Raising the Questions
Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.
- The Daily Tao
When a filmmaker raises the questions, sometimes we also fall into wanting to answer them. The answers are in the conversations, interviews, and the process. We strive to decode and construct narratives despite the bias of each interviewee. We must be disciplined, yet relaxed, in the flow of information we are using to sculpt a story. We are there only to channel and guide the story, we are not the story. Our journey is story making, thought construction, layering of the literal and the symbolic to universal truths.
The Tao today reminds me we are cannot control the creative process; we can only set up a framework for receiving the messages and inspirations. Time and ego, wrestling forever in battle, for ego cannot seem to let go of the desire to control time. Whether shooting or editing, filmmakers are not controlling time – they are capturing the essences of the time they exist in. Sometimes that essence will resonate and become part of our universal minds, sometimes that essence is a mirror only for that time. The films I am working on – all involving Hip Hop to some degree – seem to ring with an expanding tone that will spread out from this time, this place, and shift perspectives for many.
The Tao also reminds me that there are many different energies in life, and they all exist in harmony with one another. When there is a fight against the basic energies, and push to change or warp the prevailing energy, that is where we get stuck. We make the intangible a concrete concept, and believe its something we control or can change. We must learn to be still and listen to what the voices in the winds are whispering – be still, change is coming, move now, relax, love, rest, dream, work, fight.
———
So when did you first fall in love with Hip Hop?
- Brown Sugar
Eh hem. Let me clear my throat…
Before A Tribe Called Quest, it was rap to me. I loved it. My cultural antenna was up whenever we visited my grandmother in Queens. LL Cool J smoothly spitting silky lyrics and The Beastie Boys’ bouncing raging bursts of rhyme. Kurtis Blow and Herbie Hancock were extremes of the different sounds emerging. The mix of disco, R&B, soul, reggae, and yes, even punk influences fascinated me. I loved the Paradise Garage sound that was a subtle echo to the emergent rap sound. Afrika Bambaataa was a revelation – danceable and deeply lyrical. In 1985, the teenage me was drawn to rap the way I was drawn to Jazz, blues and Led Zepplin – it was visceral and intellectual all at once.
With Hip Hop, I could be moved, body, mind and soul. It was like rap had a revelation and Hip Hop was born. An evolution of styles, messages and movements, an eclectic cross cultural jam session, the refinement of the sounds of rap into the musical spear Hip Hop became was inevitable.
Tribe Called Quest was like a first crush. US3 connected my affection for jazz with Hip Hop. The Fugees came along and gave it some deep soul. The succession of I first time heard these three artists, I feel in deep love with Hip Hop.
My mother was from Brooklyn (her accent fascinated me), and she was a music lover in the extreme. Her tastes were eclectic and broad – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Nina Simone, Billy Holiday, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Ella Fitzgerald, Leon Redbone, Janis Joplin. My mother listened to music while she cleaned, while she dreamed and relaxed, while she drove. Her children were getting a captive cultural lesson from her stories of New York, her music, her passions and convictions. My mother believed in social change, moved to Canada to escape the maelstrom of the Vietnam War with her husband in 1971 (the year between me and my sister’s births). From her tastes, mine began to form.
In my teens, my older brother gave me a copy of the autobiography of Malcolm X. Straight to my heart and brain, his words were soul work. No, not Muslim or Black, soul. His words transcended the times he was writing in to reach into my mind, start the questions percolating. Malcolm X was working to find universal truths – the epitomy of speak truth to power.
I worked for a NYC independent production company, 900 Frames Inc., in the early 1990′s and it was my Hip Hop college. As a production assistant, I did pick ups and drop offs to Relativity Records in Hollis. I moved up to production coordinating rap video shoots for acts like Commonsense, Street Military, Ultramagnetic MCs, Brokin English, the Beatnuts and NKRU. I saw the struggling artists, not the stars, and their scurry to get that hit, that video, out and make the money as fast as it could be got. Everyone knew their spot in the limelight was limited. The hunger and ambition existed in everyone, including me. We were all coming from poverty, we had that common connection, to make rent, to make art, to make it out.
The spirit is there, in the music, the desire for change, for justice, for love. I deeply related to all those things, and to their poetry. Realizing later, especially in the case of Public Enemy and the “too strong/too black” samples of Malcolm X, that the lyrics were a history lesson and instruction on what was missing in mainstream messages for black people. In 2001, I began working on video elements for the Malcolm X Project at Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. Professor Manning Marable brought together some diverse voices to speak on the cultural connection between Malcolm X and black culture. Kevin Powell, Robin Kelley, Louis De Caro and Farah Griffin weighed in on movements within the culture and how they’ve been expanded, warped, appropriated, and worshipped. The up close dissection of Hip Hop culture and its direct link to the legacy of Malcolm X put even more connections together.
Hip Hop and I intersect again in performance. As I spin off into a two-year art/life-changing odyssey called VJ, I mix for Mobb Deep, while DJ Kool Herc and Busta Rhymes join them up on stage. I meet the mystical Smokifantastic and she brings me to Jessica Habie. Together, we create “The Art of Love & Struggle”, a Shocklee Production, that profiles 14 women who are part of the Ladies On The Mic Network. This was the moment Hip Hop grabbed me, body, mind and soul, shook me apart and set me right. The women were prophets, teachers, seers and healers – Toni Blackman, Amanda Diva, Claudia Alick, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Denise De La Cruz, and Rosa Clemente. I could not avoid hearing their message. The beginning of my kundalini uprising starts here, when I begin to channel the messages of the women, the intent of the director and the universal mind for inspiration to re-work every frame into a piece of art.
From there, it’s a quick two-step to Israel and shooting another documentary with Jessica. We shoot Palestinian and Israeli Hip Hop acts, and I see the message alive thousands of miles away from the source. Hip Hop became a grassroots movement, a force for social change, and a style of voice universally recognized by the masses, all without a central organizing body. The vibe is fresh, spiritual, open, angry, proud and full of dignity. DAM, Coolooloosh, Dagnahash, Funset – these acts spit in Arabic or Hebrew, but I get the meaning. The tour to the Separation Wall assaults my psyche with the bald truth that man strives to control and contain his world while killing it at the same time.
I’m back from Israel, looking for work, healing, taking a break. A random email hooks me up with the producers from Rap Sheet, the film I’m editing now. I meet Don Sikorski, the director, not knowing I’m beginning a journey with another noble soul. The project sounds interesting and complicated. I’m on board and we start digging in. It’s a project that utilizes almost every aspect of my love and exposure to Hip Hop so far. We’re just starting and have to finish in a few weeks. The writing was smooth, the first scenes of editing are going very well. The message, ah, the message – so happy I’m doing this film. The director followed the rumors of the Hip Hop Police for three years, speaking to everyone from Hip Hop stars to FBI, NYPD and the country’s top defense attorneys. And there’s the Dossier – a five hundred page document complied by HIDTA that profiles every major name in Hip Hop. The Murder Inc. trial is the lens through which we’ll tell a part of the story.
The lessons of my journey into Hip Hop and art are fairly clear to me now. I have learned to be a conduit for change to happen through me, a tool for the message. Hip Hop is purely that – a conduit through which the culture is remixed, resorted, arranged, connected, related and assimilated. The universal mind is constantly accessed, which for me makes the art form of Hip Hop a very spiritual process. These poets are listening to the winds, picking up the currents, riding them out and presenting unique ways to hear truth. A beat, a message and an open hand – to me, that’s what Hip Hop is.
Peace,
Melissa
