Transcript
Speaker: Welcome, welcome, welcome back to another episode of Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. I'm your co-host Chase here with my co-host Sam. Sam, how are you? Yeah, I'm good. It's ah it's nice sunny day the UK.
Speaker: one out of days of sun. Oh, yes. um Feeling vibing with it. was really good. It's kind of weather where I'd want to like you know have a few beers and ah go to a house party.
Speaker: I was going to say, it's good you're vibing because today's movie is all about vibes. And we, unfortunately, as the sort of miserable ah readers of films we are, I think are going to try and develop a symptomatic reading of what is clearly intended just be a good time.
Speaker: Yeah, I was just suffering from my second-hand jealousy the entire time. I think I wish. Have you ever seen Paul's Temperature? think it's Temperature. Yeah, course. The music video...
Speaker: Is it temperature? ah might be wrong. But there's there's a music video where like him and his crew head down to the... the like The elders are upstairs like chilling out, playing cards. So they head down to the basement and there's just like a fucking great house party going on.
Speaker: like Everyone is like dancing like amazing dancing. They're all like slapping the um central heating system in the basement. And then like every like four minutes into the song, one the old guys would come down and like, told you not to slap that central heating system. And be oh, they're like really respectful. And they're like, sorry, sorry. then And then he goes upstairs and the music goes back on and they start dancing. And it's like...
Speaker: That's ah the er-platonic conception of a house party. Yes. And this, I think, is this is like a runner-up to Sean Paul's house party. so You've triggered sort of a you know like a deeply cerebral memory for me, which is living in Germany and all of the sort of students lived in this kind of apartment complex, basically, that we'd taken over.
Speaker: and we'd all hang out on the roof all the time, you know sort of passing the days when we weren't in class. And um the Hausmeister, which is sort of like, I guess, the super, the guy who's in charge of the building, would always come down and be like, Leute, Leute, sind ein bisschen zu laut, ein bisschen zu laut.
Speaker: ah Which, of course, means people, people, you're being a little bit too loud. And that sort of is just like, I don't know. lodged in my memory. We were never slapping any central heating ducts. um And in fact, for a long part of it, several of our sort of Muslim peers were fasting for Ramadan. so I'm sure for them, it was perhaps not as much fun to be hanging out on the roof, ah hungry and ah not able to drink. But today is... I remember the name of the video.
Speaker: It's Get Busy. ah Oh, excuse me. Well, and it seemed like temperature was perfect because you're slapping like a like an HVAC system. So like of course, you're going to imagine... You are, but it's get busy. There are so many. There are so many bangers. There are many.
Speaker: Well, today's movie, House Party. You know, I brought this one. I'll be completely honest. Directed by Reginald Hudlin, who went on to produce Django Unchained, interestingly enough.
Speaker: And this is, to be completely honest, I mean, a movie that was insanely successful in 1990 when it came out. I think specifically in the African-American community, which means in in some ways we're sort of deeply unqualified to be talking about It's a white Brit and a white American, but it's a movie that I really like.
Speaker: So I felt um if we're doing Gen X, this one had to be in the mix. And i I have to start just by asking you, Sam, as someone who is from ah Stony Island, you know far, far away who grew up not in the year 1990, not in the era of you know The Fresh Prince, how sort of like foreign was this film to you?
Speaker: Yeah, I think, like again, like I was prepped by American cultural power, American hegemony, right, of which sort of African-American ninety s culture is maybe a underappreciated junior part, but still very much a part of like American hegemony and what's exported to the rest of the world.
Speaker: So like I think it's it's harder to escape from than you might think. Or, yeah, I had a sense of this from my Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reruns, which it was not not a favorite of mine, I have to say. can we get a boo sound effect?
Speaker: Yeah, sorry. I think just like because it was not because of the the sort of division between African-American culture and white culture, but more just because it was like really rich people. And I kind of like knew very rich people that I didn't know why you were supposed to like them.
Speaker: Maybe you weren't supposed to like them. I think that's kind of the point. But yeah for for a five-year-old, it's complex. um Why are all these people wearing stupid pastel sweaters like tied around their shoulders? this is This is obnoxious.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's an interesting like slice right of ah African-American life in the sense that I do think what is exported to the UK, it's like very much like like a kind of um a particular, like it's it's suburban, it's pretty homogenous, it's like almost like entirely black. like It's not like a mixed community, there's no Hispanic hispanic or Asian or white characters. So it's like suburban, it's almost entirely black,
Speaker: It's kind of like in a set in a, I don't know if I was reading this right, but like a kind of upper working class, lower middle. So we're in we're in Cleveland. we clear I also had no idea where we were. I was like, this is this Chicago? Is this DC?
Speaker: I couldn't replace it. Is this California at times? it soon like hat Yeah, I wasn't sure. But um yeah, so it's the kind of the black middle class in its broadest sense, right? On display here. I think Fresh Prince is actually bizarrely... I mean, obviously, the class dynamics in that are really extreme, right? That's the whole point of the show. Yeah. But there is ah degree to which this movie is underneath the surface, interested in very much the same thing.
Speaker: It's probably a good point to just say the plot of this movie is extremely straightforward, right? This is like a pop-cultural phenomenon. We'll just get out of the way here. It is about two friends, ah really three, I guess, if you include the Martin Lawrence character, who's a DJ, who's And their names are Kid and Play.
Speaker: um They're you know ah young teens. um They were actually a rap duo at the time. right And the main character is really Kid. He is sort of ah a romantic. He wants to get involved with the ladies. And ah Play is hosting a house party. Martin Lawrence is DJing.
Speaker: They go to the house party. And it's kind of about having fun there and then also trying to get with... one of these two girls that they're friends with from school, and those girls are Shireen and Sydney.
Speaker: And this is where we can maybe bring in the kind of class dynamics. So the whole thing is that Shireen is um from the projects, as they say, and this is like stage for us in all sorts of ways, like...
Speaker: you know there are like 10 people in the living room, right? There's a really big crucifix on the wall, which I couldn't help but notice. So this is presumably some sort of you know black Catholic family in the projects.
Speaker: And you know they're like, she commands her like little brother or cousin to make them Kool-Aid. And there's a shot of him pouring like an entire bag of sugar into the pitcher. And Sidney's like, oh, the thought of drinking that much sugar makes my teeth just like shrivel in my mouth. Because Sidney, of course, is from like...
Speaker: you know I wouldn't say it's quite the Uncle Phil, Bel Air household, of course, because how how many places are, but clearly sort of a richer you know economic situation. Whereas someone like Kidd seems to be from kind of in between.
Speaker: like he lives with just his dad. His dad clearly works some kind of blue-collar job where he's dependent on overtime, as we hear several times. But he's not like poor, right? No, yeah, like it's clear that he kind of owns his house. It's quite a nice house. Like, again, this is a hard thing to judge from a UK perspective because like all American houses are bigger.
Speaker: It's a fairly substantial like house and it's quite nice. I can come in on this, which is that, so any film you know made about like a northern city um about black people in the United States is always you know necessarily in the in the sort of shadow of the Great Migration, right the movement of lots of people from the south to the north. Sure, yeah. And I think that, yes, of course, there's redlining that leads to black people living in their own kind of discrete neighborhoods, but...
Speaker: The reality is that with white flight, um a lot of these areas lost a lot of economic value, which are sort of just like the value of the homes, which did allow black families to purchase these sort of like relatively large, but often under kept because of the economic circumstances of the city houses in these urban areas. Okay, gotcha, yeah. It's sort of like they're they're clearly not like super well off, but they're also not in the projects, right? So I would describe it as like a a sort of semi-successful working class environment, but where you're obviously not, you know, you're you're a few paychecks away from being done and you're sort of just fortunate.
Speaker: and You're not fortunate from white flight. I don't want to say that, but I just mean that like the result of that is actually that you do gain a certain degree of purchasing power within these areas. Yeah, and I think there was like a lot of pride that went... like The neighbour to... So Kid is the one who... Not sure, Kid. Play, his friend, is the one who hosts the house party because his parents are out of town. yeah I think there's like a vague reference to him going south, like really far south. Yeah. so That also, I think, kind of links back to the Great Migration, probably maybe to see grandparents or cousins or something in Louisiana or that kind of thing. um But he's quite...
Speaker: yeah, he's quite class conscious in the sense of like, I think he's the one who brings up the fact that one of the female characters is from the projects and the kid shouldn't get involved with her because his dad's too strict to sort tolerate the girl from the projects.
Speaker: He also like, it's like going through the house, going through these like quite nice cabinets, like mahogany cabinets, and like taking the glassware and like kind of hiding it. And then like when he's having the heart house party, he's like kind of having a go at people and being like, just cause your mama doesn't have like nice stuff doesn't mean you should be like breaking my stuff. So like he's clearly yeah like quill quite like conscious of his being wealthier than maybe the average of his friends. Yes.
Speaker: And their next-door neighbour, one of his retorts when he's sort of trying to get the police to do something about the house party is like, I paid $15,000 for this house. I should have done the math. So is that would that have been a cheap in 1990?
Speaker: That's still quite cheap. I mean, my assumption is that he's even talking about buying it earlier. But like still, that would still be relatively cheap. I mean, a lot for a working class person to purchase a home, certainly. But at the end of the day, like it's still going to be you know not expensive compared to you know a white suburb where you're probably paying $100,000 or something like that. You know what i mean? At the time, yeah. Gotcha, gotcha. But yeah, it's it was hard to read as an outsider. I mean, like in the sense that there was, I couldn't tell if it was like a depiction of the black bourgeois or whether people just dressed up for the night. Like there's a bit where a kid is running from the these bullies and runs through a fence into this like country club.
Speaker: thanks This DJ is playing like old hits from presumably the 40s and 50s, really dated stuff. He's like, oh man, this sucks. And ah he starts talking to the DJ and trying to persuade him to let him might rap. And then he notices that he's in this like massive like garden party full of like people in black tie and like ball gowns. And it's like...
Speaker: Was I reading that correctly? Because it seemed like it was kind of like the local sort of black elite were there for that event. I mean, it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely intended to show that like, even if his, because, you know, the movie kind of introduces and stages the different economic conditions of the characters, Because the first time we see them is actually at the school where there's a certain degree of parody, right?
Speaker: But I think as the movie goes on, it tries to expose you to these different sort of elements in society. So yes, this is clearly at minimum a family of means who are probably above basically anyone else in the movie that we actually deal with, with maybe the exception of Sydney, but probably even her, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And it's very interesting that the the cops are quite respectful of that gathering, right? like Yes. In stark contrast to like 20, 30, 40 minutes later when they arrest Kid's dad. don't know. It's not respectful. Yes. Well, there are. Okay. So I want to talk briefly about the class thing. And then, yes, there's a lot to say about how this movie deals with police violence. towards black people because it's a very, in some ways, very strange depiction, like very honest in moments, but also very comedic. And then the cops are like kind of the good guys for a brief period of the movie, which is kind of confusing. But I just wanted to point out that culturally, sort of aesthetically in this movie, Afro-centrism is clearly very in, right? You know, Martin Lawrence, the DJ, is wearing the big sort of black, green, and red Africa pendant. There are all sorts of like shirts throughout the movie that are drawing our attention to this. The decor in a lot of the bedrooms sort of is in these colors or directly pointing to, you know, back to Africa. It's kind of like a Garvey-ite, you know, feel to a lot of what's going on. But that's interesting because of how...
Speaker: frankly, like classist, all of the characters are to one another. So there's this kind of sheen of we're all together, but then there's also a lot of at least like jokey, but also quite real discrimination within the world of the party and the school at the same time.
Speaker: i mean, how common was it for like a high school that point in time in the 1990, right? So that's what the first year of George Bush senior's administration. So you've gone past bus, so you've got, you know, we've gone past the Civil Rights Act, we've gone through busing and sort of formal desegregation. Yeah, at that point in time, how how common was it to have like a high school that was like 90% African-American?
Speaker: Oh, definitely, I would say quite likely. i mean, if you're in an area, you know, Cleveland as a city, right, would have multiple high schools for different areas of the of the city, almost certainly. yeah Not that I'm from Cleveland, but that's just generally how it works in these urban areas.
Speaker: And if you are kind of like, have built up your little world within this kind of red line section of the city, it's simply going to come to pass, certainly by the 90s, right? Because white flight is really taking place through the 70s, maybe to some degree even into the 80s.
Speaker: But by 1990, that process is more or less complete, like the hollowing out of the urban centers is more or less complete. We're actually at the point now, probably not in Cleveland, but in New York, where you're seeing white people move back in. Like it's been long enough since this started. that started in like the didn't it? Well, it depends on the city, but, you know, because because think about like Seinfeld, right? That's 90s. mean, granted, they're like from New York, but, you know, there's a, I think when we did the episode with John Repetti, he said that the highest year for murders in New York, I want to say it was 91. Okay. if I'm not mistaken. So not quite at the tipping point Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's very foreign to me in the sense that, like, even, know, I lived in Peckham for, like, two, three years, which was, you know, first off, like, a white Cockney area and then became kind of Afro-Caribbean and then later on became, like, Nigerian and Ghanaian. And now it's kind of, like, on top of that, it's a sort of sediment of, like, upper-middle-class white hipsters.
Speaker: And, like, the school, know, when you saw, like, schools, sort of, secondary schools, like, coming out at the end of the day, like, like public schools, um Yeah, it would be like 20-30% black, 20-30% Pakistani, 20% Irish, 10% Chinese, 10% white British. like It was you know quite majority-minority, but very mixed.
Speaker: um So yeah, this kind of like like almost like segmented homogeneity in the film is quite... Yeah, I suppose as an outsider, something you associate more strongly with the 60s, 60s rather than the 90s. But I suppose the way Jim Crow and redlining and stuff was the product of the 1920s and FDR, it's going to take a long time for that stuff to unwind.
Speaker: Yeah, so the the the world of a House Party in Cleveland in 1990 looks quite different, I think, to this sort of world of... ah the UK and sort of African-American life in the UK, which I think is much more like fragmented. and and Well, first of all, you know, welcome to American segregation. But even sort of beyond that, I think it it it also is intended to be, right, a movie for consumption in the black community in the United States, which is itself maybe something to some degree, don't want to say foreign to Britain, but it really is true that in the United States you have
Speaker: I mean, obviously there are things produced for everyone, and there are probably things that in a certain sense are produced for white people, although most people wouldn't think of it that way. But there is, you know as has been the case for a long time, a kind of a culture grown up around speaking to the black community. I mean, that's why we had BT, right? This is really, in in some ways, I think a product of the...
Speaker: And of segregation and oppression experienced by the black community that necessitated not just a stronger sense of identity, but also like, well, things aren't being made for us, so we're going to have to make things for ourselves. And that's sort of why I find the, and if not quite contradictions, then tensions that exist in a movie like House Party.
Speaker: really, really interesting because it's a movie that on the one hand is clearly about celebrating blackness, about kind of this like exciting moment in youth black culture where like rap is becoming a thing. And this is obviously like a whole new feeling and moment for a new generation of of black teenagers. I mean, a great example of this is the dad, you know, when kid wants to go out, the dad's like, oh,
Speaker: But I rented Dolomite. You love Dolomite. Dolomite is a blaxploitation movie from the 70s. The dad there is really basically saying, like what, you don't want to watch like you know ah The Wizard of Oz with me? I mean, obviously, Dolomite is nothing like The Wizard of Oz, but it's like this old sort of version of what it means to be a black man as expressed through like this kind of wacky, very over-the-top...
Speaker: thing, right? It's from 1975, I think. And it's you know it's intentionally made to be really over the top. It's got like kung fu in it and it's about like pimps and nightclub owners and gangsters and things like this. Whereas Kid really just wants this new kind of like exciting version of music. I mean, you kind of nodded to this, but the movie is really...
Speaker: probably above anything else rooted in the culture of rap music and sort of like the DJ, the Martin Lawrence character. Like he's constantly, actually much like in the movie Brother, which we'll be talking about soon in Yeltsin era Russia, the kind of like new music of a moment is really intended to tell us something about a moment in history and time. And for them, it's obviously the excitement, right? This moment of, you know, frankly, what is going to be a period of,
Speaker: uninhibited influence on mainstream white American culture. Like NWA is about to totally break through. It's going to be the period where like my cousin is going to, you know, be wearing like and one basketball shorts and listening to Wu-Tang Clan constantly, even though he's a white kid from the suburbs or where I will see Allen Iverson on television as a child and be like, I want to get cornrows and my parents have to get my cousin to call me on the phone and be like, Chase, you can't, you can't do that. Yeah. You can't do that. right like
Speaker: We're at, I mean, they don't know this, obviously, in the world of the movie, but the vitality they're feeling is going to be so infectious that it's actually going to become a huge part of the end of history moment.
Speaker: But at the same time, right like it's it's it will make a migration to like the white mainstream in a few years' time. So maybe by 1997 or whatever, and you get the Beastie Boys, stuff like that. And every single light mainstream film is taking the piss, either directly out hip-hop or taking the piss out of white people's adoption of hip-hop.
Speaker: But what's interesting, I think, about House Party is that obviously hip-hop actually originates in the Bronx in the late 70s. So it's these people are in the House Party are still kind of getting it secondhand to a certain extent, right? like They're not the like urban working class of the Bronx is pioneering this stuff. They're kind of like the second wave, the kind of like nice nice middle class so of suburbanites who are like picking it up and then like running with it.
Speaker: I mean, even like the rapping, right? Like there's this rap battle between kid and play. It's very like studied and polite. You know, almost like Shakespearean, right? Like you can imagine these these kids like, you can imagine these kids like reading Dickens and Shakespeare in their English class and sort of like being inspired by it. Like it's stick it's quite, yeah, it's not quite the Bronx is what I'm trying of say, but...
Speaker: Well, yeah, there's a point early in the movie where it shows him reading. and I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but it is very much like a classic high school English text. i don't I don't remember Shakespeare or not, but you're right to a certain extent. I mean, I will say that they're definitely not like the origins, right? they They're not necessarily like on the streets in the way that somebody coming up in the Bronx or you know Compton will be.
Speaker: But there they're definitely not the equivalent of the sort of like white middle class pickup of the same thing either, right? Like it's still within the black community. Yeah, it's like a third thing almost. A secret third thing, yeah.
Speaker: What was that term in the 90s? It was like um conscious rap. Yeah, it's... Like, you can kind of see that kind of thing coming from out of this milieu, right? Like, it's kind of the same milieu as, like, which Kanye West comes out of, or, like, Tony the creator, i like Kanye West, like, coming out of this kind of, like, black middle-class milieu, right?
Speaker: This is interesting, because I think that the movie does a decent job of presenting, like, a greater kind of swath of black society. We are seeing the kind of fusion of...
Speaker: a kind of Afrocentric sensibility into this particular, you know, a little bit better off milieu. Because you you already do have guys kind of working in that that tradition. i mean, the Beastie Boys are actually earlier than this movie, believe it or not. um But I'm thinking of someone like Africa Bambada, who, you know, rest in peace, actually died earlier this month.
Speaker: And his sort of like... really Afrocentric kind of early hip hop in the 80s. And then you've also got Tribe Called Quest, which I think is from like around the same time as this, essentially, who are great. If you haven't listened to a Tribe Called Quest, highly recommend.
Speaker: um So it's the interesting thing about the movie, I guess, that I was trying to bring out is that it's kind of on this cusp between the moment where rap and hip hop already exist in the black community and are kind of making inroads, which really starts in like the mid eighty s And the moment where it's going to explode and like Tupac Piggy is going to be like the talk of the town in the United States. And you're going have like white kids like break dancing and like so in like suburban driveways in like 1996 who are like my heroes of all time or like Tupac Shakur. 50 Cent. Yeah. 50 Cent is slightly later. Yeah. He is later, but that's a great example because that moves into the early 2000s. I'm imagining like Tony Soprano's kid.
Speaker: Precisely. like I think of a girl who I knew in school, who went to school with me, who she had like a nanny. I remember I was in the play with her and she was like...
Speaker: oh, no, no, no. going to be in the play together, like you can come to vocal lessons with me. like We're going to work together on this. and like There was no way my family was shelling out for vocal lessons. But also, she was the biggest 50 Cent fan that I met in my entire, you know my whole middle school experience. like She was like the whitest, richest suburbanite, but also...
Speaker: This is a thing. this just i had a similar experience I had a similar experience of ah a girl when I was about 17, 18. We were going to sort hang out at the beach with friends. Her dad owned like owns um the largest sort of like lease car, like lease hiring operation in like the southeast of England, absolutely minted.
Speaker: platinum blonde. She was like driving like a Jeep down to the beach with me in it. And ah yeah, she's just like, oh, is it okay I put some music on? was like, oh sure, sure, go ahead. And it was just like two hours of 50 Cent. So, yeah. Which I found very amusing.
Speaker: No, that is amusing. I think that to bring it back to, I guess, like House Party as ah as a text, um it's ah it's a movie that is kind of part of this engine of the revving up of ah of a kind of celebratory ah black cultural moment rooted in music. And I find that particularly interesting because, okay, we've got Dolomite over here, right? Which is like a wacky black exploitation, super seventy s You know, like when we think of like the pimp in the big purple jacket and the hat, it's that moment.
Speaker: But there's this other tradition that intervenes before we get all the way to House Party. And that's the kind of like neo-realist tradition of guys like Charles Burnett, who made Killer of Sheep, which is a... Have you seen Killer of Sheep, Sam? I have not. No, I've not seen this one. It's a really, really good movie, but it's sort of about post-Great Migration family in l a and is an attempt to be a depiction of...
Speaker: Yeah, just sort of actual Black working class life in the early 70s. Because I think it was Burnett's master's thesis at UCLA or maybe his like undergrad one. I don't know, but it was it was a student film.
Speaker: And it's it's so it's such a rejection of the world of Blacksploitation where it's like, no, we're not all like Kung Fu fighting pimps. Yeah. There's a real like economic struggle happening as a black person in the United States who's been you know brought here in chains, who you know whose families have then migrated out of you know post-slavery sharecropping to these cities where they live in these crumbling environments. And house parties on the other end of this being like, Dolomite sucks, but you know what? We're having fun. like
Speaker: you know basically, like screw Dolomite, screw Killer of Sheep. This is going to be a moment of celebration and joy and excitement where like teenagers are allowed to just be teenagers. um you know Where the biggest concern of the movie is, am I going to be able to actually like find love at this house party?
Speaker: Which, you do get the shades of, you know okay, yes, his dad, whose name is Pop in the movie, our kid's dad, he is constantly complaining. He's like, basically, all he says is like,
Speaker: son, and you're a piece of shit. like I have to work so much. you know And all you want to do is like hang out and play and rap. And like here I am breaking my back and you don't listen to me. And you know I'm going to be honest, from a dad's perspective, you not that I'm a dad, but adopting a dad's perspective, it's like you can kind of get that. He obviously works like extremely hard. The mother has died since a one-income situation. He's got a house to take care of. And his son is just like, I'm getting in fights at school. And But we should say that almost all of it, it's like a subversion of causality in the sense that almost everything that he runs into isn't his fault. Like, he's quite a passive character in that sense. Yes. So he he is not the initiator of anything, really.
Speaker: No, there's this group of three bullies at the school who are sort of like... They all sort of look like what I would describe as versions of Mr. T in terms of like, they're all really large. They all have sort of similar haircuts to that.
Speaker: And so the one of the three bullies has what I can only describe as like a 30s gangster kind of Looney Tunes stereotype where he's like, oh go get him boss. Yeah, take him out. Sharmu's boss. It really... It does sound like a sort of bit part from The Godfather. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I think to to kids' passivity, i think some of that is that the movie is obviously directed at a teenager at that moment. And I think whether or not it is the teen's fault, the teen very often doesn't believe it is their fault, right? There's always some kind of like reason or excuse. And so there is a kind of fantasy involved here. And I'm not saying it's always a fantasy, but if we think of it in kind of psychoanalytic terms,
Speaker: a fantasy of, no, actually the world just keeps getting in my way and I really just want to be able to like have fun. and it does seem like they say play as a good student. Like he's obviously not, or sorry, a kid is not a bad kid. He's not a bad student. Like in the world of the movie, all of that is real. But if you also think about the audiences it's going out to, you know, it's teenagers, teenagers who want to be like,
Speaker: Oh, my dad, sure, he might work really hard, but he's getting in the way. you know and I'm just trying to have a good time, which you know i would say Kidd does more or less succeed in doing in the movie. But one of the things that i'm sort of interested in, and I'm obviously not an expert here, you know sound off in the comments, is the way in which the sort of Afrocentric thing has become a veneer or an aesthetic in the movie.
Speaker: That is to say, like, we are no longer in the 70s. Because that's the thing, right? Like, it might be the era of dolomite, but it's also the era of, like, the petering out of the Black Power movement. It's the era of this, you know, return to a certain kind of roots, right? it's It's where, you know, Kwanzaa is coming from a little bit earlier than that.
Speaker: you know It's supposed to have this kind of political valence. By this moment, it's being recuperated, but in a purely aesthetic way. like they're The politics we are reading out of the movie are embedded in the ways that it represents class relationships. And I have no doubt that That's to some degree intentional from the director, but the direct text, the sort of, well, and he's the writer too, but the sort of direct, like, what am I getting as a teenager watching this movie?
Speaker: I'm just looking at fashion, right? Like this is a a movie that is clearly meant to convey a certain kind of style. Like kid, we haven't even mentioned this, has like what I as an American child of the nineties would think of as the Gerald from Hey Arnold haircut, which is like, yeah. a high top haircut that's like five feet tall. I mean, I'm exaggerating, but it's really, really high. And of course, because it's completely shaved on the sides, it looks yeah enormous. like it's And my my wife made the joke. She's like, well, every character, every man in this movie, every teen in this movie either has a version of that haircut, not necessarily as high as ah kids is. Yeah, like play has one, but it's like half the size.
Speaker: Yeah, it's at half-mast, yeah. but Or they have a sort of evolution of the jerry curl where it's like similarly textured, but there will just be like a line cut through the hair.
Speaker: and so it's clearly a movie and much shorter than a jerry curl, obviously, because now we're in 1990. We're done with that. Although one of the bullies has a jerry curl, I think. But the point is... One of them has like a mullet, effectively, as well. Yeah, it's like a jerry curled mullet, yeah.
Speaker: But that's the thing, like... it's clearly intended to be this kind of like consumer text for the audience, right? Like, this is what fashion is. This is the cool, exciting music that you get to enjoy. and I couldn't help but think about that as a I don't know, the same thing we've talked about a lot on the show at the end of history was is this moment of excitement. like It's not that anyone in the movie is like, well, thank God that you know the Soviet Union is going to fall next year and we're about to enter you know into the into the true third way. and everyone and Obviously, that's not the case, but there's something in the air that seems to suggest that what we have ahead of us is a lot of fun, either because we are removed from the economic...
Speaker: sort of degradation of our parents or just because time seemed to be getting better. And the only exception to that in the movie really is the cops. I mean, there are multiple scenes in this movie of just like these two white cops, one of whom has this super Polish last name. it's Boyd and like Vygotsky, isn't it? Like one of them is called Boyd and one of called Vygotsky. Yeah,
Speaker: Yeah, the classic like ethnic white cops. And what what I find fascinating is that in the movie, it takes it seriously, right? In the sense that, yeah, they they get multiple times, they are just literally stopped for being black. And the cops are very open about this. They're just like...
Speaker: what are you doing? And you know kids like, I'm walking to you know like an event that I'm going to. And they're sort of scrutinizing him. And the only way that he gets out of it is when they realize that they've run out of donuts. And so they're just like, a behave yourself, stay in school. you know So it it does have this very serious, open understanding of the way that police treat black people in America. It it doesn't shy away from that. It's very honest about that.
Speaker: um It's before Rodney King, so it's not even like it's drawing on that. It's just drawing on this long legacy of this kind of thing happening. But then because it's a teen comedy, it's constantly finding ways to deflate the seriousness of these constant transgressions by the police. It's very bizarre. i was going to say, going to ask what you made of the the scene where Kid runs through a bush into the black tie event, which importantly isn't a white black tie event. So it's not playing up that tension. It's ah a black black tie event.
Speaker: And the bullies and him sort of get in a fight and they're accosted by the police slash the sort of elder ah elders at the party and ah lined up sort of on their knees with their hands behind their heads with cop pointing a gun at them.
Speaker: And he's like, the the good folks here aren't pressing charges against you You're very lucky. so we're going to let you go. But before we let you go, need to repeat after me. i like was you know gearing myself up that he was going to say something absolutely horrendously racist. Yeah.
Speaker: And then yeah he just goes, you need to repeat after me, I am somebody. Which is odd to me. Was that a piss take of kind of like, sort of just say no drugs, like dare drugs culture, post-Reaganite kind of just say no kids stuff.
Speaker: Was that like a piss take on like youth work and like anti-gang? Yeah. Yeah, it was very kind of weirdly therapeutic. It's a bit of like therapeutic language. like Like the cops are almost are acting as social workers, but... i can i it's It's more than that. I can tell you what it is.
Speaker: So I Am Somebody is, I guess, a poem that would be recited by Jesse Jackson. the kind of perennial, you know, US political candidates. Of course, Black community organizer and um preacher.
Speaker: And I think it's based on earlier stuff, but it's it's an interesting, like, because I think it was even, like, recited on Sesame Street. Like, do you know what? it It's sort of both a nod to an earlier version of black self-empowerment and I think kind of at the same time, like, calling it kind of hokey,
Speaker: So it's it's it's, I think, kind of a rejection of another version of black self-empowerment that's more political would be my take. It's kind of like, almost like the Booker T. Washington tradition. Yeah, it's a rejection of a kind of like black middle class version of politics, I think, is how I would read that.
Speaker: Well, it was interesting that it was coming out of the the mouth of the white ethnic cops, right? That they were the ones to sort of make them say it. Well, I think that's what really degrades it. I mean, well, that's the thing. You can read it in a couple of different ways. You can read it directly as, oh white people know about this and therefore it's lost its power. Like this just shows how useless it is.
Speaker: Or you could see it as and a heightening of the evil of the police and taking this like actual real slogan that has meaning and turning it into something that white people use to further degrade black people. And I don't necessarily know in the world of the movie which one it's supposed to be.
Speaker: But in either case, it's another nod within the movie to like a ah previously existing or previously vital version of of Black self-empowerment, right?
Speaker: um And that to me is you know it's kind of telling. I mean, we're only a couple years here out from Jesse Jackson running for president. I want to say that that was 84 that he ran for president. Under the Rainbow Push Coalition kind of thing, which is picking up on a Fred Hampton thing.
Speaker: So that's what find so fascinating about House Party is it's it's a fun movie. like You could show someone this and they would just be like, oh, it's cool. it's the ninety s you know Give it a couple of years and we have we're we're going to have East versus West, blah, blah, blah. We're going to have the 91 Bulls, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But it encodes in itself all of these little nods to the sort of like thorniness or difficulty of but of the black political and obviously just like existential experience in the United States. And that's there to be picked up, but it's by no means sitting in front of you, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's it's definitely like a film that doesn't fall ground. Like, it's interesting and that so many films that are pushed abroad by the sort of American entertainment complex are like films about black trauma or black struggle. um you know, like Boys in the Hood or um Precious, et cetera, et cetera, that actually end up being viewed by mainstream British viewers. And this is like a film that I don't, I might be mistaken, but i don't think made it across the pond in any sense. And it, yeah, it's it's it's like revelatory in some ways for its normality or its refusal to like, yeah, like really engage in...
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's's it's honest about the the racism of like, America, but it's not the central guiding or, like, um conditioning object of the film, right? It's a part of life, but it's, like, peripheral to, like, you know, hooking up with girls or, like, getting really good at rap or, like, going to a cool house party.
Speaker: like Those things ultimately are the things that like structure meaning yes at the forefront of the film. and Which, i yeah, I think is, compared to like a lot of stuff that's pushed in the UK over the years, is is quite refreshing. And it's perhaps more like speaks to the black middle-class experience in a way that a film like Precious obviously just just wouldn't.
Speaker: I was interested in the dichotomy between like the Afro-centrist, sort HOTEP-inspired fashion that you you picked up on, And then the kind of like vibes of like Kid and Play, which aren't that, they're much more like modernist. Like always like Bauhaus, like Kodinsky, know, Russian supremacists almost, style print works, like very modern. The clothes are like super streamlined, a minimalist, modernist, like kind like primary colored, like geometric prints and stuff.
Speaker: Simultaneously, you have like one fashion that's kind of looking back to roots and to nostalgia and to like fatherland or whatever. It's looking back in time to to structure meaning. And then another sort of fashion that is very much like maybe ambiguous or sort of um less concerned with like roots and politics. There's much more about a pure aesthetic expression. um I found it interesting that those two things are sort of sitting next to each other.
Speaker: Well, I think if I can if i can try and like get really big-brained about this, i think I think of the movie as trying to be very honest to the degree that a Hollywood film made for consumption can be, or at least a ah popular film can be. Because I think this is, oh yeah, it's a new line cinema movie.
Speaker: But we should say that it's it's a student film initially, right? So Reginald, he makes this as his Harvard dissertation film initially, and then it's spun out into a feature, which is kind of impressive. Yes, his thesis film yeah became this, which is yeah it's same it it is sort of a strange thing, and it is kind of particularly interesting to think about. um like i'm just I'm reading a little bit about Hudlin and the fact that his great-great-grandparents or whatever were part of the Underground Railroad which means that his own roots are not in the Great Migration. You know what i mean? Are in like an earlier version of Black Northern experience, which is to say like being involved in the Underground Railroad and being part of this this initial departure, obviously, out of enslavement in the South towards freedom in the North or in Canada.
Speaker: But ah this that's I guess maybe to your point about it having a kind of middle-class perspective in certain ways, but I want to say about this honesty that that honesty is an honesty about what Because you could just as easily say, oh, Boys in the Hood is honest, right? Like a movie about like gang violence is honest. a movie about like the difficulties of the economic experience of being a black person in America is honest.
Speaker: But what I mean by honest here is very specifically, it wants to be honest about the kind of teen experience as a teenager wants to live it. and therefore is something that you can kind of measure yourself up against and enjoy, which is very different from the blaxploitation fantasy of the 70s.
Speaker: And importantly, is rooted in therefore having to balance showing you the realities of black life, the police, the hardworking dad, the fact that people like Shirane live in the projects, the fact that within the black community, there is discrimination even against people who do live in the projects by those who don't. right all of these things, but that have to be sort of attached to fundamentally a narrative about what teenagers care about. I think a great example of that is where Martin Lawrence, who's the DJ, is waiting to get picked up by Play outside his house with all of his whole DJ thing. He's got his turntable. He's got all his vinyl discs.
Speaker: And ah Play keeps showing up over and over again with his tiny car, just with girls in it. And so he can never actually get all of his things in. The first time it's just one girl and he can only fit his like turntable in. And he's like, don't worry, don't worry. I'm going to come back for you. Like, it's fine. You can fit, but no, you can't fit. Okay. I'll come back for you.
Speaker: He comes back like over an hour later and Martin Lawrence is like, finally. And the car is just jammed with women. There are like four or five girls in the car. And he's like, no, no, you could fit. like It's fine. It's fine. And what is the point of that? But like what matters here?
Speaker: Women in music, and those two are even going to come into conflict, but they are fundamentally the concerns. like That is what we need to worry about. Much like in, you know I don't know, Yeltsin's Russia, it's like, all right, we got we got blue jeans and Coca-Cola. Well, in the US, we already have those things. So instead, it's going to be rap music and and you know the the beautiful women who go to our high school. um and Because that's even where the movie starts.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, but but also just like that kind of like fundamental frustration of being a teenager, right? like I think that was a possibly the most impactful part of the film to me in the sense that yeah just from a visceral emotional connective point of like, oh yeah, I've been in that situation like several times. is a sort of to you a Late teenage, early 20s, a friend of mine being like, yeah I'm going to pick you up, man. i'm goingnna yeah yeah yeah well I'll be another two hours. I'll be another three hours. you know and just like just like That like frustration of like,
Speaker: not having like complete self-ownership, I suppose, or so like complete agent. That sense of reliance that I think all the characters have, right? like They're either reliant on their friends or they're like constrained by their school or their parents, which is just like a... Yeah, like beyond like race relations, it's just a universal, i think, experience.
Speaker: Beyond generations even, right? like Which is the topic of this podcast. It's still universal. Well, that's kind of what I mean about the honesty. like if i If I think of this as a... as an end of history movie, I think about it as wanting to present as strongly as possible and honesty about what the teenager should be going into the 90s. And that's going to include these sort of like universal claims and also have to build in these various parts of the black experience at the same time. It's it's also worth noting that like,
Speaker: Not to put on my Yimby hat, because Lord knows I don't own one of those. But like they're walking around. like you know Kid is able to get to and from the party on foot. He walks Shirane and Sidney home on foot. The only reason that Martin Lawrence's character is dependent on play with a car is because he can't get his turntable all the way to the party without conveyance of some kind, because he can't carry something that big all the way over there. right So it's it is an interesting...
Speaker: I guess some of that honesty is also a kind of like freedom. I don't know that you get the feeling that maybe their parents didn't experience. Because the older generation in this movie is always... some maybe lovable, but usually played for laughs. like You mentioned the um the neighbor who is like just mad that they're making too much noise, talks about how much he paid, gets put on hold by 911, which is a very funny moment when he calls and he's like, 911? Okay, I'll hold. um And his own wife is constantly like, you're the one making noise. You need to shut up and just go to bed. and he's like, no, no I'm going to get these kids. He just starts like... so he's just like
Speaker: Just starts sexually harassing the teenagers as well. Yeah, he's like, that skirt, dot I can see everything in that skirt. He's like talking to the police, and he's like, you need to get out here. I can see everything this skirt. um it's Yeah, there's like a very big emphasis on respectability, right?
Speaker: Yeah, the the comments about the skirts being too short. Even like the house party like was quite tame, right? like They're slow dancing. They don't drink. Well, except for one guy. One guy gets drunk.
Speaker: One guy is drinking and like everyone else is massively disapproving of him. yeah No one is smoking cigarettes. like there's no like There is sexuality in the house party. like People are grinding. like Clearly people want to like get off, but like no one is like taking anyone anyone upstairs and fucking, ah which is something you see in like equivalent white...
Speaker: especially like middle-class sort of teen movies of the same era. Like, it's quite, and um yeah, I presume like a lot of these kids are coming from like quite strict like Baptist and Methodist homes. So like, yeah, there's a real sense of respectability that runs through it. Like, kid's dad is constantly like sort of policing the boundaries of his behavior because you I think like there's an unsaid thing and that he's like, you know, you're really clever, like you're probably on a track to college.
Speaker: His kid's a bit of a stand-in probably for... um for Reginald, who obviously ends up at Harvard. um And yeah, I think there's a real sense of like outward perception and like the way other people perceive you and why that matters or why it doesn't matter in certain contexts.
Speaker: Well, yeah, i mean, they did it's an interesting thing. People often talk about the ah Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a response to The Cosby Show. But this is also a kind of like midway response to The Cosby Show because that comes out in, I think, the late 80s, 87 or something like that.
Speaker: And so this is a movie that clearly is about like what an actual teenage life is like or, you know, to the extent possible within this form. over and against that, right? Like, they've imbibed, as you're saying, some of this kind of respectability. Maybe that's because it's a mainstream film. I don't know.
Speaker: But they're embarrassed by and upset about the older Black people in the community who are like, you got to pull up your pants, basically, and all of that stuff. And I wonder... If the I am somebody speech is even itself associated with that. And that's why it gets put into the, into the the mouths of the cops basically. And, you know, not to go kind of marvel on this, but in the mid credits, the house ah blows off the roof and lands on the cops. Right.
Speaker: After a very bizarre final scene that I think is also about this quote-unquote honesty for laughs, which is that kid comes home and is just beaten with a belt by his dad over the credits. like You just hear him like screaming and the dad saying stuff, and that's just what you hear as the credits roll until this you know house explosion happens.
Speaker: And so it's it's, again, this weird moment where it's like we are acknowledging within the community that like corporal punishment is the norm for you know transgression against respectability politics.
Speaker: But again, we're going to play it for laughs. And again, we're going to have the house blow up and destroy the cops who have been the bad guys for most of the movie, but also sort of save Kid at ah at a fundamental moment when he's being chased down by the bullies after the party. And um there's this other criminal who kind of gets in, not other criminal, there is a criminal who gets involved.
Speaker: Although actually, the bullies do something crazy. They are not allowed into the house party. And so they decide they're going to burn it down and the cops catch them with just like containers of gasoline, like...
Speaker: like putting it down or down around the edge of the building. And I thought that was such a crazy escalation. like Up to that point, they're kind of just normal like physical bullies who will like beat you up. But at that moment in the movie, they turn into like terrorists. They're like, we're going to destroy this kid's parents' house because we weren't allowed in for a party.
Speaker: um It just goes so big. But it's played for laughs, right? In the sense that his two sort of cronies are like, oh, I'm not sure about this, Jack. I mean, you've gone too far. And he has to sort of persuade them into into doing it.
Speaker: ah Yeah. And yeah, it's it's very amusing. Yeah, because it's a funny movie. Yeah. Maybe we should just state that for the record. It's a pretty funny movie. So, you know, maybe check it out for that reason alone. Yeah, I think it's um yeah it's an interesting, like, trying to think about the ways it maybe fed into didn't feed into later sort of teen movies like Superbad or Project X in the twenty ten s that are perhaps slightly more, ah you know, ah epochal or seminal for us as teenagers. Yeah.
Speaker: I see some of it in American Pie. like Obviously, there's there's a ah sort sort of big racial difference between those two movies, but it's obviously not as raunchy as the kind of thing we're going to get at the kind of millennial transition moment. It's not quite there, but it does feel like it's moving in that direction, certainly. All right, yeah. so I feel like my sort of generational take on this is that it's a ah kind of fascinating example of changes in Black political culture and aesthetic culture, it presages what's about to happen. And maybe above all, i i keep i don't know if I've done a good job of explaining it, but I find it's walking of this line of honesty and representation and and real experience of the Black community in the U.S. kind of fascinating. And even though it had a bunch of sequels, I can't help but wonder, like,
Speaker: I don't know, could you just like make this immediately after the Rodney King beating? you know like would Could you really just make this movie with these funny cops? In that way, it occupies this interesting moment of kind of, don't know it's quite optimism, but of like a normality that the black teenager can hope to experience that obviously really touched a nerve and in that sense feels very...
Speaker: end of history to me. i don't think we have so much of that now, but it's it's kind of a nice... it's It's an interesting kind of relic of ah of a of an in-between time um of a rejection of a politics before that politics sort of forcibly reinscribes itself.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's quite... to the extent that it can be, which is I think is quite hard for any, particularly for the African-American filmmaker in America. It is like a post-political film, right?
Speaker: like it's It's politics are used as as costume, and there are there are political valences, but they're very subdued. It's like playing a trumpet with a muffler on. like Or like a gun with a silencer. The politics is there, but it's it's yeah it's like it's being slowly suffocated by like optimism. Which is not necessarily... 2026 isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker: ah It's quite refreshing. It's refreshing in that way. yeah um yeah i know i'll leave I'll leave us with this, which is that if this is like an epochal kind of film that's pointing towards...
Speaker: and not sorry, a post-racial America, but like, uh, an America, an America where like race is secondary to wearing really cool trousers and like hooking up. Um, yeah.
Speaker: Reginald Hudlin actually ah you know introduced Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff to each other. um So he is the reason for the 20... What was it? 2024? I forget. You have so too many presidential elections. But yeah, the 2024 Kamala Harris... Yeah. ah House Party leads directly via a chain of dominoes to the K-Hive. So ah there you go. And I think we opened this season talking about the fact that a bunch of girls in ah a Riot Grrrl film are all now Kamala Harris voters. So maybe there's something there.
Speaker: Some grand conspiracy. I'm not sure. No, that's completely true. And to to kind of piggyback off that, there's a 2023 sort of like reboot of the series um that Hudlin did not direct, but I think was kind of involved in in some capacity.
Speaker: I think it's a remake, actually. And it has cameos from Kid Cudi, LeBron James, Snoop Dogg, Juvenile, Little Wayne, Kid and Play, of course. And then, oh, Big Sean. And then very interestingly to me of all people on Earth, Mark Cuban. hey but he's He's an owner of the Dallas Mavericks and is like known as a kind of investor from the world of Shark Tank.
Speaker: So, like, if you need to see what, like, became of House Party, you know what I mean? Because the original House Party has George Clinton from Parliament Funkadelic. And by 2023, it's moved to a point where now it has literally the guy from Shark Tank in it. So...
Speaker: so make of that what you will. um It probably says something that is above my pay grade. But you know here's what I will say to you. You should like, you should rate, you should subscribe, you should tell your friends, you should start a newsletter where every week you talk about how wonderful this podcast is.
Speaker: All still free. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Patreon, and hopefully living rent-free in your heads. um So with that, And I'd finalize with invite us to some house parties. Yeah. A very good point, Sam. ah Get us in there. Sam and will have a rap battle at your house party if you invite both of us. Yeah. We'll adapt. We'll adapt E Cummings.
Speaker: Yeah. Britain Yank. Oh, yeah. All right. With that, have a a wonderful day, everybody. Bye-bye.
