TRAJECTORIES AND TRAPS: THE VISUALIZATION OF URBAN LANDSCAPES IN HIP-HOP FILMS

Abstract

Beyond a cultural phenomenon and a movement, hip-hop is an art form – a paradigmatic art form for the postmodern age. Broadly defined the hip-hop film can be thought of as new African-American-themed cinema. Hip-hop films display the aesthetics and culture of hip-hop while also featuring hip-hop music as a score. Hip-hop artists commonly appear as lead actors in these productions and the films are concerned with urban stories about and related to African-American youth of the postBlaxploitation/post-civil rights era: the hip-hop generation. The city as concept, calculated by a “strategy” that emanates from institutes of power, sets the stage for the dramatic conflict of the hip-hop film. The hip-hop film and the plight of its characters are inextricably linked to urban spaces, both visually and thematically. This space codes and shapes the structures of urban existence in tangible and intangible ways and these codes often become a fatalistic concern for the ones who must navigate them. This objective correlative – the urban city – is key to an understanding of hiphop culture, to an understanding of the condition of the “expatriates” surviving in the treacherous inner-city.