That still leaves 10 sureshot documentaries that together reveal the charm, skill, truth and beauty of the late 20th century’s most significant cultural movement. Each film has yet to find a DVD release but both can be seen, along with Wild Style, in a short programme of hip-hop films featured as part of James Lavelle’s Meltdown at BFI Southbank this June. Absent too are Dick Fontaine’s Beat This! A Hip Hop History (1984) and Bombin’ (1988), cornerstone British TV docs that helped expose hip-hop culture to UK audiences in the 80s. It means that a couple of personal favourites are omitted, including Joey Garfield’s Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box (2002), a film whose screenings are as rare as a Basquiat-etched test pressing of Rammellzee & K-Rob’s ‘Beat Bop’ (yeah, a ref for the DJs!). It captures hip-hop in its rawest form.Įach of the recommendations included here is available to view in the UK.Īs with all the other top 10s in this series, the following list of hip-hop docs that rock is far from exhaustive and concentrates on the best titles currently available in the UK. It’s harder to fake the funk with documentary.

Hip-hop and documentary has been more consistent, perhaps because hip-hop – as a culture that celebrates individual expression – derives its strength from originality and truth. Public Enemy, Ice Cube and Big Daddy Kane once pronounced “Burn, Hollywood, Burn” and not without reason: for every Do the Right Thing (1989) or 8 Mile (2002) there’s a sizeable glut of exploitative cash-ins: 1984’s awful Body Rock, for example, or the lazy Too Legit: The MC Hammer Story (2001). But there has often been an uneasy relationship between hip-hop and fiction movies. B-boying stormed the teen musical with a wave of breakdance movies in the 1980s rap spiced up the AOR strains of music television and a wave of hip-hop stars, led by Will Smith, Queen Latifah, Tupac, Ice-T and Ice Cube bum-rushed the movies in the 1990s, bringing hip-hop to Hollywood. First captured in 1982, when the burgeoning street culture was barely a decade old, Charlie Ahearn’s groundbreaking fiction Wild Style brought together on screen hip-hop’s four main elements – DJing, emceeing, B-boying and graf writing – and entranced a generation.įrom that moment, the camera’s interest in the culture never really ceased. Hip-hop and cinema connected early and stayed locked. James Lavelle’s Meltdown includes a selection of hip-hop documentaries at BFI Southbank in June.

Mos def movie list