The toman diaries

HipHop is everything is ...........

tirsdag, februar 24, 2004

I just watched the movie Scratch. It's a really funky film about HipHop culture, breaking it into it's various parts, looking back in history, looking at present state commercialism and the future hiphop version of that.

The movie itself feels like made by a DJ, every Point is scratched upon, everything is one long set of intertwined scenes and it really, really flows. I got kinda tired at about 1hr10min, but the last 12 minutes were summarizing so it didn't really matter.

It has a really good theme of collaboration and using hiphop as a way of avoiding conflict. DJ Shadow points out that [inaudible] were the first to take the secrecy out of dj'ing by revealing what records they were using. 'They' said like hey; This is what we use, take it and make something better so that 'we' can improve on it.

"Take this and improve on it so that we can learn". Taste that and compare to software.

Qbert is another DJ whose history is told. He is really mental about hiphop. Not mental in the stupid phrase describing a psyciatric patient, but he really feels hiphop is about more than just being cool and playing the right stuff. Not that any of the other charachter in the movie are all about being cool, but Qbert talks about it alot, having alien figures in his apartment. At the end of the movie, this mentality is expressed as "We are all us. If you hurt anyone, you hurt a part of yourself."

And the end musical theme? Edvard Grieg's Dovregubbens hall.