Kimberley Monteyne, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is currently teaching at the University of British Columbia and has also taught at New York University and the Chelsea College of Art (UK). Her work has appeared in Youth Culture in Global Cinema.
Hip Hop on Film deftly probes underexplored territory in black
cinema history and discourse. Thoroughly researched and argued in
sophisticated, compelling prose, Monteyne's project takes on the
hip hop musicals of the early eighties, critically mapping their
importance to the integration and expansion of the American teen
pic and musical. Hip Hop on Film makes a solid, innovative
contribution to black cinema discourse, performance studies, urban
studies, and American studies.--Ed Guerrero, author of Do the Right
Thing and Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film
What happened to the American musical in the 1980s? It may have
morphed, as some claim, into the pop-soundtrack-heavy Brat Pack
movies, but no one was singing anymore. Even Footloose, Flashdance,
and Dirty Dancing were strictly dance only. Where did the classic
American musical go? One answer, argued by Kimberley Monteyne in
her excellent book, Hip Hop on Film, is that the genre went
underground. Hip hop has been featured in movies for more than 30
years now, driving films such as Do the Right Thing, Boyz N the
Hood, 8 Mile, and countless others, but Monteyne is drawn to a very
specific cycle of films. Starting with Charlie Ahearn's drama-doc
Wild Style (1983), she focuses on a handful of movies that surfaced
with the breakdance craze of the mid-1980s. It's a niche group;
only Wild Style and perhaps Beat Street (1984) are generally
considered noteworthy, while the rest were mostly forgotten after
their theatrical runs (though, apparently, 1984's Breakin' had
better box office than that year's The Terminator). But Monteyne
asserts that the cycle is a crucial missing gap in the history of
urban African American cinema, more progressive than both the
blaxploitation films that preceded them and the 1990s 'New Black
Cinema' that followed. Monteyne astutely broadens the discussion
out from the hip hop movies into a wider consideration of 1980s
movies, arguing that they offered a radically alternative image of
youth culture. With scene after scene of black and Puerto Rican
kids writing, breakdancing or making music, urban youth culture is
depicted as positive and uniquely artistic. In contrast to the
middle-class teens of, say, John Hughes's movies, the street
breakers and rappers don't just consume pop culture, they are out
there creating it. Monteyne also draws comparisons with classic
Hollywood musicals, connecting the narrative tropes of Beat Street
and Wild Style to old Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire movies. She
illustrates how the structures of the earlier films are re-worked
in the hip hop musicals, placing African American and Latino
teenagers at the centre of their cinematic worlds. The prose is
intelligent, well researched (the pages on the riots that followed
NYC screenings of Krush Groove are fascinating) and always
eloquent. On the atrocious Razzie-nominated Body Rock (1984), for
example, Monteyne accurately describes the film's cynical,
exploitative nature, the irony in its preppy cast disdaining
rappers who don't 'keep it real', and the Vanilla Ice-style
play-acting of former soap star Lorenzo Lamas as 'Chilly D'. Maybe,
just once, she could borrow a well-worn phrase from the hip hop
lexicon: the movie is wack. Keeping it real: Wild Style, --Dylan
Cave "Sight and Sound"
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