dream hampton’s It Was All a Dream Is the Proper Rap Documentary for Proper Now

Pitchfork author Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, bizarre tweets, vogue developments—and anything that catches his consideration.

Final week, we obtained 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. Perhaps worse, Lego clearly is utilizing hip-hop as a method to preserve 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 can be the purpose? As a result of we all know for certain that Lego isn’t rapidly serious 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 perspective, 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 problem of The Supply. Her longtime outspokenness and willingness to confront the misogyny of the style has usually 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 exhibits 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 like it) to her fiery ode to Tupac to being the showrunner of Lifetime’s revealing Surviving R. Kelly, she’s not often been delicate.

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 advised by the eyes of a twentysomething dream as she drifts from studio classes to backseat automotive rides with a couple of of the defining rappers of the period: Dre and Snoop, Mobb Deep, Lil’ Kim, Methodology Man, Diddy, and Biggie. The juiciest footage is of Biggie, with whom she had an in depth relationship, so we get to see him joke round and chill, a facet of him that’s misplaced along with his larger-than-life mythology.