Heck Of A Guy

If You Liked This is Spinal Tap, …¹

You may well get off on Fear of a Black Hat,² a relatively unnoticed³ gem of a movie that is cast in the mockumentary format popularized⁴ by This is Spinal Tap⁵ to satirize, in this case, hip-hop/gangsta rap.

The Quick Flick Pick Summary: Fear of a Black Hat

• A bawdy, riotously irreverent, over the top, profane parody that addresses the full range of rap music content: the taking and selling of drugs, violence, murder, sexual excesses, racism, hatred of the police, theft, … and, as a bonus, skewers pretentious film-making⁶ and even more pretentious cultural studies.
• … Except for the last 15 minutes. The only logical explanation for the rambling footage of this final quarter-hour is that the budget was exhausted and the film crew dismissed before the editing was completed so the only remaining staffer, an unpaid intern, spliced together whatever leftover film sequences he could find on the editing room floor, tacked it on the end, added a “That’s All Foks” template, and made it back to his middle school in time for marching band practice.
• The greater your knowledge of rap groups of the 90’s, the more parodied elements you will recognize, which is one of the gratifications of watching a satire. But, if you are were born before, say, 1980 and lived somewhere other than Vostok Station, Antarctica or my home town during the 90’s, you have inadvertently absorbed enough pertinent information to enjoy the movie.⁷

The plot follows the adventures of NWH (Niggaz With Hats),⁸ a rap group populated by Ice Cold (the vulgar, verbose leader), Tasty-Taste (the designated gangster wannabe with a fully stocked armory in the basement of his home in a white, upper-class neighborhood), and Tone Def (the DJ whose talents include spouting convoluted, mystic philosophy and scratching turntables with his genitalia).⁹

A particularly nice touch is the premise that the documentary is being produced by a graduate student in sociology, Nina Blackburn, as her doctoral dissertation on the rap musical culture. Consquently, it makes sense that Nina earnestly extracts from the group members their interpretation of the rap ethos and laboriously performs deep textual analysis of lyrics to songs such as “Grab Yo Shit,” “Fuck The Security Guard,” “Booty Juice,” and ” Come And Pet the P.U.S.S.Y.” Pseudo-profundities abound as sociologic rationales are voiced in street vernacular to explain that a song such as “Booty Juice,” featuring NWH surrounded by nearly naked girls around a southern California pool, a setting familiar to anyone who has watched music videos, is not, as the naïve might believe, an exploitation of feminine sexuality but is instead a cultural metaphor that poetically explores interpersonal and inter-sexual conflicts – or, as Ice Cold, phrases it, “The butt is like society. It has to open up.” He goes on to explain that the afore mentioned hit, “Come And Pet The P.U.S.S.Y.,” is culturally coded thusly: “P – Political, U – Unrest, S – Stabilize, S – Society, Y – Yeah.”

My own misgivings about the comic potential of the content of Fear of a Black Hat quickly dissipated with the film’s opening frames, prior to the plot or even any characters being introduced, which warn the audience that the movie contains language that may be offensive¹⁰ and then goes on to unctuously explain that such terms will not be used gratuitously but only to evoke the reality of life in a rap group. This sanctimoniously delivered combination of caveat and self-aggrandizing claptrap is followed by the narrator repeating each of these offensive expressions – several times. For good measure, each of the terms is also displayed on the screen. Very sly, very vulgar, very funny.

Excerpts

Nina Blackburn: What, if any, is the difference between a ho and a bitch?
Tone Def: A ho fucks EVERYBODY.
Ice Cold: Right, but a bitch fucks everybody BUT YOU.

_______________

Nina Blackburn: They say it’s the quiet ones that you have to watch out for.
Tasty Taste: And, if you’ve noticed, I ain’t said shit for a couple minutes now.

_______________

Tasty-Taste: “We are anti-violent. Anyone who says different, I am going to bust a cap in your ass!”

_______________

Nina Blackburn: So, what’s the deal about the hats?
Ice Cold: Shit, the hats’re what it’s all about. See, back when we was still slaves, the white man made the black man work in the fields.
Tone Def: Word. Heads totally exposed to the sun.
Ice Cold: So when the slaves got back from the fields, they was too tired to fight the white man. So what we’re sayin’ now is: Yo, we got some hats now muh-fuckas.
Tasty Taste: And we ain’t too tired to bust a cap in yo’ ass.

_______________

Nina Blackburn: Your new album is “NWH: Fear of a Black Hat.”
Ice Cold: Right. But see, actually that shit was suppose to be “NWH: Fear of a Black Hat,” subtitled “Don’t Shoot ‘Til You See The Whites.”
Nina Blackburn: Of their eyes?
Ice Cold: Whose eyes?
Nina Blackburn: Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.
Ice Cold: No, no, no! Don’t shoot until you see the whites. Period. That’s it. End of story. You know what I’m saying? But the record company, they dogged us out. They wouldn’t let us put it on it.
Tasty Taste: Yeah. We should have busted a cap in their ass.
Tone Def: They’re always trying to censor our shit.
Nina Blackburn: For instance, with the song “Kill Whitey.”
Ice Cold: That shit was a whole big misunderstanding. They took the whole thing out of context.
Tone Def: They were trying to say we were advocating killing white people and shit.
Tasty Taste: Yeah! Do I look like the type of nigga that could kill a whole buncha white mutha fuckas? I mean, you know, if provoked, but not on a humbug.”
Nina Blackburn: Well, in the song lyrics I’m quoting: “He’ll rip you off. He’ll take your money, make you work for free. Though you may scoff. It isn’t funny. He’s the devil, see. Kill Whitey.”
Ice Cold: Right. Now how can you listen to that and think we’re talking about killing all white people?
Tone Def: Fact. We were talking about one specific whitey. Whitey Deluca our ex-manager.
Tasty Taste: He ripped us off for 70 g’s.
Ice Cold: That’s right. And Whitey Deluca wasn’t even white. He was Italian. He was one of those olive complexion MFs you know.
Nina Blackburn: If I remember correctly, he ended up murdered?
Ice Cold: We wasn’t in town when that shit happened.
Tone Def: Wait a minute, we were here.
Ice Cold: No, no, no. We were in Cleveland like a “mo fo” remember?
Tone Def: Oh, yeah.

The Final Line

It’s subversive, it’s obscene, it’s great fun.

Video Samples From Fear of a Black Hat

Fear Of A Black Hat – Introduction

Fear Of A Black Hat – Come Pet The P.U.S.S.Y. (Song and Intro)

1. This is another entry in my continuing series of movies that, for one reason or another, were overlooked when they were in the theaters but which meet my idiosyncratic criteria to rate a B+ or better ranking. Operationally, a B+ movie, especially one produced a decade or so ago, isn’t a can’t-wait-to-see-it sort of event, but it is an odds-on bet to provide solid entertainment during, say, a cold, rainy Chicago weekend. My review is designed to provide enough information and a sufficient sense of the flick to allow the reader to determine if it’s worth a Netflix selection.↩
2. The movie’s name, I assume, derives from the Fear of a Black Planet album by Public Enemy↩
3. Fear of a Black Hat, which hit the theaters in 1994, grossed, according to imdb.com, only $238,000 on a budget of $999,999.99, a sum said to have been set to allow the film company to deny that they had cut a million dollar deal with the previously untried director, Rusty Cundieff. ↩
4. This is Spinal Tap is frequently but erroneously credited for originating the mockumentary genre. While the identity of the prototype is obscured by technicalities and arbitrary definitions, my vote would be for Albert Brooks’ 1979 film, Real Life, in which he plays an aggressively narcissistic director who persuades a family to be filmed going about their day to day lives, paralleling the technique of the PBS series An American Family, except Brooks is openly manipulative, fine-tuning the family’s presentation to improve the film with predictably disastrous – and hilarious – results, which, come to think of it, makes Real Life a prescient spoof of today’s reality shows as well.↩
5. Upon hearing mention of Fear of a Black Hat – or bringing it up themselves – a white guy wearing a black turtleneck may identify himself as a paid-up member of the cinema cognoscenti by sneeringly referring to it as This is Spinal Rap, tragically failing to recognize that this comment was modestly clever for precisely twelve minutes the first time it made the rounds in 1994; the merciful response is bemused silence although a chuckle emitted sotto voice or an elegantly delivered bitch slap is certainly acceptable.↩
6. In addition to the mockumentary/documentary spoof, black filmmakers Spike Lee and John Singleton are parodied by the brief appearance of a character named “Jike Spingleton,” who is directing a flick called “New Mack Village,” starring Ice Cold. The short segment of “New Mack Village” displayed mimics the opening scenes of New Jack City down to details such as Ice Cold wearing the same black hat that Ice-T wore in the actual film.↩
7. If you’re unsure that you possess the requisite Rapological expertise, take this test: Could you distinguish between Snoop Dogg and Vanilla Ice if they were, however unaccountably, standing within six feet of you? If so, you pass. For extra credit: With which musical phrase do you associate M.C. Hammer: (a) “If I had a hammer” or (b) “Can’t touch this?” If you guessed (b), you’ve got the straight-up boo-yaa knowledge, fo shizzle.↩
8. The group’s name is a parody of “NWA,” (Niggaz With Attitude) ↩
9. Figuring out correlations between NWH members and real life rappers of the era is a pleasant, albeit not essential, pastime. Minor characters include a white singer called “Vanilla Sherbet,” a flash in the pan named “M.C. Slammer” who is trying for a comeback, and “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme,” an all-girl group whose byword is “We have four spices.”↩
10. The subjunctive is misleading; the language is certainly and exceedingly offensive; this is not a family night video unless your mother is a lot different from my mom.↩