Fear of a Black Hat

Rusty Cundieff / 1993 / 88 min. / digital video

Columbia College Conaway Center, 1104 S. Wabash
Friday, November 22, 2019, 6-10pm
free admission

Part of An Incomplete History of Hip-Hop in Film, presented by South Side Projections, Columbia College’s Hip-Hop Studies Minor, Hip-Hop Club, and Hip-Hop: A Sonic History course

Writer-director-star Rusty Cundieff’s debut film is quite possibly the best hip-hop film of all time, a scathing satire of the hip-hop industry that took over the mainstream in the early 1990s. A mockumentary chronicling NWH, a controversial but not particularly talented gangsta rap group, the film lovingly but pointedly skewers the tropes of the genre with its picture of a group of angry young men who purport to hate the industry that is making them filthy rich while its white overlords get even richer off their labor.