Scratch Scratch Freestyle: The Art of Rhyming

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The history of hip-hop cinema is not that much younger than the music itself. With a street culture as vibrant and alluring as hip-hop, it was only a matter of time until enterprising filmmakers would seek to capture it on celluloid. The graffiti documentary Style Wars from 1981 was one of the first to relate not simply the rebellious spirit inspiring the early graf writers but also the wider social milieu of post-industrial, 1970s New York that influenced hip-hop's rise to begin with. Similarly, Fab 5 Freddy and Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style became a cult classic not because of superior plot or drama but because it documented the lives of many of hip-hop's early pioneers like Busy Bee and the Cold Crush Brothers.

Inevitably, America's love affair with hip-hop turned into a petty fad, resulting in a spate of exploitative films that elided the deeper meanings of the culture for a pat presentation of superficial style (Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo anyone?). While hip-hop cinema made a triumphant (though not always compelling) return to Hollywood by the late '80s, it was less documentary-style films and more attempts at dramatizing the social environs with which hip-hop is associated: gangsta-themed films like Boyz N' The Hood or Menace II Society for example.

Documentaries on hip-hop retreated, appropriately enough, underground. As the costs of video cameras fell, it became common to see people holding cameras aloft during concerts or DJ battles or park ciphers, documenting as much as their tapes could hold. Eventually, folks began to edit and compile all this raw footage, producing a second generation of mostly youth-crafted and youth-oriented hip-hop documentaries during the '90s.

The main problems with these films aren't lack of passion or commitment or footage: if anything, they have these in excess. It's more that they, like hip-hop's oft-times chaotic pastiche -- offer too much at once. While hip-hop doesn't necessarily need the Ken Burns treatment, many filmmakers -- and in all fairness, many of them are committed amateurs rather than industry-trained professionals -- go too far in the other direction. They tend to privilege the performance, assuming that good footage alone can make a film work. The sensory overload can offer great moments, but without a guiding narrative, audiences rarely receive any sense of unity from the films.

For example, there's no question that John Carluccio's 1997 Battle Sounds has been a groundbreaking film that looks at the history of hip-hop DJs, a sorely needed corrective to all the vast mic fetishizing that goes on in rap music. With years of compiled footage and interviews with key pioneers like Grandwizard Theodore, DJ Jazzy Jeff and Q-Bert, Battle Sounds doesn't lack comprehensiveness, it lacks cohesion. Its attempt at engaging DJ history through a straight chronology falls apart early on and after a while, it's not always clear what each segment is trying to convey. What we're ultimately left with are some stellar scenes, but not necessarily a way to string them together.

In contrast, Doug Pray's recent Scratch is able to combine the same impressive footage and interviews that Battle Sounds boasts, but Pray's film is far better organized. Pray, whose previous work included a documentary of Seattle's early '90s grunge scene called Hype!, clearly spent time thinking about story development. A main difference between Scratch and other hip-hop docs is that Scratch is able to appeal to both in-the-know aficionados and a more general public lacking any in-depth knowledge of the DJ world.

Organized into a series of chapters that cover everything from the pioneers (Bambaataa, Kool Herc), to the new innovators (Mixmaster Mike, the X-Cutioners), to related side topics like producing and beat digging (i.e. record collecting), Scratch serves as a strong introduction to the world of hip-hop DJs that manages to achieve both breadth and depth. As noted before, you don't have to know a thing about DJs to get something out of the documentary and that's one of its strongest points.

For example, Pray wisely and humorously keeps re-running footage from Herbie Hancock's seminal "Rockit" video which featured Grandmaster DST on the cut. For many of the film's interviewees, DST's performance was their first exposure to DJ craft and became the inspiration for many a career. Every time "Rockit" comes up in his interviews, Pray quickly splices in a few frames of DST scratching and apart from the sight gag, it's also a brilliant way to accent "Rockit's" singular importance in the history of modern DJs.

As with many documentaries, some of the best footage is the most candid. In one scene, Pray simply walks around a room in Q-Bert's house known as "the Octagon" where four DJs, including DJ Shadow and members of the Supernatural Turntable Artists, take turns at their respective station, building off the communal energy being generated.

At the same time, Scratch does suffer a little from the "kitchen sink" impulse to include as many angles as possible and some tighter editing would have likely improved an already good product. But more controversial is how Pray's chronology and cartography of hip-hop's DJ history skips entirely over Philadelphia of the late '80s, a city once synonymous with world class DJs as the hometown of both DJ Jazzy Jeff and Cash Money. This exclusion was likely made to include other material but for any DJ fan in the know, the invisibility of Philly, in light of the film's focus on New York and San Francisco, is a glaring omission. It's a significant mar, but luckily, one of the only ones.

Hot on the heels of Scratch is Kevin Fitzgerald's equally impressive Freestyle: The Art of Rhyming. In many ways, the two films cut an uncanny similarity in their production quality and approach, but if Pray's movie looks at the world of DJs, Fitzgerald gives it up for the MCs. Both films open up in 1970s New York as the start of their tale and both are organized into selective chapters in an attempt at lending points of focus to topics that are hard to pin down into easy categories.

Freestyle isn't exactly a new film -- variations of this work-in-progress have screened as early as 1999 but as Fitzgerald has spent more time with it, it's gradually taken on more cohesion and direction. Part of what makes Freestyle interesting is how it acknowledges the difficulties in defining the very name itself. An early conversation/debate created through cross-editing finds two different rappers offering competing definitions of what "freestyle" is -- stream of consciousness improvisation vs. non-linear abstractions. While Freestyle doesn't formally adopt a singular definition, its focus on three MCs in particular: Supernatural, Juice and Craig G seem to suggest that the highest talent most rappers can aspire to in a live setting is to improvise unscripted.

As is to be expected, there's a wealth of candid and concert footage that feature some hilarious and impressive examples of quick-witted thinking in the heat of battle. At the same time, Fitzgerald has a dedicated eye on history and context and though most of his interviewees are contemporary rappers, he is also careful to include commentary from proto-rappers like New York's Last Poets. That balance demonstrates the bigger picture that Fitzgerald is able to convey in Freestyle: it's not just about spitting hot verses, for Fitzgerald, lyricism is meaningless without an understanding of history and purpose.

Most importantly, with both films, the aesthetic awe and beauty of hip-hop shine through loud and clear, whether or not you're a devout fan or curious newcomer. The ways in which both directors capture the genius of DJ scratching or MC free-styling helps make it clear where the passion to create the films stems from to begin with. If either is capable of imparting even a fraction of that infectious energy and marvelous virtuosity, they've succeeded in spades.