by JAY WATTS III

I managed to catch an early-morning broadcast of 1994’s broad-reaching hip hop satire, Fear of a Black Hat, directed by Chappelle Show fellow traveller Rusty Cundieff. It’s a mock doc parodying the two twin poles of the early ’90s hip hop controversy, the gangsta rap of N.W.A. and the potty-mouthed Miami bass group 2 Live Crew, amongst others. It follows the career arc of fictional group NWH (Niggaz With Hats) as they deal with white managers, hostility to and from the Man and other assorted scandals associated with standing on the top. Whether it’s better than Chris Rock’s CB4 is a matter of intense subjectivity (I’d say yes), but I certainly think the production is remarkably faithful to the various sounds at the time, and the humour tighter.

After some digging, I managed to find three tracks from the soundtrack on the Avatar Records Web site. The posi-daisy-tribe post-NWH work of DJ Tone Def (capable of scratching records with his member) is represented here with a scatological humanist manifesto, “I’m Just A Human” (www.avatarrecords.com/nwh/av/im_just_a_human.mp3), containing this nugget of a couplet: “When I doo-doo, is my shit not brown?/It’s a universal thing/We all flush it down.”

“Booty Juice” (www.avatarrecords.com/nwh/av/booty_juice.mp3) is a lurid pool-side bouncer, and in the film, represented a return to their earlier, bass-oriented sound, with a brass refrain and song structure akin to LL Cool J’s “Jigglin’.” Being the aware heads they were, the group wasn’t completely oblivious to their huge influence, and released “A Gangsta’s Life Ain’t Fun” (www.avatarrecords.com/nwh/

av/GangstasLife.mp3) in conjunction with childhood education organization Rappers Against Violence. The myriad ways in which a gangsta’s life is hell, and the true dangers of the ghetto grotesque, are presented, but didn’t seem to work so well with the video featuring Ice Cold in a hot-tub, pouring champagne down the throat of a well-endowed topless female friend, surrounded by obligatory mounds of cocaine and cold, hard cash.

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