) aesthetic with the filmmakers’ own unique vision and identity to create a new style of expression (not unlike the way Chuck Berry fused styles in the 1950s to create the musical form that defined the youth culture of his day).

“Ghost Dog” especially achieves a synthesis that deepens the possibilities of hip-hop at the same time that it brings new energy to the filmmaker’s work. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and “Rhythm of the Saints” albums. Like Simon (and Elvis and all of Berry’s other rocking white progeny), Jarmusch, Toback and the other whites mining this territory stand the risk of seeming like cultural imperialists.

But as every rapper knows, no significant advance in popular culture comes without cross-pollinating traditions. With all of its sampling, recycling and fast-flying references to other songs and art forms, rap may be the ultimate cross-pollinator. It couldn’t exist without devouring all the music and pop culture that’s come before and then regurgitating it as something new.

And at least some rappers see the cross-cultural collaborations now going on in hip-hop-infused movies as a two-way street. The influential rap group Wu-Tang Clan has been especially busy. One of its members, the RZA, scored and appeared in “Ghost Dog.” Other members of the group appear in and helped write and edit “Black and White.”

More Rap Artists Joining Hollywood Mainstream

Hip-hop--having conquered the pop music world and become largely synonymous with today’s youth culture--has set its sights on Hollywood in a big way. So many rappers are acting in movies and television--and pioneers such as Will Smith and Queen Latifah have become so mainstream--that all the DJs and Ices and single-name phenoms with new acting and producing credits no longer draw notice. Some of them, though, aren’t content merely acting in other people’s movies and financing their own vanity productions. As Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon raps on a song that appears in “Black and White,” “This ain’t a game--we run businesses.”

“I want to be in the filmmaking business,” says Power, the executive producer of Wu-Tang and an actor who plays the conflicted central character in “Black and White.” He is an incongruous figure as he sips a Coke in the lounge off the lobby of West Hollywood’s Bel Age Hotel. Middle-aged businessmen in suits cut glances at the T-shirted figure with the diamond-studded gold amulet and earring.

“I want to direct and produce stuff and be part of it, like Robert De Niro and all that crowd,” he says. “I feel like I’m a jack-of-all-trades. And I’m not going to just be in it to make hip-hop movies. I’m international. Wu-Tang is an international thing.”

He says he sees hip-hop having a lasting impact on Hollywood.

“First of all,” he says, “the film industry is going to change itself.” The emergence of video and digital cinema will increase access, effectively atomizing the industry, he says, making it easier for anyone to make and distribute movies.

Raekwon, for whom “Black and White” is his first involvement with the movies, agrees. “Some people say it [film] is the next level of rapping.”

Toback, Power and Raekwon all stress how involved the rappers were in the making of the movie.

“This was a pure collaboration,” Toback says of his largely improvised, documentary-style film. Members of Wu-Tang, in addition to creating their own dialogue, went with him into the editing room and were involved in cutting the movie, although Toback was the final arbiter in deciding its ultimate form.

Toback, who talks about his close friendships with people like Mike Tyson (who has a memorable confrontation in the movie with Robert Downey Jr.), Jim Brown and Harvard professor Louis Gates, skirts dangerously close to seeming like an overaged “wigger” himself (that’s what the black-acting white kids call themselves). In the 1950s, Norman Mailer used the term “White Negro” to describe the same thing. (Mailer’s son, Michael Mailer, is a producer of “Black and White.”)

Toback, though, thinks there is a major difference between that earlier era and today’s identity-shifting whites.

“The ‘White Negroes,’ as they were called, were marginalized outsiders in their own culture,” Toback says. “That era’s [racial and social climate] necessitated a division from the mainstream white people’s culture. You couldn’t be a White Negro and say you’re still a part of white people’s culture. The white people’s culture considered you freaks.”

That is no longer the case, he says. Black culture “has become central to white popular culture on a certain level. You’re giving up nothing and risking nothing. The black culture has stretched out and included the white culture. . . . This is the biggest leap into genuine integration in the 300-year-old racial nightmare in America.”

This is in large part what the movie is about, but on a more fundamental level Toback says it’s about the mutability of identity and people’s search for their true selves. The white prep-school kids aren’t the only ones playing roles in the movie. Ben Stiller’s character, for instance, is a former gambler who changed not only his lifestyle but also his name when he became an undercover cop.

Toback says he deliberately tried to make his movie in the style of a rap song. That includes the provocative opening. “An identifying characteristic of hip-hop is the way that it flashes its personality in the face of the viewer or ear of the listener,” he says. “In effect it’s saying, ‘I’m here. Pay attention.’ It’s a blast from the boom box, literally and figuratively, out to the listener.”

Chronicling Life as Rappers Know It

If hip-hop movies really are “the next level of rap,” as Raekwon claims, it’s legitimate to ask what type of movies will likely come from this. The work of most rappers in film has not been distinguished, and much of it is as stereotypically demeaning of black people (and women) as anything Hollywood ever has produced.

Raekwon says the music and, by extension, the movies, merely chronicles life as the rappers know it.

“This is our literature--the streets coming at you in musical form,” he says. “A lot of us didn’t get a lot of education from reading and writing all the time.”

“Black and White,” despite its differences from other hip-hop movies, uses many of the story conventions of this literature of the streets--plentiful sex, violence, crime.

“It’s a film about reality,” Raekwon says. “The film is a documentary about what happens inside hip-hop.”

Actually, he says, he argued with Toback to include more violence--not because that’s the life he experienced on the mean streets but because that’s what he’s accustomed to seeing in movies. “I like action movies,” he says.

Toback refused to include the gang warfare Raekwon wanted, but the director justifies the criminality and violence he does use by saying, “You can’t make a movie about hip-hop without dealing with murder.”

Power plays a gangster in the movie who wants to go legit by producing a rap band. He defends the criminal elements in so many movies that deal with black life as a necessary first step for many artists who want to make it in the industry. The reality is, in many cases that’s the only way to get through the door.

“Uptown Saturday Night,” one of Sidney Poitier’s first directorial efforts (1971), was about black gangsters, he notes. “Samuel Jackson started out being a crack head in movies,” he says. “We do it to get past it, to try to make it better.”