Hacker Cinema
Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
2000 · Film · documentary · 71 min
Directed by Kevin Fitzgerald
From neighborhood ciphers to the most notorious MC battles, "Freestyle: the Art of Rhyme" captures the electrifying energy of improvisational hip-hop--the rarely recorded art form of rhyming spontaneously. Like preachers and jazz solos, freestyles exist only in the moment, a modern-day incarnation of the African-American storytelling tradition. Shot over a period of more than seven years, it is already an underground cult film in the hip-hop world. The film systematically debunks the false image put out by record companies that hip-hop culture is violent or money-obsessed. Instead, it lets real hip-hop artists, known and unknown, weave their story out of a passionate mix of language, politics, and spirituality.
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For anyone that is a fan of hip-hop and interested in its origins I can recommend the Nas documentary Time is Illmatic (2014)[0]. I recently had the pleasure of catching the Nas & Wu-Tang tour and RZA said that Wu-Tang can claim nearly 30yrs of hip-hop's history. Noreaga said in an interview with Nas that he suggests people new to hip-hop start with Nas and then go _backwards_ in hip-hop's history to understand just how revolutionary Nas was as an artist to evolve and advance the form of rap.
I can also recommend numerous other documentaries such as Bombin (1988), Wild Style (1982), Style Wars (1983), Scratch (2001), Freestyle (2000), Martha a Picture Story (2019), 80 Blocks from Tiffany's (1979) and Beat Kings (2007) in no particular order.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdLDW6l7D8U