Mid90s opens with 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) sneaking into his older brother Ian’s (Lucas Hedges) room despite having just received a brutal beating from the guy he looks up to. The room is adorned with ball caps on its walls, a slick sneaker collection on the floor and a massive hip-hop library that the younger sibling eagerly scans.
The vast disc collection has expected heavy hitters like BDP, Craig Mack, Gang Starr, Rakim and Wu-Tang, but also less celebrated (at the time) artists like Brand Nubian, E-40 and Tha Alkaholiks.
Like so many details in the movie, it’s thorough and carefully curated by writer/director Jonah Hill, who tells me over the phone how he worked his own love of hip-hop and skateboarding into a time capsule coming-of-age story.
“These are things I’m not a casual researcher of,” says Hill, whose argument for authenticity is also his defense for having characters in his film utter racist, homophobic and sexist language.
“[Hip-hop and skating] are things that I’ve studied as deeply as I would go in and study for any film that I’d be a part of,” he says. “It so happens to be two things that are deeply embedded in my DNA.”
I probe his early childhood hip-hop consumption – specifically, whether he gained his unquestionable affection and encyclopedic knowledge of rap during the mid-90s or after the fact. To Hill, the queries sound judgmental and authoritative, and perhaps they are.
“I don’t judge people for how or when they find things,” he says.
But I obsess over it because there’s a vast difference between experiencing hip-hop as a teen in the mid-90s versus a few years later, when the internet (and specifically Napster) made discovering and relishing all music, whatever genre, as easy as the click of a mouse.
From a strictly Toronto perspective, to be a hip-hop fan in the mid-90s meant being limited and vulnerable to the selections on MuchMusic’s RapCity and Buffalo radio station WBLK 93.7 (Flow 93.5 didn’t show up till the early 00s). It meant soaking up hip-hop along with R&B, where you’d get your doses of LL Cool J, Pac and Coolio peppered with Keith Sweat, SWV, Az Yet and Silk.
And if you wanted to dig beyond the radio edit singles and listen to entire albums, you had to head over to Music World (because it was cheaper) or HMV (because Music World didn’t have what you were looking for) and spend almost $20 on the CD (or half that on the cassette).
Just keeping up with Wu-Tang wasn’t cheap, so for those of us who grew up in low-income households it became a shared venture. I had the 36 Chambers album and Liquid Swords, another guy had Tical, and another had Cuban Linx (and remember: Wu wasn’t the only game in town at a time that had Biggie, Outkast and Nas dropping debuts).
Trading CDs and recording the albums we didn’t own to cassettes was essential. And all this just to listen to the fucking albums.
So it was with great envy that I watched the opening sequence in Mid90s: that room, those sneakers and all those CDs (including artists it would have been difficult to be familiar with without a subscription to The Source magazine).
Ian’s room is a shrine to mid-90s hip-hop culture that left me puzzled. It’s a collection and signifier of hip-hop authority that takes a great deal of privilege to acquire. How does a teen from a mid-to-low-income home afford all this?
There might be some answer on the periphery that is never explained. Or maybe it’s simply Hill’s admirable shrine to hip-hop imposed on the character’s space. The actor, who grew up in L.A.’s affluent Cheviot Hills neighbourhood with parents who worked in the entertainment industry, might have been able to afford all that.
However he acquired, discovered or researched it, Hill’s impeccable collection is just one of those moments that rings false within the film’s prescribed setting – but rings true to a nostalgia for everything worth remembering about the mid-90s.
It’s also an early warning that the authenticity in this film is selective.
See full interview with Jonah Hill here
rads@nowtoronto.com | @JustSayRad
