It’s been over thirty-five years since Kool Herc was driving around South Bronx and rocking block parties with Busy Bee and Melle Mel on stage, rocking folks all over town in a New York City that doesn’t exist anymore. Over the years Hip Hop has changed and spread all over the world and one element of the culture, rapping, has had some of the most changes. Once just a way of promoting the DJ, it's now the most visible and celebrated part of the culture. Rapping can seem easy to some or to something they don’t really pay attention to but for some it’s one of the most important aspects of a song, from the lyrics to the cadence of voice to how the emcee flows over the beat. Something From Nothing – The Art of Rap is a film by Ice T that explores the Hip Hop lyricist, and what goes through their mind and how they come up their rhymes and their feelings of the art itself.
The film follows Ice-T who now is probably known more now for being in Law & Order SVU than his earlier career as a gangsta rapper. In reality, Ice-T is a proto-gangsta rapper one of the few to helped create that subgenre of rapping about crime and the lifestyle of crime. Ice-T basically goes through a path of interviews starting with some of the earliest emcees who helped define and create the form of rap from Grandmaster Caz and Grandmaster Melle Mel to Doug E. Fresh, who helped define what beat boxing is to Hip Hop. The film is totally crafted as a set of conversations of peers, some of the greats ever talking about what it’s like being on stage and first writing Rhymes to how they attack making a song or what some of their favorite verses are.
This film also has some surprisingly beautiful sky shots of New York City and Los Angeles that are peppered throughout with Ice’s thoughts and ponderings about emceeing and his conversations. The relaxed nature of the talks Ice has with all the different artists are also punctuated with verses by them spitting (slang term for rapping) into the camera which is all bravado and grandstanding as it seems each one that does it knows that other emcees will be showcasing their skills and they must prove they are the best on the mic. Those are some of the film’s strongest moments. The camera also pays a lot of attention to what everyone is wearing. Close up shots of the tennis shoes has to be about ten minutes of the screen time. It’s not really distracting since things like being fresh or materialistic is an important part of the culture. In any other film it would be a detriment but here it’s like a perfect little detail.
Ice-T did a really great job with this focusing on something he is a part of and close to personally. There are some people that are not in the film that raises a few questions on why they weren’t in it. It’s a good overview of rap that is a little deeper than what you might expect. If rap isn’t your thing maybe this would be worth checking out to get a little insight. And if rap is your thing then this will be like going to church.
