Benjamin Meadows-Ingram

Boss on Deck

The Notorious BMI: Ain't always pretty, but it's always real.

Get Buck

Posted 02/23/2007 at 9:40 PM | 2 comment/s

You juggle a million things and the blog just falls by the wayside. But as I tell my team, that ain’t no excuse, so I’m back at it with the automatic… Gotta love Young Buck. Yeah, he’s outta his damn mind – seriously, the man’s a loose cannon (“the Glock stays on me and the knife’s for backup, I’m comin’ to the VIBE Awards, dare ya ta act up”) – but in a way that makes him a great rapper, both to watch and listen to, if not to hang out with. He’s a rock star in the best sense, which is exactly why the video for “Get Buck” sells the single so much better than the single itself. It’s one thing to hear Buck deliver simple lines about being tougher than everyone else he can possibly think of over a sparse beat. It’s another thing to see him lock down Nashville and literally stomp all over town. I like Buck (tho didn’t love Buck the World – shouts to Sha for coming through with the preview goods), and because I have some wild faith that one of these days he’ll come through with a true classic (Straight Outta Cashville was great, but it was no __[fill in to your taste]__), I hope this record wins, the album sells, and he gets another shot. Then again, with Fif’s whole music making approach making me nervous these days, I ain’t even confident that the third Buck album will make me, well, wanna get buck. One of those time-will-tell things, I figure…

Time – and just a short bit of it, too – will also tell if Craig Brewer’s new film, Black Snake Moan, is able to put bodies in seats and critical acclaim back in his ear. Moan, the Memphis-based director’s first project since the impressive, and Academy Award winning, Hustle and Flow, is a challenging film, both in terms of storytelling and payoff.

Full disclosure: as a Memphian, I’m a Brewer supporter. I’ve interviewed him multiple times, been in touch with him for several years now, know folks who know him well, the whole deal. And yet, I can’t say I like this film. Monday night I attended the movie’s NYC premiere and checked it out for the second time (I’d seen it last fall at a press screening). The stars were all there – Sam Jackson, Christina Ricci, David Banner, producers John Singelton and Stephanie Allain, Brewer himself (no JT, tho) – but the flick, well, it fell/falls a bit flat. Not nearly as funny or as campy as the trailer suggests, this is a movie about a nymphomaniac who gets chained to a radiator by a farmer hoping to break her of her sex craze. Read that description again. Does that even begin to make sense? Unsurprisingly the movie struggles to turn such a ridiculous conceit into a story – one with character growth, conflict, resolution, and all that. Brewer’s too arty to be a B-movie director. He believes in his shots, he believes in his actors, and he believes in his stories, so he lingers over all of ’em, which can be tedious when he’s chasing the wrong tail. Hustle and Flow told a story we all knew but had never seen. Moan tells a story that we would have never known or seen if Brewer hadn’t dreamed it up. And Star Wars it ain’t.

There are some cool things about this movie, tho. The individual performances, excluding JT’s, are all amazing (something Brewer clearly has a knack for). And the subversion of American ideas of race and sexuality, and where those ideas intersect, is also worth noting with a fucking asterisk – the big black man is trying to cure the white woman of her raging lust, not thrust his upon her, and he attempts to do this by physically chaining, i.e. enslaving, her to his chasteness (wrap your mind around that).

Fnally, there’s the scenery and the music. Like with Hustle, no one is shooting this part of America and these aspects of American culture (rap and now the blues – shouts to Scott Bomar and his Making Easy Money suits!) with this much heart. All of that said, I feel the same way about Brewer as I do about Buck – I hope he wins and I can’t wait to check out the third studio project. There’s a lack of great art out there attempting to flow in these veins – and because my heart is tied up in all of it for all sorts of reasons, I have to keep the faith.

Back to the Basics
No great new music this week, so I'll just throw this out cause my man put me onto it awhile back and it bumps:
Mack Maine F/ Lil' Wayne & Dizzy -- "Ride With the Mack"

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