Hip-hop was born nostalgic. Even in its early days, the music already recycled the past, keeping the parts it liked (funk bass-lines, rock breaks), leaving out whatever it didn't (sampling credit, country music). Even a film like Wildstyle, made back in what feels like another epoch (1982), waxes on hip-hop's fading innocence -- this back at a time when few people outside of the Bronx had even heard of the term "hip-hop" yet.
Hip-hop cinema, in particular, rides the nostalgia wave all the time. Krush Groove romanticized the New School, CB4 satirized the gangsta age while Belly translated the orgy of opulence in Hype Williams' rap videos from MTV to the big screen. Rick Fumuyiwa's Brown Sugar though, is different than all of those, which is surprising considering how derivative it is.
It's a struggle not to think of the film as the hip-hop version of Love and Basketball, which, like Brown Sugar has Sanaa Lathan as the female lead. The basic narrative is almost identical. In Brown Sugar, Taye Diggs and Lathan star as Dre and Sidney, hip-hop professionals (he's an A&R, she's a rap magazine editor) and friends since age 10. If you recall, in L&BB, Omar Epps and Lathan play two friends, both basketball pros, who've known each other since childhood too. It doesn't help that Diggs' razor-thin beard is so Epps-esque that, depending on the angle, it's easy to confuse the two.
While we're at it, that plot is also a lot like The Best Man, also starring Diggs and Lathan, where Diggs plays opposite Nia Long as two media professionals who've been friends since college (that film includes Morris Chestnut who is conspicuously missing from Brown Sugar but maybe that's because he was too busy making the Steven Segal/Ja Rule film, Half Past Dead). The film also liberally samples (samples...like borrows...get it? Where's the real hip-hop? It's over here!) from other tried and true romantic comedies set in New York, most notably Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally 1) because they rip off the Central Park walk scene (though, in all fairness, Reiner bit that shit from Woody Allen's Manhattan) and 2) there's an extended conversation between Chris and Dre about the ending of Casablanca which is just like Harry and Sally's late-night conversations about the exact same issue (should Bogart have let Ingrid Bergman get on the plane?) Aaaaand...there's a little touch of The Big Chill here too, both in terms of the rose-colored glances to the past as well as Brown Sugar's use of a conscious hip-hop soundtrack to replace The Big Chill's Motown revue. But then again, it's not as Big Chilly as Fumuyiwa's last film, The Wood (also happening to star Omar Epps and Diggs), which tells the story of three 30-something homeboys reminiscing about their youth.
Damn, where the hell was I? It's hard to sort yourself out of all the buppie films that have cropped up in post-Spike Lee black cinema. Oh yeah, Brown Sugar.
For all its derivative-ness though, there's something surprisingly original about the movie. I could be wholly mistaken but this is the first film that's hip-hop centered from a middle class, college-educated, post-New School perspective. If that sounds like an awkward mouthful, that's because it is, but there's no other way to quite describe it. I know this demographic well since I'm a card carrying member of it and if you're not sure if you are or not, take this quick quiz:
- Did you start listening to hip-hop after 1986 but before 1994?
- Did you know the big, gold chain wearin', eye patch sportin' rapper in the 1984 flashback scene was Slick Rick before Lathan's voiceover told you as much?
- Did you know that Mos Def and Queen Latifah (who have supporting roles in the film) were actual rappers?
- When Al Hirt's "Harlem Hendoo" is playing in the background in one scene, did you correctly identify it as the sample behind De La Soul's "Ego Trippin' Pt. 2"?
- Do you think hip-hop has lost its soul since 1997?
If you answered "yes" to any of the questions above, especially 5), then this is a film that speaks to your kind of hip-hop mentality. If you answered "no" to all of them, you're probably just a fan of buppie cinema and are no doubt eagerly awaiting the next Omar Epps and/or Morris Chestnut film.
As far as the cinema world goes, all this is probably quite immaterial but from a hip-hop perspective, it's a little stunning. In one scene, Dre's boss at Millennium Records reprimands his idealistic underling by saying, "If you want to keep it real, go work for Rawkus". Even if you happen to know that Rawkus is a formerly independent record label that used to carry a heavy cache of credibility in the underground, this is a joke so obscure for a mainstream audience that I couldn't believe they made it (well, I also can't believe that in 2002, anyone would claim that Rawkus is keeping it real, but that's another story).
Brown Sugar is made from the musical perspective of aging backpackers in their 20s and 30s, seemingly grafting together Nelson George and Joan Morgan's sepia-soaked writings on hip-hop in their respective books (Hip Hop America and When the Chickenheads Come Home to Roost) and scored to a college radio playlist to boot. It's a major change from the hip-hop films that have preceded it such as Juice, Menace II Society and CB4, which invoke hip-hop's authenticity fetish through their hyperbolic -- or in the case of CB4, caricatured -- street "realism", something utterly lacking in Brown Sugar. Besides the obligatory playground shots that open and close the film and one scene where Dre and Sidney visit Chris at an underground open mic, the "street" is well nigh invisible in this movie, and instead we have lingering scenes shot in high class restaurants, Sid's Fort Greene brownstone, and Dre's midtown office.
The authenticity game in Brown Sugar is played not through hip-hop, but with hip-hop, meaning that what the film ultimately is concerned with is how real hip-hop is to itself. The term, "the real hip-hop", gets bandied about in the script with more frequency than on an underground 12" or Okayplayer.Com's user forums and while it sounds just as hackneyed in the movie as it does everywhere else, the fact that there's even a film that concerns itself with the concept of "the real hip-hop" is striking.
This quality of Brown Sugar marks a strange moment in hip-hop's evolution. The post-New School generation that Brown Sugar comes out of has been vociferously loyal yet has always been more elitist and populist. The majority of rap artists today don't make records for this crowd (too narrow -- and finicky -- a demographic), hell, even the real-life magazine that the fictional Sidney works at, XXL, doesn't cater to that audience. Yet Fumuyiwa is essentially making a mainstream film from that "underground" perspective, which isn't to suggest that he's selling it out at all. If anything, he's too earnest in his loyalty.
Brown Sugar wears its aesthetic politics on its sleeve from the very beginning. Lathan's voiceover asks, "when did you first fall in love with hip-hop" and in response, the likes of Kool G Rap, De La Soul, Pete Rock, Black Thought, Talib Kweli and others pop up to respond (Jermaine Dupri is the only odd ball in a mix of artists drawn from the Underground Top 25). Not only that, but the movie then shifts to a flashback scene that takes place in the South Bronx in 1984 as a young Dre and Sidney meet for the first time during a cipher battle between Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick and Dana Dane. What's notable about this scene is that Fumuyiwa makes the decision to cast the actual rappers themselves -- a generous gesture to be sure -- but no one's going to confuse any of the three with being 20 years younger than they look. This example speaks to Fumuyiwa and screenwriter's Michael Elliot (Like Mike) commitment to a particular hip-hop authenticity that most other directors wouldn't waste a moment thinking about but it's a point lost on most who go see the movie unless they were avid readers of ego trip magazine or own all of The Roots' albums, including the UK import From the Ground Up.
If you happen to fall into the latter camp, then Brown Sugar might just be the one and only film to ever cater to your sensibilities about hip-hop even as it coats it in a Terry McMillan veneer. It's telling that the movie's original title was I Used To Love Her, taken from Common Sense's 1994 anthem, which certified the beginning of New School nostalgia and the underground's backlash against rap's spreading commercialism. For Common, the fictional "her" is hip-hop and as he talks about his love affair with her, he's really talking about his changing relationship with rap music. Like a mobius strip turning in on itself, Brown Sugar inverts the analogy again, with hip-hop as a signifier for all that's good and pure in love and life. In essence, you have a movie that treats hip-hop as a metaphor for relationships based on a song that treats relationships as a metaphor for hip-hop. The mind reels.
In the film, Sid and Dre continually look to the past as a way of escaping the complexities of their present -- Dre's marriage to another woman, Sid's courtship by a charismatic basketball player, etc. That is, of course, the very essence of nostalgia -- a valorization of what was in order to cure the ills of what is. At every turn, the script tries to emphasize that the key to Dre and Sid's future lies in recovering the innocence, purity and perfection of their (and hip-hop's) past. Remembering that "I used to love her" opens the door for Dre and Sid to love one another.
The problem is that Fumuyiwa fails to recognize the limitations of Common's song, and as a result, denies his narrative the kind of potency that it could have had. Hip-hop was never as perfect as we think it was. As affecting as the song is, "I Used to Love H.E.R." places our memory of hip-hop on a pedestal built on bodies of straw men (gangstas, players, pop rappers). Yet, the past only looks more luminous because we've conveniently forgotten all the flaws and mars that happened along the way.
You can argue endlessly about whether the music/culture was more vibrant then or now but you'd have to be militantly naïve to believe that the same problems that seem so endemic now (misogyny, materialism, nihilism) weren't woven into the fabric of hip-hop's heritage. By ignoring those blips and skips, it's no wonder that hip-hop's past seems so distant and pristine. It's as if nothing ever went wrong "back in the day", which only makes the imbroglio of hip-hop today seem all the more despairing. Yet nostalgia gone amok means reaching for a past that never really was. If Sid and Dre's relationship in Brown Sugar seems artificially sweetened, that's because the only problems they seem to have are in the here and now. But it's hard to believe that their past -- like hip-hop's past -- could have been so unblemished.
The life of anything (like hip-hop) or anyone (like Sid and Dre) benefits from a full embrace of everything that goes into it. The film, in taking on attributes of Love and Basketball, When Harry Met Sally and other similar films, understands this in a fleeting way, recognizing that what makes Sid and Dre's friendship and romance powerful is precisely their history together. Yet, it's a portrait of the past cast in soft focus -- all blemishes removed -- and the story wastes a real opportunity to give both of its lead characters greater nuance and depth.
This critique aside, I still can't help but like the film. Sidney is working on a book throughout the movie, which she later describes as either a love poem or love letter to hip-hop and Brown Sugar, with its romanticized ideals about the music and its culture, is precisely that: designed to woo and charm. For those of us already long under hip-hop's spell, Brown Sugar confirms and validates our own love affair and even as you recognize its shortcomings, it's hard to deny that the taste is still sweet.
