Block Party is just plain fun. From the minute the menu loaded–a great clip of Chappelle, bullhorn in hand, yelling at a marching band and dancing–you get invited in; the sense of play makes this one of the best concert films I’ve ever seen, and I’m not even a particular fan of any of the musical acts (admiring all, but only really digging the Fugees on my own time). Like The Last Waltz, I ended up loving the performances because of so much context, so clear a sense of the performers’ joy, despite my prior disinterest in the musicians.
The movie does a wonderful job capturing the infectious energy of Chappelle, intercutting performances with clips of Dave preparing the site, encouraging folks from his hometown in Ohio to come (with golden tickets and bus) to the show in Bed-Stuy, goofing with the site’s residents. The film slips in sideways a pretty hard-edged critique (of racism, of politics, of the relationship between those two and celebrity) while remaining never less than party-minded; in fact, and this is what I’ve always loved about Chappelle (and separates his challenges from a comic like Sarah Silverman) is that sense of invitation. It’s a party, it’s silly… even as his material (and the musicians’ performances) remains explicitly political and incisive.
He has a fantastic joke about the D.C. snipers, that he slips in after a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences (I won’t give it away) . . . and the joke conveys yet complicates, affirms while not simply asserting the problems discussed: the joke flirts with racism, confuses those of us in the audience just marked by the discussion as a problem. Great, great stuff. I want more Chappelle, and I’m also mightily impressed by Michel Gondry’s work directing.
I agree with reynolds. This is a terrific film. I wasn’t expecting so much good music, though. I guess I was thinking there would be more performances from Chappelle. He appears onstage at his own block party for all of about 5 minutes. Most of the really good stuff with Chappelle is, as reynolds has pointed out, at rehearsals and days before the party, walking around with a bullhorn.
By the end of the film, I had a slight feeling of confusion, brought on, perhaps, by my sense that there was a missed opportunity, or an opportunity only partly seized: to document the reunion of the Fugees. When Erykah Badu hits the stage, the film becomes something else entirely. She steals the show. Maybe this is just the logic of the block party, and therefore it’s to Chappelle’s credit that the camera gives us no more than what the crowd gathered at Quincy and Downing had: a beautiful but brief moment in time. We get a few glimpses backstage, but then it’s over. Everyone’s gone.
And this is why I was, and still am, puzzled by the amount of time Chappelle and his director, Michel Gondry, devote to the odd couple living in the Broken Angel house. Not only do they take up more (it seems) screen time than Chappelle, but one scene in particular is looped.
In the end, I think this film was not about Chappelle, but it definitely was for him; it was something he needed to do. In one backstage scene, someone (I can’t remember who) explains that after Half-Baked, Dave suddenly had all these white frat boys for fans, and that this isn’t what he’s all about (as he’s explaining this, you can see on Chappelle’s face that this is a very real concern). It’s a telling moment–I mean, look around the web and you’ll see dozens of descriptions of Block Party that read, more or less, the exact same way: “If you’re expecting Half-Baked, you’ll be disappointed.” Or “this film is no Half-Baked.” For Chappelle to surround himself with socially conscious hip hop artists for just one night, for just a single moment, and to share it with anyone who wanted or cared to join in, must have been not just therapeutic but spiritually uplifting.
i liked this film a lot, but as some reviews have pointed out it evades one of the central problems that both chappelle and most of the acts on the stage face: their audience is predominantly white. of course, this is true not just of so-called conscious hip-hop but of mainstream hip-hop as well, but it is far more true of acts like common and the roots (who actually begin their album things fall apart with an exchange from mo better blues about the audiences of modern jazz). in fact, ?uestlove from the roots raises this question during one of the interludes in the film, pointing out that chappelle has the same problem, and chappelle, who looks uncomfortable throughout, interrupts with a non-sequitur joke.
it is interesting to read the staging of the show and of the film as a way of asserting an audience for the space of the show/film that most of the performers don’t get to have during their regular gigs.
I think that non-sequitur joke, in the passage Arnab notes, is the one I reference above… and I think that joke is aimed AT, not for or around, the white audiences, an oblique yet tangible challenge which will produce disparate readings by black and non-black (and predominantly white) audiences. Do we laugh at the stereotype in the sniper gag, and if so are we then implicated in its racism? Is Chappelle being “racist” in repeating such a joke?
That has always struck me as the brilliance of Chappelle’s post-Half-Baked work: to get the joke one has to recognize and affirm some racist underpinnings. (It recalls for me his blind black KKK character…) I realize the obvious challenge: some people laughing may in fact just be racist. And that seems to be why he rejected the show, but… I still think it’s far more provocative and challenging, and is reflexive about the problems of production and audience Arnab smartly outlines.
where i differ with you mike, is that i didn’t see “a serious discussion of the pressures placed on black performers who are celebrated by predominantly white audiences”. i saw ?uestlove trying to start that discussion and chappelle uneasily pulling away to the more oblique kind of thing he’s so good at. partly, i think, because the film is not in that mode, and partly because the question almost derails the logic of the block party.
i think this tension is probably a large part of why he ended the show. not simply that his inside-out explorations of racism etc. were in danger of being taken literally by much of his audience, but that this whole audience thing is a bit of a conundrum. if you watch the live audiences between bits on the show (and in the block party) they’re predominantly black, most of the cultural material for the bits comes from what me might lamely call a “black experience”, the address is in a black idiom, much of the critique is internal. it seems to me that chappelle’s imagined audience is a predominantly black one (as it is for almost all conscious rappers whose critiques of the limits of gangsta lifestyles etc. is heard mostly by white kids in college towns and not by the people they’re addressing). but the reality ends up being different. even for someone like chappelle whose comedy is predicated on going beyond it, identity politics returns in the form of the audience.
edit to add: there is also a class thing happening here, but i’ll let somebody smarter tease that out.
Your reading makes sense. And I think we’ve come at this in other conversations–I tend to privilege the oblique “complexities” of the comic mode, sometimes at the cost of a more direct engagement with the politics of direct engagement.
And yet…I’m still not sure I’d call Chappelle’s joke a derailing, more of a performative engagement *with* ?uestlove’s remarks. Your point that such a reframing may miss (or misread, or mistake) the realities of audience identity is well-taken.
oh, i don’t mean any of this as a “nailing” of chappelle, i enjoy his oblique approach immensely (silly is always better than serious–the lamest moment in the film is wyclef jean lecturing to the kids in the school). i think his comedy tries to go outside the categories of race and identity that even a critique such as ?uestlove’s operates within. i think the problem he faces is that he’s trying to do post-identity politics in an identity politics world. and i think this is partly why he pulls that conversation away in the film–he takes it into his mode. i think the film falls short of greatness not because it evades this question (as i somewhat moralistically put it in my first comment) but because it fails to deploy it as a productive tension in its own form. what this would look like, of course, i have no idea but it reads well!
also, and this is where i was trying to get out of feeling out the class stuff, his comic vision comes from a very different milieu than the kind of stuff that has become commodified as “black comedy”. where even the rappers he hangs out with are locatable within a larger framework of hip hop (formally, for example), chappelle is sort of out there on his own as a black comedian. i’m sure there’s a lot of writing on this kind of thing with reference to writers like percival everett etc. but i think for performers the question of audience is more insistent and direct.
Nice. It’s a smart read.
Now let’s get back to John’s question: how and why does that odd couple creep so often into the film?