New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Film tries to 'Hustle' us on value of street cred

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Film tries to 'Hustle' us on value of street credFilm tries to 'Hustle' us on value of street cred

The movie "Hustle & Flow" is not only the latest update of blaxploitation and the most recent neo-minstrel development in black popular culture. It also represents a crisis of artistic consciousness because it was produced by filmmaker John Singleton, and has been supported by Spike Lee and Will Smith, both of whom have presented private screenings.

This is not minor because all three of these men have previously remained removed from celebrating the sort of scum that this film - and that the worst of the rap industry - raises high from the dung heap of popular culture at its most irresponsible and dehumanizing.

Some will defend it because of the remarkable performance by Terrence Howard, who portrays a low-level pimp with a dream of becoming a rap star. With that arrives a muddled conception of morality in which up is down and down is up. The condescension toward black people and women is astounding.

The pimp is airbrushed and carries himself like just another ignorant Negro trying to get above the bottom. That is the fundamental fraud of the film, which avoids the hard story of pimps and their brutal relationships to their whores, who are actually the tragic figures. If, like "The Godfather," it had sought to tell the blood-encrusted truth, it might not have been so irresponsible and might have been able to boast a complexity more like that of this year's "Crash," which also featured the plentiful gifts of Howard.

As a rapper, the pimp in "Hustle & Flow" is supposed to have so much charisma that he is able to convert, or should we say pervert, the middle-class wife of his record producer, a high school buddy. As is often the case, the black middle-class woman is depicted as a hindering lame. But true to cliched manipulation, she thrusts aside her reservations about her husband's wallowing with scum and brings sandwiches to a recording session! The session is held at the pimp's home; not a whorehouse, but one full of his whores. As one black woman said to me, "Supporting your man's dream is one thing, but what sophisticated black woman would go to a pimp's house and offer him, his whores and her husband some snacks?"

Easy: the straw one in the movie.

This film is not about facts or morality or the artistic accuracy of tragic vision. It is about commercialism masquerading as black authenticity. How Singleton, Lee and Smith went for this package is a serious question.

According to this movie, and as we should know, "street credibility" - thug and criminal experience - supposedly transcends all things, be they upper class, middle class or no class.

Of course, the worst of rap has long projected and promoted the amoral vision of thugs and street hustlers, all of whom, in the real world, have never - ever - been shy about saying that they would sell excrement if there was a market for it. This vision has proved quite successful for the extremes of rap, where criminality, misogyny and the crudest materialism soar above all.

Singleton, who has been an ambitious filmmaker, will probably draw a big profit. He is now willing to take his audience into a world where fertilizer is worshiped because it grows bushels of money. But never forget that fertilizer always smells exactly like what it is.

That, finally, is what we can say of "Hustle & Flow."

Originally published on July 25, 2005