"Fuckin' punk/ you ain't a leader/ what nobody followed you/ you was never shit/ your mother shoulda swallowed you" -
Big L, '98 Freestyle
A young
Biggie Smalls is on a street corner in Brooklyn. Mr. Wallace is hefty but not quite notoriously big yet. He doesn't even look old enough to drive a car. His button down shirt with the short sleeves needs work but the talent that would make him the pre-eminent east coast MC later on in the nineties is evident. He's spittin' freestyles in a battle. An older cat has challenged him and Biggie is killin' him. The crowd is nodding with every word he spits. The other MC is pacing back and forth trying to figure out how he can come back. Biggie keeps spittin'. The cadence, the rhythm, the energy, the moment is all B.I.G. While he is on this mic at this point in time, he is hip hop. The other rapper knows this. He won't even try to retort, walking away as Biggie continues on.
Kevin Fitzgerald's
Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme is all about that particular energy that the freestyle, be it a cypher or a battle or headz just droppin' lyrics on the corner, pulls out of people. Whether it's Biggie's street corner in Brooklyn or
The Good Life in LA or somewhere in between, the kinetic motion inherent in hip hop is apparent as soon as somebody drops a beat. Following the roots of hip hop from the freestyling baptist preachers to
The Last Poets to
Kool Herc's Jamaican heritage -- and footage of an early 70s Kool Herc driving around New York in a drop top with two giant speakers in the back is the film's coolest visual - without ever talking down to the audience,
Freestyle tells you as much about the people and the power of this culture as
Wild Style and
Style Wars did 20 years prior and how infectious it is.
In fact,
Freestyle's showing at The Arclight in Hollywood, infected the usually tragically hip theatre with a lot more hop than it was ready for. The movie started 20 minutes late, people couldn't or wouldn't conform to the assigned seats credo,
Malcolm Jamal Warner was left stuck outside the door. It was multicultural like LA's very eclectic hip hop crowd is. A red head turned to her friend as they walked by our aisle and said, "Girl, we best have our seats." Something about that just cracked me up. It was the cherry on the top of this cross-cultural sundae reminding me of my days in college with our hip hop student group,
Urban Art Family, discussing
Supernatural and whether written rhymes were better than freestyles and sittin' in the radio station that nobody could hear tellin' them blunted DJ cats to play
Incarcerated Scarfaces cuz "That shit is the shit." Ah yes, for the fleeting time that
Freestyle was on the screen, it made me feel what I have always loved about hip hop. How vibrant, vivid and now it is.
Felicious and I had dinner at the cafe afterwards listening as some west coast cats spit west coast freestyles at the reception. We hoped that the cypher would continue long enough for us to join in. Dinner was longer than expected and this wasn't a parking lot near The Good Life so it didn't last. Much like Kevin Fitzgerald's documentary, we were left hungry for more.