Documentary captures the art of hip-hop

Tuesday: Teach class at Duke University. Leave Duke at 6 p.m. and fly to Harvard University in Cambridge.  Wake up the next morning and teach class at Harvard. Fly back.

These were the trials of 9th Wonder, a hip-hop producer and rapper and, subsequently, director Kenneth Price during the making of The Hip- Hop fellow, which premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on Saturday.

The documentary film is an offshoot of 9th Wonder and Price’s first collaboration, The Wonder Year.

While screening The Wonder Year at Harvard, Dr. Marcyliena Morgan encouraged 9th to apply for their year-long hip-hop fellowship. He did and the rest, they say, is history. 

But not before Price was there and ready to make his next documentary film.

“There’s a hip-hop archive at Harvard of all places, and 9th is such a dynamic artist,” Price said. “To see him go up there and be a part of that world was something I thought would be a good story to tell.”

Both 9th Wonder, also known as Patrick Douthit, and Price hail from North Carolina. 9th grew up in Winston-Salem and studied history at North Carolina Central University before making it big with the group Little Brother. He would go on to work with prominent artists such as Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z.

Meanwhile, Price went to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington for his undergraduate degree and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for his master’s in media studies.

The essential question being asked in their film is: what needs to be done in order to change the current momentum, and widely negative, perception of hip-hop music?

“We should celebrate Kendrick Lamar more than 2 Chainz,” said 9th Wonder, who attended the Full Frame screening of the film and led a Q&A session along with Price.

But more than whom we choose to worship, where hip-hop lives and breathes needs to be addressed, 9th said.

“We can’t let radio be our judge anymore, we can’t let TV be our judge anymore,” said 9th. “I think the biggest thing we can do to help reconcile that is communication between the generations.”

To reconcile the generational gap means knowing the history of the music, appreciating who is sampling who and why. And as 9th Wonder said, “It may take a Bobby Bland record to do so.”

For his research project as a fellow, entitled “These Are the Breaks,” 9th looked at his own top 10 albums and investigated the original albums that were sampled in them.

“You can take it back as far as like old soul music and the civil rights movement and just New York in the 1970s,” Price said.

While we see 9th Wonder in the film taking his students – in the class he co-taught with Morgan – back to classic records, Price uses the same strategy in the structure of his documenting.

He segments The Hip-Hop Fellow with quintessential albums like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders, Nas’ Illmatic, Jay-Z’s Blue Print and Little Brother’s The Minstrel Show.

Artists and producers – such as Young Guru, Phonte, Ali Shaheed Muhammad – all comment about what the albums meant to them and the relevancy they still have.

It’s a resource for the millennials of today who might not understand the impact these albums had on the art form and the listeners back then.

Price said, “You have young adults now that weren’t alive when Biggie or Tupac were alive. So basically – and this isn’t a bad thing, it’s just how life is – for their entire growing up, Kanye West is almost like an old school guy to them now.”

For Price, it wasn’t about having big names drop knowledge about big name albums. It was about the respective artist’s tie to the subject. 

Kendrick Lamar’s tie is that he knows and worked with 9th Wonder in the past. But also, 9th was studying Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, but has not actively worked with Dr. Dre himself.

“So who has? Kendrick Lamar has,” Price said. “So to hear the impact The Chronic had on him, growing up in Compton, that was what we were after.”

Price’s collaborations with 9th Wonder snowballed after doing his master’s thesis on The Wonder Year, as it led not only to The Hip-Hop Fellow but also to countless other music videos directed by Price himself. Some of the projects include Buckshot and 9th’s Shorty Left, Phonte featuring Evidence and Big K.R.I.T’s The Life of Kings, and numerous videos for Rapsody.

 “Music videos can be produced in a small amount of time,” Price said. “You don’t have to worry about audio. You don’t have to record dialogue. You’re not writing a script. So music videos are easier on that front.”

Looking back on his time in college, Price said that for filmmakers – more than knowledge or technique – school allows a necessary experimentation phase.

“I lived in Wilmington and worked on big movie sets and realized that wasn’t for me. I tried stop motion animation stuff,” said Price. “I think that was the biggest advantage of going to school all those years, just having that time to make mistakes and shoot projects and work with other people.”

Fifty years from now, maybe even sooner, when hip-hop history degrees are offered across the country, when the art form itself will have evolved to its next level, The Hip-Hop Fellow documentary will be a tool and an insight to those future generations.