With the ever-rising status of hip-hop in today’s media landscape comes the need to document the origins and spirit of such a prominent aspect of our culture. A few decades after its birth, it has effectively become a multi-billion dollars industry: As all subcultures reaching a stage of surexposition, it is at risk to get its original message diluted, distorted. More than ever, it is important to look back at the conditions of its birth and the sheer, simple principles it first defended.
This is just what Shan Nicholson’s documentary movie Rubble Kings aims for, chronicling the evolution of the New York gang culture in the 1960’s: the escalating violence, crime and poverty in the Bronx in the late sixties that gave birth to hip-hop in the seventies. To accompany the movie and its moving, foundational story, New York hip-hop producer Little Shalimar aka Torbitt Schwartz—known from previous work with Run the Jewels—has written the original soundtrack, and has just released Rubble Kings as an album. It showcases notable appearances from Bun B, Ghostface Killah, Killer Mike, Tunde Adebimpe, Boldy James, Cuz Lightyear, Ka and Roxiny, in addition to Run The Jewels. On the occasion, we have caught up with Little Shalimar for the London screening of Rubble Kings.
The whole Rubble Kings project started off the back of a long-term friendship, cemented by the love of hip-hop. Movie director Shan Nicholson and Little Shalimar are no strangers to each other: they are really dear old friends and Nicholson is a reformed hip-hop producer himself, which explains his motivation to unveil the turbulent, moving story of the gangs. Unsurprisingly, there’s a certain musical feel in Nicholson’s style as a director, as Little Shalimar describes: “He started making movie maybe 10 years ago, and we saw it was the right move for him as he brings the same production sensibility, sampling sensibility to his work… He puts things together in a way that is really fun to watch.”
Both were not contemporaries of the period depicted by the movie, however they did grow up in New York aware of the story of the gangs. The discovery of archive footage of the Peace Treaty first lead to the idea: “The story is pretty mind blowing to me. I grew up myself in New York City in the kind of era coming after this, we knew the law of the gangs, even if at the time they had broken up.” The Hoe Avenue Peace meeting, which came after a dark period of escalating violence in the Bronx, is the first of a series of events that permanently changed New York’s history.
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The film is about the gangs, says Little Shalimar, and the end of the super violent gang era. “We grew up with more small crews and parties, so it was really fascinating to see the roots of what my own experience of the scene was. Especially The Warriors – based on the true event that makes the centerpiece of this film. To see the power of self determination that these guys were able to summon was really inspiring. The bravery to not do what their surroundings and their society was telling them not to do is a powerful thing.” The gangs wanted to prove they had worth in society, defiantly willing to show the world they existed, and most of the characters represented are still community activists now.
This was not Little Shalimar’s first attempt at scoring movies, and he soon became a natural choice for Nicholson: “Shan had an original done, which had all this music from the era added in… And of course the process of going through all the clearance process and hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost made him soon realise this was not going to happen, so as I had scored another movie set in a similar time, he came to me to put together some of the music. I ended up scoring the whole film with original productions. Beyond the financial value, you can get more creative if you create the music for the picture. I love film scoring, that’s something I would definitely like to do more.”
Creating the soundtrack was a well-thought process for the producer. As the movie had built scenes around a certain music, Little Shalimar watched each scene and questioned himself on how he felt about the music that made each scene successful, how it could be improved on, using his own knowledge of the music of the era: “I knew pretty much all of it. Shan and I lived together for year and shared records – we were pretty sympathical on a music level to start with.”
As it contains a lot of interviews and little live action, the structure and form of the movie itself was a challenge for the producer, that’s why here the music becomes even more important as an element of its own: “I think in general I considered the music like a different character or an external narrator – and then the movie changed a little bit and it worked.” To reflect the importance of the dialogues in the movie, Rubble Kings – the album showcases some key dialogues from the film. It is mainly because the project was first thought as a mixtape and evolved progressively to become an original album: “Originally we thought we would just put that score out as an album. And then we both agreed it was a good idea to create an original album separately with various artists involved, I work with all those people all the time – half of the music was from the movie, half of it was me sampling myself, sampling my own scoring and creating new material out of it.”
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It’s crucial for kids to see the underlying powers of this culture…
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Rubble Kings is a movie about New York City. The city itself possess a very special narrative of conflict, violence, retribution and self-realisation, which we can clearly see at play in the film. There’s also a context of immigration, a melting pot of crowds, cultures coexisting, not always without conflict – and conflict tends to bring up good narratives. If the movie itself focusses on the facts, Little Shalimar’s album aims to reflect the universality of its message in the music: “I decided pretty early on not to have only New York rappers. Although it’s specifically a New York story, I don’t think this is specifically a New York message, I think it’s a global situation and the general message is universal. For example, Detroit now is very similar to the south Bronx in the 70’s, so we got someone from there on the album to speak about Detroit.”
The drive to make the story relevant to today’s hip-hop listeners pushed Little Shalimar to invite contemporary artists like Run The Jewels to take part to the project: “Kids would have otherwise missed it. That was the initial idea, then we figured out how to do that in a way that worked as an album.“ His ambition makes the album stand out as a piece of art of its own. “Especially in terms of hip-hop culture, he explains, it’s really important for kids to get grip to that as now hip-hop has turned to this multi billion dollars industry, that has a huge weight – it’s crucial for kids to see the underlying powers of this culture. There are ghettos all over the world… And typically brown people are largely ignored by the system that is there to shelter us all through, that’s why we wanted to make something that was still referencing the movie throughout, without being too South Bronx centric.”
Little Shalimar’s album is the herald of the movie’s most essential substance, and there’s a certain magic in seeing humanity and individual choices transforming an experience of exclusion, injustice and violence into a new art form. We can currently witness a resurgence of interest for hip-hop and many theories debating its roots. As a matter of fact, there are many reasons and factors that have lead to its birth. Rubble Kings is a brilliant reminder that even before the Zulu Nation, a group’s thirst for peace and solidarity prepared the ground for one of the most important cultural trends of the last 50 years.
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'Rubble Kings' is out now.
Words: Marie-Charlotte Dapoigny