When Rappers Act

By: DJ Undacut
(NOTE: All the views expressed in this essay are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of Dublin's World)

What up. A lot people consider me the highest ranking official on hip-hop knowledge that they know. I know hella shit. Any time they have a question about the minutia of the infinite world of rap they step to me. After they ask about what song sampled what, and I drop game on how Sugerhill Gang never paid Grandmaster Caz for "Rapper's Delight", we get to the usual question that always comes up when non-heads want to talk head talk: why do rappers always have to act?
This is an age old question and instead of having to repeat my thoughts on it over and over again I'm gonna just put it down and let it lay here for the rest of time till man evolves into cyborg and cyborg evolves back to monkey and so on.
Check it out: singers and pop stars have always been inserted into films to increase their popularity and bring kids to the drive in. Elvis is the obvious stand out. He became his own one man studio pretty much starting with "Love Me Tender" and ending with the documentary "Elvis on Tour" five years before his death on the toilet.
The first rapper to be featured in their own vehicle on the big screen in an actual narrative film was a group. The Fat Boys starred in "Disorderlies" after having a cameo in "Krush Groove" (a film that deserves a future essay of it's own) and it wasn't very good. I saw it when I was eight and I don't remember really liking it. I got excited when "The Fat Boys Are Back!" came on during the opening credits and it was all down hill the rest of the way pretty much.
Rappers had cameo's here and there through the remainder of the 80's but it wasn't until 1991 that rappers straight took over the silver screen with what I like to refer to as the Ice Age: the onscreen emergence of Ice Cube and Ice-T.
Ice Cube seemed like the better actor of the two at the time, not because he necessarily was, but because he made better choices with his roles. His debut was "Boyz N The Hood" for God's sake. It was perfect for Cube because he got to just chill out and be hard and play the tragic thug that drinks forties and tells crack heads to: "get yo baby out the street!" It was probably the best film debut by a rapper ever.
Mr. T came out in "New Jack City" around the same time and wasn't really as sly with his choice. While Wesley Snipes got to play the all American bad ass king of the streets Nino Brown, Ice T had to run around playing a grungy looking back stabbing cop of all things. He was supposed to be the hero but who the hell was rooting for him? Everyone was loving Nino Brown while he destroyed the city with top grade crack and looked cool doing it. Ice T was left to say God awful lines like: "I want to shoot you so bad right now my dick is hard." C'mon.

Both "Boyz N the Hood" and "New Jack City" were hugely successful films and showed Hollywood that rappers could give movies something that Van Dam and Stallone just weren't providing anymore: credibility. Here were scary men that could play tough guys and in some cases were actually tough guys. Ice Cube had an honest to God curl and Ice-T had "managed" women before he picked up the mic. To Hollywood these guys weren't acting, they were the real thing, which is ironic since both men became known for "gangsta rap" which is mostly acting anyway.
The Ice Age came to it's zenith when both Ice's came together to helm the completely forgettable "Trespass". It was in that movie that you realized Ice-T could actually act and Ice Cube was just sort of doing his thing. Years later Ice T kind of has the last laugh with his winning over of America in the role of Finn on "Law and Order: SVU" while Ice Cube has people who remember NWA scratching their heads because of "Are We There Yet?", and people who don't remember NWA scratching their heads because "Are We There Yet?" is so fucking horrible.

Speaking of horrible we should throw in one last thing about the Ice Age. In 1991, the same year "Boyz N the Hood" was released, another Ice made his screen debut: Vanilla Ice. The name of the film was "Cool As Ice" and it is not only the worst film starring a rapper it could very well be one of the worst made period. Mr. Robert Van Winkle can't fucking act his way out of a bag from a Cross Colors store. The script is sitcom trash, the plot is nonexistent, and the acting is atrocious. In fact it is so bad I would rather watch it than "Trespass" any day.
Next came the rapper who's film career almost out shined his rapping: Tupac Shakur. Compared to all three Ice's and pretty much all other rappers come actors Tupac is one of the most talented (acting not rapping). In fact he is such a talented and committed actor that after playing a gun toting psycho named Bishop in the 1992 film "Juice" he actually did a Daniel Day Lewis and became a gun toting psycho for the rest of his life. You can argue which of his movies Tupac shines brightest but I think it's "Poetic Justice" since he plays just a regular dude and made it cool and believable.
Mos Def is a funny actor, he has a comic timing that is spot in and I enjoy him in most of what he does. One of the stand outs is an early indie film he did called "Where's Marlow?" (if that floated under your radar, which it most likely did, then I recommend you peep it). He's also good in "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy". But somewhere around there in his career he seemed to suddenly start getting cast as the partly retarded guy (both "16 Blocks" and "Be Kind Rewind" are evidence of that). It wasn't until I saw him on Real Time as a panelist that I realized Mos Def is actually semi retarded. I like his music but dude is not smart, seriously.
People always like to think of Snoop as warm and cuddly but he did have his body guard murder someone back in the day and I think he's best when he's playing a straight dick head like in "The Wash" and "Baby Boy". Ludacris is just alright, not terrible but not good enough for me to have an opinion. Method Man is pretty good all though all the great actors in "The Wire" made him kind of seem shitty. RZA is fucking terrible at acting. LL Kool J is an alright TV actor but no Ice T. 50 Cent is not good yet his DVD's just keep popping up on the shelves, what gives?

We can't forget the rappers that really went for it in the acting world before realizing their limits and retreating back to the studio. Andre 3000 definitely comes to mind. After popping up on the big ("Be Cool", "Four Brothers") and small ("The Shield") screen he just kind of disappeared. My thought is that here was a guy with a ton of talent and charisma that had always done things well but when he acted it just wasn't quite... there yet. I like to think he recognized that and retreated. Saul Williams burst on the scene in "Slam" and was the new hot shit for a minute. To be clear, I love Saul Williams, I think the man is one of the rawest, illest living today, but after getting praised in "Slam" I kept noticing him popping up in bit parts in stupid new age movies where Kevin Spacey plays an alien come to earth to teach us how to live and Saul was always playing weirdo's and crazy men and way over acting to where I cringed every time he was on screen. True story.
Probably the best actor who was once a rapper is Queen Latifa and I say that because who the hell even remembers that she was a rapper once? She spent years languishing in that piece of crap sitcom "Living Single" before doing parts in movies and then turning heads in "Set it Off". "Chicago" is what won her a real deal seat at table Hollywood and now my Mom gets excited when she see's her name in a cast. All hail the Queen!
That about does it in this one. There's about ten thousand rappers that acted in some capacity that I don't feel like mentioning because I forget them or they were just so stale and unimportant in their role that it wasn't worth wasting ink. I just mentioned who came to mind. Any way, thanks for reading and I'll be back dropping game on that ass soon enough. Until then, remember: "keep yo baby out the street!"
-DJ Undacut, 01-06-12