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BELLY — Hype Williams and Soul II Soul bring hip hop "Back To Life" · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes adult language, some talk about sex and drugs, but on the downside, it's also got spoilers.
• 0:10
  So today I'm going to tell you the story of an incredible moment in a '90s American gangster movie.
• 0:16
  And it all starts with the birth of a band, I bet you've heard of, at an '80s British nightclub.
• 0:25
  Let me take you back to that night.
• 0:27
  A Sunday in London, 1988.
• 0:27
  A club called the Africa Centre.
• 0:31
  Outside the entrance, hundreds of beautiful people mill around.
• 0:35
  Now zoom in on one of them, a gangly, red headed musician with an appropriate nickname.
• 0:40
  Yes, I'm Simon Law, otherwise known as The Funky Ginger.
• 0:44
  He's there with his sister, who's a singer, and he's holding a thin white cardboard box, inside, a stack of vinyl 12 inch singles.
• 0:52
  Fresh off the presses, a dance track the two of them just cut, and they want to put it in the hands of the mega-popular DJ collective inside the club called Soul ll Soul and their ringleader, DJ Jazzie B.
• 1:05
  We used to laugh because it was like, you'd have the 12 inch boxes and they really did look like pizza boxes.
• 1:12
  You'd say to the bouncers, something like,"I'm just bringing a pizza for the DJ." They knew what that meant.
• 1:17
  You had a 12 inch to give to the DJ, they let you in.
• 1:21
  And one of the biggest thrills of that whole situation was that we now got free entry and skipped the line getting into Africa Centre club.
• 1:30
  Because honestly, the crowd outside was as big as the one inside.
• 1:34
  It was about 500 people max, and it was always 500 people queuing to get in and we just skipped the line, went straight in.
• 1:40
  It was so cool. Oh my God.
• 1:41
  It was the equivalent of getting on the VIP line for like Studio 54 in the '70s or something.
• 1:46
  100%, yeah.
• 1:46
  That was our Studio 54.
• 1:49
  Records were being made there, records were being broken there.
• 1:54
  Things that Jazzie played, new things that he played became hits.
• 1:58
  Inside the Africa club, it's easy to see why Londoners of every race, wearing their ravey finest, are blissing out to the Soul ll Soul DJ's funky flow of records, past and present.
• 2:09
  You know, they started off as a reggae sound system, but then they started playing soul music.
• 2:13
  All these different kinds of music seamlessly woven together with a very beautiful vibe, which was all about dancing.
• 2:22
  Jazzie's favorite saying was,"If you're not dancing,"you can fuck off home." You know?
• 2:27
  And he'd say that regularly on the mic.
• 2:29
  But as Simon winds through the crowd towards the DJ booth, pizza box full of vinyl in hand, the music stops and Jazzie makes a different announcement on the mic.
• 2:39
  For the first time ever, he's about to spin a tune composed and performed by Soul ll Soul.
• 2:45
  It was the tune Fairplay, that was their first single, and it was like the crowd, he billed it, you know, he said, this is our own music.
• 2:53
  And he says play, it starts...
• 2:55
  It starts with a really heavy groove, heavy beat.
• 2:59
  Baby, baby Crowd didn't move at all.
• 3:03
  Everybody was like mystified.
• 3:06
  And then, I just remember it vividly...
• 3:08
  Now danceOkay The energy spreading out amongst people and people starting to groove and by like about a minute in, everyone was just going nuts.
• 3:23
  Because they could feel it, like, this somehow distills down everything that this scene is, into this tune, you know?
• 3:33
  Soul II Soul is the place where you should beOn Sunday nights... And that's where it all built from, really, you know.
• 3:42
  And then they got an album deal because of the success of that.
• 3:44
  And then I came on board for everything after that really.
• 3:50
  Yeah, Simon's own single did okay, but he'd go on to make way bigger waves as a member of Soul ll Soul, a band whose energy spread out of UK dance clubs around the world, and a decade later, into the opening scene of a movie that was going to make hip hop history.
• 4:18
  I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome to the MUBI Podcast.
• 4:21
  MUBI's the global film company that champions great cinema.
• 4:24
  On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 4:27
  This is Season 11, we're calling it Needle on the Record, Side Two.
• 4:30
  This is the sequel to our season a while back all about needle drops.
• 4:34
  Those moments when filmmakers take a tune, drop it in their movie and magic happens.
• 4:38
  This time around, we're focusing on UK music of the '80s, and you are not going to find a more mesmerizing use of that than the opening minutes of the 1998 movie, Belly. The first and only film by superstar music video director Hype Williams, who used an ethereal Soul ll Soul track to set the tone for what was billed as a black gangster movie, but looks and feels like some kind of crazy fever dream, because that's kind of what inspired it.
• 5:04
  Really, I started writing the amazing dreams that I had while I was in the coma for two weeks.
• 5:09
  That is Anthony Baden, who co-wrote the movie's story with Hype, and I talked to him, Soul ll Soul's Simon Law, of course, hip hop historians and BAFTA award winning director Akinola Davies Jr. about a film that totally mystified critics back in '98 but left a mark on music and moviemakers into the 21st century.
• 5:27
  On the one hand, you know it's like a gangster film, but visually it was the most incredible representation of Black skin on camera I probably had ever seen.
• 5:36
  Probably still to this day.
• 5:39
  So open your eyes, mind and ears as we drop the needle on Belly.
• 5:49
  So if you're into hip hop, you are into Hype Williams' work, whether you realize it or not.
• 5:54
  But back in the '90s, most hip hop fans definitely realized it, even from a continent away.
• 6:00
  I grew up in Germany, in Frankfurt, Germany.
• 6:03
  I'm a military brat.
• 6:04
  That's Panama Jackson, these days he's senior editor at the Black news and culture website, TheGrio.
• 6:09
  So what used to happen all the time is our family members would record shows like BET'sRap City or VH1 Soul orYo! MTV Raps, and they would send them to us so that we could keep up with pop culture.
• 6:21
  So I used to watch like these videos on loop, and you just naturally look to who the artist was, who the song, what album it was on, but also the directors were always listed.
• 6:31
  Yeah, at the end of every video there was a director credit.
• 6:33
  And Hype Williams, you knew, was the guy once you got to a certain level.
• 6:37
  I mean, look, Hype was doing videos for for Puffy and Biggie, if you saw a big budget video, you just assumed it was a Hype Williams video.
• 6:43
  I remember when the Fugees did Ready or Not. I don't actually know who directed that, but if you were to tell me right now that it was Hype Williams, I would, I'd be like,"Yeah, that makes sense." It wasn't.
• 6:51
  But I know what you're saying.
• 6:53
  It does have like sexy helicopters and a chase scene in it.
• 6:56
  Yeah, Jay Z. When you got there, you went to Hype.
• 6:59
  Hype is the one who did the big budget videos, the ones that were events, not just the music video with the homies in the neighborhood, the ones that had the storylines and had the look.
• 7:09
  He's like the Michael Bay of of videos, you know what I mean?
• 7:13
  Like if there's an explosion in your video Hype Williams is not far behind.
• 7:18
  For rap video in the '90s Hype Williams was a luxury brand.
• 7:21
  In fact, a lot of times the artists in his videos wore luxury brands and moved in slow motion through hyper colored, luxurious worlds.
• 7:29
  Which makes sense because even as a kid from a rough part of town in the middle of a music revolution, he was all about the image.
• 7:38
  I am Anthony Bodden Junior as my dad is Senior, and I wrote the story for Belly. Anthony Bodden befriended Hype in kindergarten in 1970s Hollis, Queens, and they were around in the '80s when Hype's high school, Andrew Jackson High started minting rap royalty.
• 7:58
  Run-DMC you know, kind of went there and Ed Lover went there.
• 8:03
  You know, Ed Lover fromYo! MTV Raps was a good friend of ours at the time.
• 8:07
  And LL Cool J was in the neighborhood.
• 8:11
  But while Bodden got deep into the music and started writing lyrics and rapping himself, his pal Hype got way into a different corner of hip hop culture.
• 8:19
  Hype was a graffiti artist.
• 8:21
  I was doing rap and Hype was doing graffiti on trains and stuff.
• 8:25
  He was doing crazy stuff.
• 8:26
  He would sneak into the train station and go to the end of the train where everybody was at, and he would tag the train up.
• 8:35
  Even then, his style was kind of highbrow, influenced by street artists like Keith Haring and Basquiat and pop art of all kinds.
• 8:43
  You know, like European magazines, he likes to rip out pages.
• 8:47
  He'll rip out like a hundred pages out of the magazines.
• 8:50
  And he'd be like,"Yo, I like this shot.
• 8:52
  "I like that shot, I like--" And he also likes comic books.
• 8:56
  - The angles on the comics.
• 8:56
  - Yeah.
• 8:58
  Like sort of canted.
• 8:58
  Everything's at an angle.
• 9:00
  Nothing's just head on.
• 9:02
  I tell you another little secret, me and him, we used to watch cartoons like, let's say Tom and Jerry or Fred Flintstone or something like that, right.
• 9:10
  Turn the sound off that and play Biggie or Pac or, you know, and just watch the timing, the movement.
• 9:20
  And it seems like everything, especially if you were smoking weed back then, everything seems to like mesh together.
• 9:28
  And we'd be like,"Oh, that shit is crazy." Yeah, I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about.
• 9:34
  I definitely didn't do that over and over again in college.
• 9:37
  No way.
• 9:38
  You ever see a lump come on, Fred Flintstone's head?
• 9:42
  Eventually, Hype applied all those aesthetics from fashionable to freaky at the closest thing Queens had to a movie studio.
• 9:49
  He took that artistic vibe to Classic Concepts.
• 9:56
  Classic Concepts was a production company run by a guy named Ralph McDaniel.
• 10:00
  They made some of the early rap videos, which he'd run on his public TV show, Video Music Box, the first rap video program.
• 10:08
  This stuff was pioneering.
• 10:10
  But not really high production values.
• 10:12
  That's Dimitri Ehrlich.
• 10:12
  In the '90s he was writing about hip hop forInterview magazine and hosting and writing shows on MTV.
• 10:20
  Music videos in general were low budget things, because record companies at first didn't want to spend, you know,$50,000 or $100,000 on a video.
• 10:26
  They were spending like $5000 or $1500 in the early days.
• 10:29
  Especially when most rap labels at that time were indie labels.
• 10:33
  In the late '80s, like a lot of these labels didn't have giant music video budgets.
• 10:38
  So the videos were relying primarily on the charisma of the artists, but the videos themselves, you know, I don't think a lot of artistry and energy was necessarily in the earliest days of rap videos.
• 10:50
  But Hype got hired as a production assistant at Classic Concepts just as budgets were starting to beef up, and he saw an opportunity.
• 10:57
  I have to say, I never wanted to do musicthat wasn't my thinking. That's him in a 2018 interview with Red Bull Music Academy.
• 11:05
  You know, I wanted to get my hands on a camera, but what Ifound out was the stuff that was being done at the time was--It just looked bad all the time.There was rappers in junkyards and shit like that.So I thought, well, maybe someone should--Should apply themselves differently.No one would listen.So I just said, I'll just do it myself. This was his opening salvo, the 1991 video for girl group BWP and their tough ass rap called We Want Money.I'm fiending, I'm schemingI need money, catch the meaning? It's definitely not Michael Bay level production, but you can see hints of a new kind of rap video language, exaggerated comic book camera angles, bright graffiti backdrops, whip pans and sort of a story as the ladies accost a pack of peacocking dudes all over town and demand they pay the bills.
• 12:02
  Stop, pull over, motherfuckerYou forgot the rent's due, sucker?Dear... Hype Williams was not alone, but was one of the people to kind of bring super saturated, vivid colors and more of a cinematic eye to making videos.
• 12:17
  Just vivid, intense, you know, fast paced edits.
• 12:20
  When Hype Williams made the shift from music videos to film, people were like, "Ooh, this guy's bringing the aesthetic"of music videos to film." But I think actually it was the opposite.
• 12:28
  I think he was kind of brought a cinematic eye to music videos.
• 12:32
  And what his eye saw wasn't always pretty.
• 12:35
  Over the next year, he made five videos, getting tougher and more surreal.
• 12:39
  This clip for Cutty Ranks' dancehall reggae track Living Condition has a grimy sepia look and dancers grinding in a corner of a derelict warehouse backlit by live flames.
• 12:50
  Worship the Devil and worship SatanYou know the living conditionMake a deal about the living condition So the hype around Hype was building.
• 13:01
  But meanwhile, his kindergarten buddy, Anthony Bodden was heading towards a fire of his own.
• 13:09
  Bodden had been rapping for a while around Queens, over beats spun by a friend, DJ and soon to be legendary rap producer, Irv Gotti.
• 13:17
  But then he made a move.
• 13:19
  First of all, I got married and I had my first baby.
• 13:23
  So I decided to say, you know what?
• 13:25
  I'm going to get a job, all right.
• 13:28
  You know, and just like my dad told me to do, and I'm going to, you know, I'm gonna do the right thing.
• 13:33
  So I moved to Maryland because prices in Baltimore were a little different then.
• 13:38
  I got here in '91, by '92 I crashed.
• 13:45
  I crashed, you know, probably doing about 60 or 70 miles an hour head on with a with a truck.
• 13:52
  My friend died in the car.
• 13:54
  They flew me to Shock Trauma.
• 13:57
  They'd just opened up Shock Trauma in Baltimore.
• 14:01
  They got me there in seven minutes.
• 14:01
  They...
• 14:04
  I went into a coma.
• 14:04
  I was in a coma for two weeks.
• 14:08
  I had a tracheotomy in my throat.
• 14:11
  I was on life support.
• 14:13
  I-I-I...
• 14:13
  It was like I met God at that time.
• 14:21
  I wake up and pretty much the first cat that was by my side was Hype and Irv.
• 14:31
  You know what I mean?
• 14:32
  Those are two guys I really remembered being there and Hype said to me.
• 14:38
  He said,"Listen, I'm glad you're awake.
• 14:40
  "I'm glad you lived through it, but we're going to make a movie"when you get out of here." And I said, "What? Are we going to do a movie?" And he said, "Yeah, we're going to do a movie,"so start writing your story." So I couldn't speak.
• 14:55
  So they gave me a pen and I started writing the amazing dreams that I had while I was in the coma for two weeks, first.
• 15:03
  That was really like I had an out of body experience there.
• 15:09
  Sure enough, what he and Hype eventually came up with was a story of two friends trying to get by in a rough part of Queens, all of it told in a way that totally feels like an out of body experience.
• 15:24
  I sold my soul to the devilThe price was cheapIt was cold on this level It's twice as deep One of the friends is Tommy, played by rap star DMX.
• 15:35
  As the movie begins, he spits a jaded rhyme in voiceover about living a life of crime.
• 15:40
  I gots to make my roundsI do whatever for the dollar Fuck 'em And then there's the other guy named Sincere, who's exactly that.
• 15:51
  Helping Tommy do crimes, but only because he's got a wife and a kid named Kenya to support.
• 15:56
  We had Kenya this past year.
• 15:56
  You know, when shit gets crazythey keep me sane. That's him.
• 16:01
  Played by another rap genius, Nas in another voiceover.
• 16:06
  And that's the movie's whole vibe.
• 16:07
  It's like all these voices in your head and luscious images streaming by, like dreams or nightmares.
• 16:14
  Early on, Tommy decides to ask a Jamaican kingpin named Ox to supply him with heroin.
• 16:19
  - Who is it?
• 16:19
  - Tommy, I'm here to see Lennox. And the whole thing is shot in the dude's opulent living room while Hype woozily dissolves back and forth between the soccer game on a nearby TV and Ox veiled in hash smoke, laying down the law with his super thick patois.
• 16:36
  Don't you ever bring scared business to me.You're looking at the toughest rassclaat Jamaicanin the United States of America. In scenes like that, time seems to crawl, but then it races.
• 16:49
  One minute, Tommy and Sincere's crew are taking over the drug trade in Nebraska.
• 16:53
  We got settled down in Omaha selling dope, getting money. The next, Tommy's assassinating a guy in Jamaica.
• 17:00
  And then the story starts taking these political, spiritual turns that Anthony Bodden says he also pulled from a kind of alternate reality.
• 17:09
  He who control the dance floor, control the people. See, he and Hype worked on the story of Belly over literally years, while he worked as Hype's assistant on bigger and bigger videos.
• 17:23
  And I want to focus on this one from '95, Tupac's California Love.I don't want nobody beating up the dance floor but us. The video's, basically a mini movie that pays homage to the post-apocalyptic story and look of an actual movie.
• 17:43
  I love Road Warrior and that Tupac video is definitely...
• 17:47
  That's freaking Road Warrior all day, if you check it out,Road Warrior.But I can hear them. Now, Bodden says that wasn't only'cause Hype thought the movie was cool.
• 17:59
  It's because back in the '90s, his whole worldview and Bodden's and a lot of folks in the hip hop worlds was kind of apocalyptic.
• 18:09
  At the time, we were really into conspiracy theories.
• 18:12
  We were reading a lot of crazy books, like, let me tell you, we were thinking the world was going to end with Y2K.
• 18:24
  Not just because of the Y2K computer bug people were already saying could make global infrastructure fail, there was talk about like a conspiracy to kill Black leaders at the turn of the century.
• 18:35
  Just to set off a real internal war.
• 18:39
  And everything's going to change.
• 18:40
  Everything is going to be crazy, this is going to happen, that's going to happen.
• 18:44
  So sure enough, towards the end of Belly, as New York City celebrates New Year's Eve 2000 in Times Square, Tommy gets sent on a mission to kill a Nation of Islam leader, while Nas' character, Sincere, decides to bail out of the criminal world and out of America.
• 18:59
  The year 2000 was coming and Y2K was coming, and Nas was going to Africa.
• 19:05
  He was going to fly there so that he could raise his baby in peace and start farming.
• 19:11
  And no more selling drugs.
• 19:13
  No more shooting.
• 19:13
  You know what I mean?
• 19:15
  Yeah. So kind of withdraw from the civilization because it was coming down.
• 19:19
  Yes, yes.
• 19:20
  I thought, you know, let's go off the grid.
• 19:22
  Let's go off the grid over in, you know, in Africa and reestablish the umbilical cord between the brothers that are all over because they're they're really not united.
• 19:35
  So Belly's a gangster movie, a long form music video, a millennial nightmare, a morality play, a call for Black unity, all wrapped up in these head trip visuals.
• 19:45
  And for Panama Jackson, it's both a mess and hypnotic.
• 19:49
  Like if you were making a movie and you weren't sure you were ever going to get another one, you were like, I'm gonna put everything in it that I can.
• 19:54
  That's what this is.
• 19:54
  That's what Belly is.
• 19:56
  I'm just putting everything in here.
• 19:58
  Including a soundtrack that sounded as stark and startling as the movie looked, and Hype knew just the tune to start with.
• 20:05
  Soul ll Soul strip things down for the ultimate nightclub scene.
• 20:09
  That's coming up in just a minute.
• 20:10
  Stay with us.
• 20:15
  All right, everybody, MUBI is the global film company that that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 20:23
  We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in cinemas.
• 20:24
  Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers, We've always got something new to discover.
• 20:32
  And something I bet you're gonna want to discover on MUBI as you finish this episode is a movie called My Father's Shadow. That is the Cannes award winning debut feature from Akinola Davies Jr, who you're going to hear from in the next act, talking about the visual impactBelly made on his work.
• 20:48
  Story-wise, though,My Father's Shadow is in a way different vein.
• 20:51
  It's about a dad in Nigeria who reenters his two sons lives to take them on a trip from the countryside into the big city of Lagos.
• 21:00
  This is just a gorgeous, huge hearted movie.
• 21:03
  Akinola won Best Director at the British Independent Film Awards for it.
• 21:06
  By the way, since we're talking about music, it also features an incredible score by the indie musician, CJ Mirra and Duval Timothy, who has also produced for the likes of Kendrick Lamar.
• 21:16
  Also, go back and listen to our MUBI Podcast interview with Akinola about My Father's Shadow. He's just a sweet, super smart guy.
• 21:25
  That movie is streaming now on MUBI almost globally, and you can watch it by subscribing at mubi.com As usual, we have all the links and info you need in the show notes of this episode.
• 21:36
  Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 21:43
  Okay, so it's sometime around early 1998.
• 21:46
  Hype Williams is laying down the soundtrack for Belly, and you have to wonder why this guy, who's movie stars two of the biggest rappers of the day and who's made videos for all the other rappers, would start his film with a decade old R&B tune.
• 22:04
  For the answer, I'm going to rewind back to the day that tune was written.
• 22:09
  A hot day in London, 1988, a neighborhood called Soho, right in the middle of town and Simon Law, The Funky Ginger, is strolling down Kingly Street for one of his first recording sessions with Soul ll Soul.
• 22:22
  He steps through a doorway and descends.
• 22:26
  A basement studio, 8A Kingly Street. Went downstairs.
• 22:30
  All that early Soul ll Soul was written and put together in that little studio that was a sweatbox in the summer, you know.
• 22:38
  No fancy business at all.
• 22:40
  But it had so much vibes.
• 22:40
  In the end, after the success of Soul ll Soul, I had so many people coming down there like Chaka Khan came down there, JT Taylor of Kool & the Gang was down there.
• 22:51
  Oh my God.
• 22:52
  But that'll all come later.
• 22:53
  Today it's just Simon, Jazzie B and a beat inspired by a classic 1972 soul single.
• 23:00
  Ladies and gentlemen, we have the Honey Drippersin the house tonight. I remember Jazzie came in and I-- If I'm thinking back now, he probably was channeling the Honey DrippersImpeach the President beat, you know.
• 23:17
  So he kind of tapped that on a drum machine.
• 23:19
  And I immediately sort of felt that.
• 23:25
  And I had some chords.
• 23:30
  And we put-- Very quickly put down just a rough sort of thing, which is basically the chord structure that you hear of Back To Life.Back to lifeBack to the present timeBack from a fantasy Later, Soul ll Soul singer, Caron Wheeler added lyrics and her trademark killer vocals.
• 23:51
  An outfit called the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra filled out the sound and in 1989,Back to Life became a number one hit across Europe.
• 23:59
  Top five in the USA, won a Grammy.
• 24:02
  I mean, I was into indie rock in '89, and even for me, this song and especially its chorus, evokes the era.
• 24:08
  - However do you want me- HoweverHowever do you need me But here's the thing.
• 24:13
  This Back to Life isn't the one Soul ll Soul put on their actual album back in '89. The album version sounds like this.
• 24:21
  However do you need me- However- However do you want me- Do you want me- However do you need me- Do you need me- However do you want me It's this incredible acappella.
• 24:31
  It has the same, "However do you want me" chorus, the same bridge.
• 24:34
  But the verses are different.
• 24:37
  Caron is doing this wonderful kind of big acappella, harmonizing herself. It's quite extraordinary, still to this day.
• 24:45
  Steady, are you readyAre you readyWhat's going on? Yeah, there's nothing but Wheeler's voice till almost the end when a beat kicks in and the song seamlessly segues into the album's final track.
• 25:00
  A song called Jazzie's Groove. Right at the end of the acappella, you hear these claps coming in...
• 25:07
  That builds up toJazzie's Groove, which kind of then is a really heavy groove.
• 25:20
  And it's just a magical moment, even to this day.
• 25:23
  I've heard it a million times and I'm still thinking that was a masterstroke.
• 25:27
  Sure, because it sounds cool, but also because to any club DJ's who might have been listening and back then they were all listening.
• 25:34
  It was an unspoken suggestion that they could use the stripped down Back to Life the same way as an otherworldly intro before dropping a big beat and the DJ's got the message.
• 25:46
  London, in the scene there, people would drop it-- It was incredible.
• 25:49
  You heard it everywhere.
• 25:52
  People would let the whole acapella play and then drop a heavy beat at the end, and it just, it was the ultimate setup, kind of ethereal setup to a groove coming in, you know.
• 26:01
  Because it was dramatic.
• 26:02
  It's like, it's a pause before everything goes off.
• 26:05
  It was, it's very dramatic. Yeah.
• 26:07
  And Anthony Bodden says before long, his hometown DJ's were doing the same thing.
• 26:12
  That is a Queens anthem.
• 26:12
  We love that record.
• 26:16
  Irv Gotti was DJ Irv at the time, and he used to put that record on his tapes and to mix it with, you know, that's all the great DJ's from Queens used to blend records where they would rock, R&B and hip hop together.
• 26:34
  It's like cookies and cream.
• 26:34
  You know what I'm saying?
• 26:37
  So in Belly, Hype followed suit, using that smooth R&B track like the calm before he sets off a storm.
• 26:53
  So the opening scene of Belly is Nas, DMX and two members of their crew who are going into a nightclub to effectively rob it.
• 27:02
  Not even effectively, they're going in to rob it.
• 27:04
  Steady, are you readyAre you ready- What's going on?
• 27:08
  - What's going on? They walk in with a stripped down version ofBack to Life by Soul ll Soul.
• 27:15
  Walking in, but slo-mo, walking in...
• 27:18
  As they do, pushing through a sea of people, they're bathed in the club's fluorescent lights that makes them almost glow like blue ghosts.
• 27:25
  Their eyes seem lit from inside.
• 27:25
  Their pupils shine bright white.
• 27:31
  The blue lights are going, so the eyes are what you see.
• 27:33
  But it's in slo-mo while the music perfectly sits in the pocket.
• 27:38
  However- How do you want me?
• 27:39
  - Do you want meHowever do you need me There's a sense of like, ominous tension that holds for, like, three minutes.
• 27:47
  That's hip hop writer Dimitri Ehrlich, again.
• 27:50
  It's a very quiet way to start a movie, actually.
• 27:52
  You're in a strip club, nothing is thumping. There's no-- Normally in that environment it'd be boom, boom and it's just this voice and like, it's almost silent.
• 27:59
  It's almost like, you know, when you do a painting, the white space matters.
• 28:01
  And a lot of people don't understand that, like how much the space between notes matters.
• 28:05
  And what Hype Williams did with this opening scene is use so much quietness to create so much tension, and you just feel a well's about to-- A dam is gonna break on you at any second.
• 28:14
  Sure enough, as Caron Wheeler's solo voice splits into three.
• 28:18
  - I live at the top of the block- Living at the very top The dam breaks.
• 28:23
  All of a sudden, it's like flashes of guns being loaded up, and then they go in and they end up shooting the guy on the stairs.
• 28:30
  It unfolds into this chaotic scene of violence that it's strange because that song is not fast.
• 28:39
  I mean, even when the beat drops, you're still in the 80 bpm range or something like that.
• 28:44
  It's not fast, but it just seems to fit perfectly.
• 28:50
  It was the best time of our lives.Getting money was all we ever did. In terms of like, the most perfect musical soundbed for a scene, that is top five, dead or alive.
• 29:07
  Of course, when audiences showed up for Belly's opening night in November 1998, they didn't know that yet or anything else they were in for.
• 29:15
  But Panama Jackson says hip hop fans had a feeling they were in for something different.
• 29:20
  Even in a decade where Black movies and Black gangster movies likeJuice had been all the rage.
• 29:25
  New Jack City or Juice, these are all Spike Lee movies, right?
• 29:30
  These are filmmakers making films.
• 29:33
  This is Hype Williams making a movie.
• 29:36
  Nas and DMX are the stars of this movie.
• 29:38
  They're on the poster of this movie.
• 29:40
  There were several rappers in it.
• 29:42
  You know, Method Man is in the movie.
• 29:44
  T-Boz is in the movie, Taral Hicks is in the movie.
• 29:47
  And Hype Williams, who is what we know is the hip hop director of directors is the one leading the charge.
• 29:54
  I... It just felt like this was a movie for us by us for hip hop culture.
• 29:58
  So it was like a Spike Lee movie might have hip hop in it and he loves hip hop, but this was going to be hip hop making its movie.
• 30:05
  Yes, it felt 100% internal to and of the culture in ways that other things didn't.
• 30:11
  And he says the movie announced itself that way right from the jump.
• 30:18
  It's in the prologue, just before the nightclub robbery scene, while DMX spits that rhyme in voiceover about the thug life.
• 30:26
  I sold my soul to the devil The price was cheap Hype dissolves to a slow tracking shot across a street sign.
• 30:33
  Linden Boulevard, a road name checked constantly by one of Queens' greatest rap crews.
• 30:39
  A Tribe Called Quest.
• 30:40
  Back in the days on the Boulevard of Linden You know fromCheck the Rhime like you-- You know if you are into hip hop, you know Linden Boulevard.
• 30:48
  Because it is an essential part of your hip hop listening.
• 30:51
  And then hearing-- Like DMX...
• 30:51
  It just-- For those of us invested in hip hop, its 100% like, you know this world that's about to unfold.
• 31:01
  But it turns out a lot of other people...
• 31:04
  didn't know what was going on.
• 31:09
  Critics and viewers who maybe weren't hip hop heads came for the story, not the culture, and they couldn't figure it out.
• 31:15
  I mean, there's points in the script where I'm still not sure what's going on.
• 31:19
  And Anthony Bodden says that's because some of it never got shot once the studio noticed its politics.
• 31:25
  The powers that be, I would say they got wind of what was really going on.
• 31:31
  They pulled us in the office and they said,"I want to know on page X Y Z, what are you trying to say, sir?" They were like,"Why is Nas going to Africa?""Why is--" You know, all of these kind of things.
• 31:44
  Did the script get rewritten basically because they were, you know, worried about it?
• 31:47
  Well, let me tell you.
• 31:49
  Every time they pulled a page out, they did not add a page to.
• 31:54
  And they took about 30 pages out of the script.
• 31:56
  So that's why you have a big jump.
• 31:58
  Nas is talking about he got shot and then next thing you know, he's talking about let's go to Africa.
• 32:04
  So critics didn't get it.
• 32:05
  And then the movie got grief from the community in the form of an ex-basketball star turned movie theater mogul, Magic Johnson.
• 32:13
  Magic Johnson had theaters, and he was like, "I would never"play no movie like this in my theater." But he's going to play all the gangster movies, Casino. He's going to play every gangster-- But he's not going to play a Black gangster-- And this is not even-- I can't even say this is a Black gangster movie.
• 32:33
  This is a real life story.
• 32:35
  Hype wanted people to feel what we felt like growing up.
• 32:40
  This ain't Freddy Krueger.
• 32:40
  Anyway.
• 32:43
  I love Magic Johnson, too, but I was just disappointed in him for not representing and helping us out anymore.
• 32:51
  And he didn't.
• 32:52
  Belly wasn't a flop.
• 32:53
  It turned a profit, but it was like a third of the box office of films like Juice orMenace to Society. Over the next few years Hype Williams set up some other movies, but they didn't materialize.
• 33:04
  He still makes blockbuster videos.
• 33:06
  The one he dropped this year for rapper T.I.
• 33:08
  has 23 million views on YouTube.
• 33:12
  He's never made another movie.
• 33:18
  But for a growing cult of fans, this one is plenty.
• 33:25
  You're listening to Larry June, 2 Chainz and The Alchemist and the video for their hip hop tune last year called Generation. It features the crew strolling in slo-mo into a strip club because 2 Chainz said he wanted a Belly look.
• 33:37
  I hang by myself my partner got locked up by bounty huntersI tell a bitch, take a jet-ski from Miami to Bahamas That's just one of tons of homages to that nightclub sequence, and it goes beyond videos.
• 33:50
  Joe Freshgoods, who is a clothing designer, you know, clothier, created a set of shoes around Belly, like some New Balance, two pairs of shoes that are like color coded to go with that opening scene, like the black and white attire, the blue light colors and all that.
• 34:07
  That's how significant this scene is.
• 34:08
  Somebody dedicated a clothing capsule to it in the 2020s.
• 34:12
  I get a phone call from Flacko this evening.He wanna meet in Harlem. Meanwhile, just this year, a social media video featured Nas himself in a recreation of another scene from Belly that midway through, turns out to be an ad for Ray-Ban sunglasses.
• 34:25
  ...newest creative director of Ray-Ban.- Oh, wow.
• 34:27
  - Turned over a new leaf, B. And maybe most important to the kind of person who listens to this podcast,Belly's influence has also been showing up in art houses.
• 34:37
  Yes, my name is Akinola Davies Jr. and I am the co-writer and director of my debut award winning film,My Father's Shadow. Akinola saw Belly on DVD when he was a teenager after after hearing it hyped up for years by his brothers, the guys who got him into hip hop.
• 34:54
  I think so many people were into it, but when you're like 14 or 15 or 16, like you don't care that much about the plot, you just care that Nas is in a film, Method man is in a film, DMX...
• 35:06
  My first email in, I guess what you guys call high school, my first email was DMX141@hotmail.com.
• 35:14
  That's how much I loved DMX at the time.
• 35:17
  Yeah, man, it could have been about a sandwich shop, and I still would have thought it was the coolest thing ever.
• 35:21
  But when he finally saw it, he realized there was more going on not just politically or even in the visual pyrotechnics of that nightclub scene, but in the way Hype and his cinematographer, Malik Sayeed, photographed people who looked like him.
• 35:35
  On the one hand, you know, it's like a gangster film, like whatever, but visually it was the most incredible representation of Black skin on camera I probably had ever seen.
• 35:46
  The way lighting had been in Hollywood for years had been very, like, not very complimentary to Black skin because it's for white characters.
• 35:54
  Black skin kind of absorbs, whereas like white reflects.
• 35:57
  So all you need to do is you need something that can enhance and allow it to sort of reflect.
• 36:03
  So my, the way I understand is they used dimmer light and like baby oil on the actor's skin to reflect it.
• 36:10
  Yeah. And I think for me, it's very much how I choose to operate on set. All my makeup teams know that you need to have oil on set so that we can like pick up the highlights in faces and skin.
• 36:21
  Hype and Malik set a precedent for the standard of what Black skin could look like.
• 36:27
  And I don't say that lightly.
• 36:28
  I don't know any Black filmmaker..
• 36:31
  We all reference this film.
• 36:33
  This film is like the stuff of legend.
• 36:35
  In 2017, Barry Jenkins movie Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture.
• 36:39
  Jenkins says, one of its main influences was Belly.
• 36:46
  But meanwhile, Anthony Bodden took a while to really take all this in.
• 36:50
  I would say for about 20 years I refused to tell anybody that I wrote that story.
• 36:59
  Really?
• 37:01
  Yeah. 20 years I went without telling anybody.
• 37:04
  I thought it was, you know, like telling somebody,"Hey, you know, I got an F on my report card." Really? Even-- I mean, like, it made its money back.
• 37:13
  Yeah but even the money, the money is nothing.
• 37:17
  You know, I don't care about the money.
• 37:19
  I wanted to hit a target and I, I felt like I missed the target and a lot of people didn't get the fruits and vegetables and they only got the candy, you know?
• 37:32
  So now I'm rotting everybody's teeth and I'm walking around smiling.
• 37:39
  And then I met this young lady who told me, "Why wouldn't you...?" You know, "What's wrong with you?
• 37:44
  Are you crazy?""You're supposed to--" I just didn't feel like it was a feather in my cap.
• 37:53
  But you got convinced that maybe this is something that you could own.
• 37:56
  Oh, after she said that, I said, "You know what?
• 37:59
  "I am going to own up to this, and I'm going to tell everybody.
• 38:02
  "I'm going to tell people that." And as I say it, a lot of people are like, "Get the hell out.
• 38:07
  "I don't believe you." I'm like, "Listen, Google me.
• 38:10
  I'm telling you." And they're impressed because yeah, Belly's weird, sometimes garish, complicated full of probably way too much, but stripped down to its basics, it was the setup to a deep groove that's still spinning.
• 38:38
  And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 38:41
  In a couple of weeks, we will wrap up this season about great movies with great music but next time, a special episode that kind of touches on the same topic.
• 38:49
  I talk to multiple Oscar winning director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu on the 25th anniversary of his breakthrough film,Amores perros and his early days spinning records on Mexico City radio.
• 39:01
  You know, rock and jazz and folk music and you know, every kind of classic music, everything.
• 39:07
  I think I'm much more into music than in films, let me put it that way.
• 39:11
  Also in on that conversation is the movie's legendary cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto.
• 39:15
  He and Alejandro have a blast reminiscing together, it was a joy to listen to.
• 39:19
  Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 39:20
  Till then, if you love the show, seriously, hit pause and leave a five star review, right now, wherever you listen, won't you?
• 39:24
  Let the world know we're not your standard movie chat show.
• 39:28
  You can also find me on Threads or Instagram at Rico Gagliano, that is Rico G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O.
• 39:36
  Happy to wax nostalgic with you about '90s hip hop or indie rock.
• 39:39
  And now let's roll credits.
• 39:41
  This episode was written, hosted, and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 39:44
  Ciara McEniff is our producer along with assistant producer, Kat Kowalczyk.
• 39:47
  Jackson Musker is our booking producer.
• 39:49
  Mastering by Stephen Colon.
• 39:51
  Martin Austwick composed our original music.
• 39:54
  Special thanks this week to Louis Nash for taping Akinola and to Peter, Therese and Karina Lesser.
• 39:59
  The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca.
• 40:04
  And as always, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch some movies or some Tom and Jerry with the sound turned down, if you know what I'm saying.