MovieChat Forums > Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Discussion > No metion of...

No metion of...

posted 7 years ago by yngvai
2 replies | jump to latest

Glad this finally came out, but it seemed a bit light.
Everybody's going to have their "Hey, thay left THIS out" opinion.
Just ploughed through all 4 episodes last night, and thinking about it overnight, here's what stuck out to me:

Nothing about beatboxing? 1st or 2nd episode, I kept waiting for them to bring on Doug E Fresh.

Nothing about sampling and the legal fight that stemmed from it? They can (rightly) spend time talking about Here Comes the Judge, but not a thing about The Funky Drummer?

Nothing about the hip-hop that brought in more jazz - Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul?

The timeline seemed a little off when they made it seem that the Beasties' Fight for Your Right/Licensed to Ill became popular, and then after that was the endorsement of My Adidas and the hit of the Walk This Way remake from Run DMC. In reality, the Raising Hell album came out first - May 1986 with My Adidias being the first single, then Walk This Way over the summer, while Licensed to Ill didn't come out until fall of 1986 and Fight For Your Right not being a single until after that.

Also not a single mention that Licensed to Ill was the 1st rap album to hit #1 on the Billboard charts.

They showed Fab 5 Freddy, and talked a little about MTV, but didn't take that final step to talk about the monster delivery system that was Yo! MTV Raps.

They talked about how Big Daddy Kane and Biz Markie were together, they interviewed Roxanne Shante, but not a word about The Juice Crew? Also, with Roxanne, nothing about her and UTFO and battle tracks? They were already interviewing LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee!

Nothing about how huge MC Hammer was?

They talked about the controversy of Fck the Police, but nothing about 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Want to Be and the legal fight and ruling by a judge about obscenity?

I loved what I saw, but it needed another episode or two.

[–] Killtrend 7 years ago

I totally agree with all your points. I also wanted to see more on breakdancing and maybe some graffiti stuff, as it is all part of the Hip Hop culture, but I get this was based on the music only. I also wanted to see more of the females MCs. Since the documentary is Canadian, I also wanted some Canadian Hip Hop included.

It definitely needs 1-2 more episodes, for sure.

[–] Chris Engelbrecht 7 years ago

I see this as the filmmaker's personal journey into trying to fathom the origin of hip-hop, with his audience tagging along. It couldn't possibly catch everything for 2.5 million Canadian dollars. It couldn't have been the hip-hop version of Ken Burn's Jazz anyway. I'm amazed at how broad the thing manages to be in under four hours playing time.
Yeah, MC Hammer is definitely missing, C+C is missing, a guy like Will Smith is missing, Salt-N-Pepa is totally missing (basically much of the "positive" hip-hop got dropped, the more negative stuff is more interesting, I guess). But, personal journeys is a fine documentary format too, so no biggie to me. I keep putting it on on Netflix, so it must have something, and it got me digging into the whole spectrum like I never did before.