Last month, I drove to Los Angeles to visit the Grammy Museum’s “Hip-Hop America: The Mixtape Exhibit.” Thanks to a recommendation from co-curator Felicia Angela Viator, I contributed material to the exhibit – short blurbs for a planned installation that would have allowed visitors to read my writing while listening to music. Unfortunately, the installation was canceled. Save for a Spotify playlist that compiles my song selections, none of my work appears in “Hip-Hop America,” which closes on December 31.
The Grammy Museum consists of five floors, including a gift shop and a café/terrace. I paid $15 to access three of them; the fourth, a showcase of the K-pop label HYBE, cost an extra $10. As I walked through the entryway to “Hip-Hop America,” videos of Grammy performances from past and present were screened on a wall in a constant loop. It opened to a room where, immediately on my left, was a chronology of the genre, beginning with its origins in the Bronx, New York. As I read the descriptions of various artifacts, I couldn’t help but notice that many were on loan from the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.
Much of the room consisted of interactive installations like “Sonic Playground,” which featured a microphone setup similar to Rap City’s “The Booth,” two Serato turntables, and laptop beat software. I could see children and teens playfully messing with the equipment. As the aforementioned Grammy scroll cut to MC Hammer’s performance of “U Can’t Touch This” at the 1991 ceremony, I overheard a couple chanting along to the track, tongues firmly in cheek. One young man walked around with a phone attached to a tripod, carefully filming each element, presumably for content. I suppose I was gathering content, too, as proven by these photos.
“Hip-Hop America” seemed geared towards tactile experiences. A “Hip-Hop in Stereo” booth invited visitors to replicate a booming car system by cuing tracks like UGK’s “Front, Back & Side to Side.” (Disappointingly, it omitted the jeep-beats phenomenon of 90s New York rap a la EPMD and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin System”.) A “Lyrical Adventures” booth showed snippets of famed freestyles like Black Thought’s 2017 performance on Funkmaster Flex’s show. There were a stack of mixtapes assembled by Sergio Ornelas (which included tapes from his late partner Stephanie “DJ Stef” Ornelas); handwritten lyrics by 2Pac and Lil Wayne; and an array of outfits like the pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers Eminem wore during Dr. Dre’s halftime show at Super Bowl LVI.
The self-guided tour lasted just under an hour. It felt like a primer for enthusiasts who love Biggie and Dilla but haven’t necessarily heard of Coke La Rock. Entry points are important to draw people beneath the surface of rap hits they hear in TV commercials and watch on YouTube. Still, I was grateful after I stumbled onto an event that happened to take place in the Clive Davis Theater that same afternoon, two floors below “Hip-Hop America.”
In the Hour of Chaos: Hip Hop Art & Activism with Public Enemy’s Chuck D is a documentary about the rapper’s year-long residency in 2022 with UCLA’s Hip-Hop Initiative, a program in the university’s African American Studies department. The 45-minute film – co-directed and executive produced by department head H. Samy Alim and graduate students Tabia Shawel and Samuel Lamontagne – surfaced socio-political concerns such as women’s participation in the culture, the importance of studying how language is deployed, a nascent “krip hop” movement that centers disabled artists, and hip-hop’s international impact. In regards to the latter, the doc featured music from Australian rapper Maya Jupiter, South African group Prophets of Da City, and French stars Suprême NTM. Commentators included well-known academics like Jeff Chang, Davey D, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Adam Bradley, and Cheryl L. Keyes.
After the screening, Alim took the stage with Byronn Bain, Joan Morgan – the HHI’s artist-in-residence for the current academic year – and Grammy Museum event host Schyler O’Neal for a lively panel discussion. Crucially, they seemed to have little patience for current rap. “Hip-hop is the cultural arm of capitalism,” Alim said, who added he was quoting Tricia Rose of Black Noise fame. Someone mentioned Black Star’s “Thieves in the Night,” a 1998 track written at the height of the underground vs. mainstream era.
Morgan, a journalist and academic renowned for her work in Vibe magazine as well as the 1999 memoir When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, admitted that she relies on her son’s playlists to keep up. “We lean on hip-hop too much,” she says, adding that her belief is in the “infinite” creativity of Black people, whether that creativity is expressed through hip-hop or some other form not yet identified.
Morgan also said she believes in making space for younger people more informed by where the culture is now. Incidentally, I drew a similar response from her years ago when I contacted her for an NPR story about women and hip-hop. She directed me towards one of her protégés, Dr. Treva B. Lindsay. (For various reasons, my piece wasn’t published.)
As the panel concluded, the chasm between “Hip-Hop America” and hip-hop as a historical socio-political movement yawned, unfilled. Morgan recalled a long-ago academic conference where KRS-One – notorious for his aggressive theorizing at these kinds of events – boasted that he was a South Bronx native. In response, she, Mark Anthony Neal and others retorted that they grew up in the Bronx, too. As the theater audience applauded Morgan, Bain added, conspiratorially, that KRS was born in Brooklyn. It’s an argument very similar to how old-school Oakland folks point out that Too Short is really from L.A.
Morgan’s story was meant to illustrate that these scholars are deep-rooted, too. But as someone who has spent nearly his whole life in California, I also heard an undercurrent of “I was there” very similar to the argument KRS-One made. What if you weren’t ten toes down in the OG Bronx block parties like Morgan? Does that mean you’re not a “real” hip-hopper? What if your interpretation of hip-hop strays far from traditionalist values and doesn’t conform to conscious themes? Does that make you an illegitimate capitalist, weak flavoring for a pop product? Or not hip-hop at all?
Before I left the Grammy Museum, I asked In the Hour of Chaos co-director Tabia Shawel a few questions about the documentary.
How long did it take you to put together the movie?
The movie itself is around two years of labor that we put together this film. As noted, it started back in 2020 when we had the vision for an artist-in-residency program at UCLA. And that didn’t come into fruition until 2022. Chuck was our inaugural artist-in-residence. And so that was filmed over the course of 10 weeks. Those 10 weeks of film were condensed down to some 40-odd minutes, which you saw here today. Overall, it took about two years or so to produce.
How did you fund the creation of the documentary?
That’s an excellent question. We were largely funded by the generous support of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African-American Studies at UCLA, who was instrumental in ensuring that a program like HHI has the resources in order to bring folks like Chuck D to UCLA.
I saw there were three directors on the movie. Who did what?
We work very collaboratively. But, of course, HHI is under the leadership of H. Samy Alim, who serves as the faculty director. I, in my former capacity as assistant director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center, came on [the project] initially. Then we had our other co-lead, Samuel Lamontagne who, at the time, was a graduate student but will now be a UC professor at Riverside. In terms of the distribution of labor, it was very much a collaborative effort that we’ve done throughout the course of this time.
In terms of filming, we have to give all props to the Bad Man Son’s team, Aaref Rodriguez, Richard [Heredia-Arriaga]. Bad Man’s Son really took on the challenge of documenting what it was we put together at UCLA. In terms of the editing, they too were also involved in the process, along with the executive producers I just noted, Samy Alim, Samuel Lamontagne and myself. But it surely was a collaborative effort that involved multiple people.
What are your plans as far as distributing In the Hour of Chaos?
Since this is an educational documentary, there isn’t necessarily a plan to make money. This is more about showcasing the work that we did to a global audience, wherever we can. We started here at the Grammy Museum, given their work in creating educational programming, so that we can connect with a larger community. We will continue to do that. And, as Samy noted in the talk, try to make it so that we can get a global audience.
Is this the first screening of the movie? Do you have any other screenings arranged over the next several weeks and months?
It is. As of now, no we don’t [have additional showings scheduled]. But we do plan to have something put together so that we can get this film out to the people.
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