Every generation has movies and songs that it can point to that play central roles in shaping or identifying that specific generation. Sometimes, those movies and songs can transcend cultural lines, but other times, they indicate a specific culture or sub-culture of a generation.
These media indicative of a culture are usually refered to as things we were “raised in” or “raised on.” For me, and many like me, the time of my upbringing would be the late 1980′s and early-mid 1990′s.
In the 90′s, a new movie genre labeled by Hollywood and others, as “Hood Movies” or “Gangsta Movies,” became popular. The movies were labeled as such because the settings were generally Black American “ghettos.” These films depicted so-called inner-city violence/crime, street gangs, and the drug “underworld.” But, an underlying principle was the moral or lesson taught through the storyline. Some of the most popular are: Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, and New Jack City. I can still remember, in the early 2000′s, traveling to the movie store and browsing the “African-American Cinema” section to fill my DVD collection with these inspiring films.
In 2011, through the use of Hip Hop, a music genre that also marked the mentioned era, Lupe Fiasco vocally creates a montage of some of the scenes from classic “1990′s classic Black cinema.” Thanks to the advent of the Internet, Dolobeats was able to create a video montage of those scenes and deliver it to us to be inspired all over again.
In the words of Lupe Fiasco, “These are just a illustration of a few scenes that helped raise a generation.”
Scenes include: Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, Dead Presidents, Juice, South Central, Colors, Poetic Justice, New Jersey Drive, New Jack City, Sugar Hill, & Paid In Full.
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