Freestyle

Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, Dir. Kevin Fitzgerald. Palm Pictures.
In my quest for free entertainment, I'm now tapping into Comcast's On Demand movies. I picked this one because I know Palm Pictures has created some fantastic music documentaries. I love Scratch, Doug Pray's Palm Pictures film about DJs. This is a great accompaniment, focusing on freestyle MCs. The film's scope is perfect: it puts hip hop in its historical context and discusses some commercial successes like the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac, and Eminem, but it focuses mainly on underground artists and the difference between freestyle rhyming and written rhymes. The stars are Supernatural, Juice, and Craig G., all phenomenal off-the-cuff battle MCs. Supernatural talks about how he trained to be an MC, reading the dictionary first, then a rhyming dictionary, and about how everything he reads goes into his rhymes. Cut Chemist (one of my favorite DJs) is featured briefly, and I think he worked on the score. Mos Def and J5 perform, and Mos is still kind of scruffy looking -- the film was made before his success as an actor.

This movie really made me think about how I read my work aloud. Watching the MCs that are most effective and how they make the crowd respond to them makes me think about how to present my work at readings. This doesn't mean I'm planning to freestyle at the podium (although it would be a lot cooler if I did). But I can choose pieces that have a good flow and repetition and work on the way I read them. I really like reading aloud -- I wish there were more opportunities for that.

This is another example of people doing what they love simply because they love it and not because they'll get anything else out of it. For most of them, it's exclusively about the sheer joy of performing, of creating a temporary art form that will most likely not be reproduced. It's also about people building on each other's creativity and about building positive things from negative emotions. I was lucky to stumble upon it.