Word: baadasssss
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Jump to Hollywood's blaxploitation era in the 1960s, when blacks suddenly were allowed to make movies told from our point of view. Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song--an ode to a wronged black man on the run from the cops--introduced the lead character as a "baadasssss nigger coming back to collect some dues!" And that "nigger" in the film, as Van Peebles tells it, snapped the streak of "liberal, sort of nice movies where we always ended up dead...
Thompson Room, Barker Center. Oct. 25-27, from 4:00 until 5:30 p.m. Melvin Van Peebles, the maverick filmmaker best known as the writer, director and star of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” will be delivering this semester’s Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures. The LeRoy lecture series is co-sponsored by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, the Department of African and African American Studies, and Basic Civitas Books (a division of the Perseus Books Group). They are held in honor of the Harlem Renaissance...
...mean like sexy bitch.") There is dialogue--alternately inspired, funny and contrived--about how black men use whites' fear of them and whether it "uplifts the race" for a black man to hook up with a white woman. Even the label's name borrows from Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the seminal blaxploitation movie. Platinum asks, Who's blaxploiting whom...
...view to their antipodes--militant groups like the Black Panthers. Blaxploitation didn't have a dream; it had a shotgun. And if many of its heroes were pimps and pushers, at least they could do the pushing without getting punished for it onscreen. Melvin van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's BaadAsssss Song (1971)--"Rated X by an all-white jury," bragged the poster--stunned audiences simply by showing a strong black man who fought, had explicit sex and tangled with white cops, yet didn't get killed for it by the end of the movie. Blaxploitation's heroes, men and women...
...BaadAsssss also examines the music, which the larger (i.e., white) audience probably knows better than the movies. There is archival footage of Shaft's director, Gordon Parks, coaching Hayes as he records the movie's funk-legend theme, and critic Elvis Mitchell explains how Curtis Mayfield's antidrug score for Superfly subtly rebuts the movie's pusher-glorifying plot (the same tension as exists in much gangsta rap). The documentary confirms blaxploitation's lasting influence on music and movies by interviewing Afeni Shakur (mother of late rapper Tupac) and Quentin Tarantino, the white boy whom blaxploitation made. The Oscars...