Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap 

[Indomina]

DVD REVIEW 
In rap, you are whatever you say you are. Until someone contradicts you with faster, flashier rhymes, your words carry a kind of truth. It’s music of self-definition, and as such, it’s the perfect genre to tell its own story—and spin its own mythologies. With  The Art of Rap, director Ice-T chats up old- and new-school MCs from the Bronx—the birthplace of hip-hop—to Compton, asking them to explain their craft. Thanks to his status as pioneering gangsta rapper, Ice-T gets access to some prime players (Chuck D, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre), and he elicits some illuminating responses. Early on, underground hero Lord Jamar recalls starting out with the instrumental “Do It Yourself” B-side of Kurtis Blow’s 1980 classic “The Breaks.” He’d always thought rapping would be easy, but facing his first beat, Jamar drew a blank. Ditto for Eminem, who got booed his first time onstage and says here that “words are like puzzles,” even after all these years. For Eminem, hip-hop was a means of finding and asserting himself, and similarly, many of Ice-T’s subjects compare rapping to fighting. “You’re being set up,” Lord Finesse tells potential challengers, likening rhymes to boxing combos. Others are less adept at explaining their processes, but rock songwriters rarely fare much better. If the goal was to portray rap as more than “people talking over records”—an antiquated criticism in 2012—Ice-T easily succeeds. Beyond that, he presents a mix of profundity and self-aggrandizing jibber-jabber. Given the subject, that seems about right. –Kenneth Patridge

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