the wall came tumbling down: can jay-z and p. diddy regenerate hip-hop culture with a video and a play?

by armond white

05.12.04



hiphop hit a brick wall at its most influential moment with booty-clapping, money-tossing imagery and lurid, greed-driven lyrical content. but filmmaker mark romanek and jay-z have finally broken through this ethical stagnation with the new music video 99 problems. it's a strong, strangely beautiful fiction that subverts hiphop cliche and achieves a streetwise definition of new york city that film and music fans have been waiting to see updated since mean streets.

there have been a few fresh visions (public enemy's 911 is a joke, de la soul's a roller skating jam called 'saturdays', wu-tang clan's could it all be so simple), but romanek himself summed up the cliches back in '91 when musing on a concept for de la soul's ring, ring, ring (hey, hey, hey). chicago-born romanek lamented, "all rap music videos look the same. they're all shot against a brick wall." the success of that stereotype—the marketable pretense of "keeping it real" by keeping it degraded—is what has kept the culture from growing.

hiphop's brick wall of stereotypes about the city and its inhabitants was erected by the culture itself. and because it's lucrative, those cliches got repeated. stigmatization is perpetuated every time you see a music video by lil jon & the east side boyz, juvenile, bonecrusher or nelly that reinforces banalities about the way black people live. in all fall down, even director chris milk ignores kayne west's introspection ("we're all self-conscious, i'm just the first to admit it") for t&a. this dubious picto-mythology has even influenced the way artists and audiences imagine urban life. they accept rude and lewd affectation as authentic, as in nas' one mic.

this seemed unstoppable—the video hoodrat doomed to forever chasing its own tail—until now. in 99 problems, hiphop's best-selling cliches are subverted by romanek's first-time shooting of a hiphop video on the streets of new york and jay-z's intense dramatization of the place.

in stevie wonder's 1973 "living for the city," a tourist famously (and naively) exclaimed "new york! just like i pictured it!" ironically, romanek proves that in the hiphop era most people's idea of new york comes from videos (and movies) that dishonestly construct a stereotypical new york of loiterers, thugs and reprobates. black and white film gives it a documentary effect, as if casting an anthropological eye on graffiti, tenements, break-dancers and flashy cars. the stylized look distances ghetto life, but romanek's structure shifts from borough to borough, playground to jailhouse—a series of interlocking actions from a crazy-quilt travelogue of new york city. 99 problems shows a young black man's new york as it has never been seen before. jay-z spins a tale of common aimlessness and selfish survival ("ya havin' girl problems?/i feel bad for you, son/i got 99 problems/and a bitch ain't one"). his delivery is terse yet eloquent—swingsong, but the world he walks through is ferocious.

no rap fan watching 99 problems would sensibly long to partake in its spectacle. the jail scenes (with frontal nudity of inmates being sprayed for lice) are controversial, restricting the video's airplay even on cable outlets. this is a tribute to romanek's visual intensity. he has an iconographic gift to make commonplace things memorable or (as in hurt for johnny cash) numinous. in 99 problems, images and words become a wrecking ball against the familiar edifice of ghetto-fabulous determinism. 99 problems breaks through the nyc truisms of poverty and deprivation that hiphop culture has romanticized. romanek sees the place clearer, tougher and poetically. the cliches will no longer stand.

every other music video director will have to face up to this and respond. romanek's esthetics are informed by a rare social consciousness. (he not only shows what new york folks look like, but how they actually live, mixing harshness and lyricism.) that's the subversion. this video questions what all the others say is fly, def or cool by showing that hipster perspective to be limited; simply sexy rather than shocking; and laughable instead of tragic. "we're trying to show the artistry side of hiphop," jay-z told a reporter. "i just really wanted [mark] to shoot like where i'm from in brooklyn and shoot the hood, but shoot it like art, not just shoot a bunch of dudes or a bunch of cars."

most hiphop videos don't document new york so much as portray its mean-streets myth: a place of strife, aggression, hostility. it's where immigrant dreams are crushed by ethnic separatism, capitalist ruthlessness and the various mobs and drug cliques. in 99 problems, romanek and jay-z mix scenes of stress with scenes of diversion. the contrast of boys on bikes with bikini-wearing lap-dancers suggests a broad range of behavior. romanek's juxtapositions remind us how such images are usually placed in limited contexts. he's learned from his peer hype williams how to make these activities sensual and kinetic, but his restless montage creates a new political, moral tension. he can't think of the innocuous routines in ghetto life (a kid romping on a discarded mattress, a madman dressed as a shaman in an apartment corridor, a b-ball game) without also considering the pernicious ones (pitbull fights, shootings, profiling by police). that's where the filmmaker's sensibility syncs with the rapper's.

jay-z has extended the new york consciousness of biggie smalls and has matched biggie's verbal genius. jay-z's songs present an honest, never sappy view of the apple as black america. stepping up his perception on last year's the black album, jay-z needed to represent urban lore in a way that did not diminish it. his previous video dirt off your shoulder (directed by dave meyers) offered the slyest empowerment. instead of finger-flipping rebellion, jay-z prescribed brushing away the day's troubles—or a bothersome person—with a single, imperious, stylish gesture. paced to jay-z's narration, the day-in-the-life images became nocturnal with a snap of his fingers. lights in the city went dark, then all the ghetto folk began to glow like images in a thermal x-ray. their phosphorescence symbolized life-force, a misunderstood (often misrepresented) energy.

it was not a great day for the race when the entertainment industrial complex took on the artisanal productions of urban youth, eventually taking over their dreams. and it was not a great day for america when hiphop helped shift young people's priorities toward the purely commercial and self-serving. in this era of black/youth exploitation, it is the delusion of success that prevents social progress. today's hiphop conventions include stereotypes that harken back to the tap-dancing, street-corner busking ragamuffins you see in depression-era flicks, only this time around the break-dancing, hoop-dreaming youth are not deprived of social opportunity; they're in defiance of more beneficial alternatives. if they're in show business, self-abasement becomes their social opportunity.

jay-z's 99 problems refers to precisely this twisting of motivations and ambition. he is dedicated to the proposition of serious hiphop (just as chuck d once griped, "your general subject, love, is minimal/it's sex for profit"). as romanek's images keep coming at you—pulsing to producer rick rubin's sullen, reverberating beat—they fall into line as maybe the truest-ever hiphop portrait of new york life. from the marcy projects to a church in brooklyn, it's a visual parade of around-the-corner confrontations, whimsical children, lost adults, desperate hedonism—the things most hiphop videos treat blithely. no bling-bling allowed. romanek never pauses for condescension, but a couple shots that dolly into a funeral home, then a coffin, are appropriately stunning. only the inevitability of death impedes on the velocity of life.

if ever there were a new york city observation, that's it. most hiphop videos are devoted to the shallow distractions of entertainment and fail to recognize the moments when its habits and rituals move into the realm of tragedy. the power of 99 problems comes from this realization. when jay-z raps, "let me re-in-tro-duce myself," it's his intention to re-present urban life more profoundly. an interlude of jay-z and rick rubin stopped by a suspicious cop offers more than jay-z's amazing theatrical mimicry. he does two voices in the dialogue—both supercilious authority and wised-up player. showing how street smarts blur into legalities, this scene explicates an nyc life lesson. through sharp characterization and romanek's visual flair (including an incriminating dissolve to the contents of a car trunk), jay-z plays out the hard way ambition competes with despair.

the brilliance of 99 problems coincides with sean (p. diddy) combs' broadway production of a raisin in the sun, another break through the wall of hiphop platitudes. combs shifts from his hiphop career to reintroduce the contemporary pop audience to the tough discourse of civil rights found in lorraine hansberry's 1959 play. was it only ego that made him debut on broadway in a raisin in the sun? would the hubris of this production be better suited for the clinton era? or does the play register somewhere in combs' mind as a genuine expression of the black american struggle, such that hiphop has distorted?

taking the male lead as walter lee younger, jr., the young man whose ambitions confound the women in his family (the role that sidney poitier made definitive in the 1961 film version) is a test of combs' pop culture authority. he must be able to convey walter's aspiration ("i'm a giant surrounded by ants"), and he has to convince his base audience that those early-60s goals (self-determination, equal rights) still matter. "ain't you see no stars gleaming that you can't reach?" walter asks sympathetically.

during an opening week performance at the royale theater, the mixed crowd included a group of jersey-clad wiggers yelling "diddy!" at the star's entrance and whooping whenever walter showed energy or aggression. bad-boy celebrity can be a burden—especially when it gets in the way of a serious message. moving from "it's all about the benjamins" to hansberry requires a progression from adolescent impudence, an effort toward growth. combs poses a significant challenge to his fans when walter declares, "life is divided between the takers and the tooken," because the play's thrust undercuts that short-sighted, chart-topping cynicism. walter's alibi for gambling the family insurance inheritance on a shaky business deal is, "i didn't make this world. it was given to me this way"—lines written 30 years before tupac would paraphrase them to excuse his own acquiescence to greed and nihilism. by explicating hansberry's wisdom, combs stands a chance to correct ghetto humbug and salvage hiphop culture.

combs' lack of stage craft (he internalizes rather than projects) isn't surprising; the surprise is that this project is more serious than most of the music he's lately produced. hansberry's play contains a solid understanding of urban life. amiri baraka first scoffed at it, but later recanted and praised. by putting raisin on the boards, combs resurrects a classic every bit as worthwhile as a streetcar named desire. what has been dismissed as ethnic homilies now appear, after the sea change of hiphop, like sturdy wisdom. walter is an authentic american type, though less widely acknowledged than a hiphop caricature. hansberry positioned him in a chicago flat haunted by the ghost of his father, a black man sacrificed to the scourges of the pre-civil rights era. yet the play is juiced by sexual tension: walter strains under the loving, oppressive weight of women. ("why you always trying to feed me!" he protests.) the first strong scene is a confab between walter's wife, mother and sister. they're three aspects of hansberry's self but, like robert altman's film 3 women, also manifestations of what the artist knows about the distaff search for identity and its various stages.

in the movie, star power fused with hansberry's articulation. poitier, ruby dee, claudia mcneil, diana sands and ivan dixon were all great. this largely female stage cast (especially audra macdonald and phylicia rashad) gets by because they understand their mission. a nigerian suitor for the sister beneatha (sanaa lathan) gives her an african name that translates as "she for whom bread is not enough." he for whom fame is not enough can still use acting lessons.

the concurrence of 99 problems and a raisin in the sun is a significant breakthrough in new york pop and for hiphop culture. on p. diddy's disgraceful mtv series making the band, the thumbsucking wannabes have no consciousness that the lifestyle they pledge themselves to requires they reflect on their personal lives and social obligations. they seem to believe life is what they saw in every vapid music video. (the way they trashed a downtown hotel and p. diddy's park ave. mansion confirms the most racist nyc stereotypes.) in his non-acting role as record mogul, p. diddy is an exploiter, not a teacher. raisin at least proves his artistic instinct is sound, just as 99 problems is a triumph for its makers.

at this cultural moment and in these works, romanek, jay-z and p. diddy are forcing a reassessment of what hiphop culture means. both 99 problems and a raisin in the sun represent responses to a dead end. ultimately, both works signal a regenerating of new york culture, new york potential. i can't think of any other popular artists who are attempting or achieving as much.

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