Oh BBC Four, we do love you, but this was an uncomfortable proposition from the start. We watch your pop music documentaries, because – let's face it – nobody else is making any, but so often they are pretty thin gruel. There are gems, of course, generally the ones focusing on an individual artist or label, or super-specific genre or time period. But the broad-sweep ones are more often than not a hodge-podge, seemingly governed in their narrative by what library footage was available, but also by a cripplingly old, white, rock establishment view of history.
Even when soul and reggae are the subjects, it's always the dad-friendly stuff, and the story inevitably peters out around 1983, while the recent extensive history of independent labels was a real shocker. Its stories were well told, but its implicit message that – bar a couple of minutes on rave – white guitar bands were the start and end of independent music since 1976 was historically inaccurate and frankly a bit gross. So seeing that the channel was turning its attention to rap – and to the political aspects of rap at that – was a bit like hearing that your headmaster is taking street dance lessons for an end-of-term spectacular.
Practically nothing is said of post-2000 hip hop
OK, the positives first. There are some major ones. There are no old, white, broadsheet/monthly magazine journalists in this programme (and yes I am aware of certain ironies in me writing this, thanks): almost all the talking heads are black, either academics or figures from within hip hop itself. It's presented by enormously charming Brit rap veteran Rodney P, who does the thoughtful and sometimes emotional “my personal journey” links a whole lot better than most professional TV presenters can. And almost all of them have something interesting to contribute at some point in the 90 minutes. There's the odd profound and deftly expressed insight into deeper historical forces behind rap tropes, like the pervasiveness of the industrialised prison system in the USA feeding its hostility, or how rap at its brashest is only reflecting wider American capitalist values, yet gets judged more harshly than other crass consumerism.
But jeez, if you want to get the absolute encapsulation of the old establishment view of hip hop, spelled out as if to people who've never heard a rap record in their life, this is it right here. With maybe one exception, every single person speaking in this programme appears to be over 40: BBC Four has temporarily pushed aside one ageing orthodoxy in favour of another. There's even a moment where Russell Simmonds talks about Puffy, Jay-Z and Dr Dre – incredibly wealthy men in their mid-forties or older – as the new generation.
Not once but twice in the course of proceedings, we are earnestly told about “the four elements of hip hop” – rapping, dancing, graffiti and deejaying – and the secret fifth element, knowledge, as being the essence of hip hop culture: which perhaps was true at the inception of the movement, but hasn't been a seriously current view for twenty-odd years. Endlessly, a semi-mythical mid-Eighties golden age, when KRS-1, Rakim and Public Enemy were supposedly speaking just to enlightened black audiences, is held up as hip hop's ideal form, and pretty much the only modern acts shown or spoken about positively are those who hark back most to that ideal, like Kendrick Lamarr, Dead Prez and Mos Def.
The consensus is that, though the celebration of acquisition in Puff Daddy and Snoop Dogg's records is understandable given the form's roots in poverty, they were the start of a cultural decline leading through 50 Cent and into... well, it's never really quite clear what. Beyond the very occasional nod to Jay-Z, practically nothing is said of post-2000 hip hop. There's no Lil Wayne, no Outkast, no Young Thug, no Kanye – all figures who have helped to radically redefine not just rap but conversations about and within black America – let alone younger figures who are setting the cultural tone for these fervid times. Constantly there is the sense that hip hop is only political if it is overtly didactic, with almost no acceptance that some of its greatest social impact can come when it's at its bleakest, silliest or most problematic. You can just hear all the Guardian comment thread posters cheering “Hurrah, yes, all that bling-bling is just so meaningless!”
There was SO much slack and repetition in this documentary that could have been cut
Not only are most of hip hop's most provocative, disturbing, funny, youthful, entertaining and currently relevant sides written out of history, but so is sex, in all senses. Women are utterly absent from this documentary, apart from in one brief and wince-makingly tokenistic section in the middle, where a couple of women commentators are wheeled on briefly to comment on, y'know, women's stuff, then wheeled back off so the old geezers can get back to their good-old-days chat. This section is an uncomfortable mix of prurient and puritanical as it creates a false dichotomy between sexy women rappers (Lil Kim and Nicki Minaj) and worthy ones (the inevitable Queen Latifah flashes up on screen for a second).
Damn, could they not have found even 60 seconds to acknowledge that Beyoncé, one of the biggest cultural icons in the world now, is using the tools and language of hip hop to deliver powerful social messages? There's a painful, but painfully funny moment during this, where British rapper Estelle is gamely defending women's right to dress how the fuck they want, when Rodney P asks her: “What does hip-hop look like when you take the women out?” Without missing a beat, she smiles “It looks like a very one-dimensional cockfight”.
There were 90 minutes to play with here, huge parts of which consisted of old men from the music industry, some clearly no longer at their sharpest, talking at quite some length. It's understandable that Rodney P was keen to meet his hero Rakim, and his place in the documentary is deserved – he is indeed, as is driven home many times, one of the very best rappers in history – but did we really need to have so much of the show taken up by him answering questions that weren't asked? Did we, indeed, need to be told about the four elements twice? No one contributor is actually terrible at any point, but the uniformity of tone and assumptions is relentless. Rodney P is a brilliant screen presence, in many cases more interesting than the interviewees, and just about carries the whole thing single-handed - let's hope this leads to him being on screen more in future - but deserves better from the researchers and especially editors.
Hip hop deserves better: if this had been just one in a series or season of contrasting personal perspectives - presented explicitly as a history of the Eighties and early Nineties - it would have been great, but obviously the channel were never going to give as much airtime to the biggest musical movement of the modern age as they did to, say, indie rock. There is SO much slack and repetition in this documentary that could have been cut, leaving space instead instead for people as sharp and funny as Estelle managed to be in her 30 seconds. Space for anyone but forty- and fiftysomething men repeating their orthodoxies at great length, in fact. But then I guess it wouldn't have been a BBC Four music doc.