This is the Life hails the god MCs of West Coast hip-hop, 20 years later
Friday, April 3rd, 2009Something mystical must have seeped through L.A.’s smog near the dawn of the 1990s. What else would account for the birth of a heady hip-hop movement, more god-like than gangsta?
No, this is not another ode to Dr. Dre and the N.W.A. legacy, West Coast icons though they remain. But while they capitalized off of L.A.’s legendary, gang-banging lifestyle, a collective of unheard MCs were busy representing the Good Life.
Like the steady proliferation of wack MCs, rap documentaries flood the digital airspace faster than it takes to download “exclusive” footage nowadays. To the contrary, This is the Life should be required viewing for a hip-hop generation stuck on YouTube.
It chronicles the largely unknown but influential underground scene that organically sprouted in December ’89 from a health food spot called the Good Life Café in Leimert Park. Responsible for spawning lyrical giants including the members of Freestyle Fellowship (Myka 9, Aceyalone, Self Jupiter, Peace), Chali2na, Medusa, Ellay Khule, Chillin Villain Empire, Volume Ten, Pigeon John and a host of others, the weekly Good Life freestyle hip-hop battles became the breeding ground for the Left Coast’s fertile, underground intelligentsia. Not only did the scene uplift a culture, it impacted an industry even as it remained oblivious to the narrowly defined aesthetics of commercial rap.
As a result, the majority of the Good Life MCs never received their just shine — West Coast sunsets notwithstanding. Now available on DVD (at GoodLifeLove.com), the award-winning 2007 documentary — which also makes its cable premiere tonight on Showtime, Fri., April 3 — aims to change that.
We talked with the film’s director, Ava DuVernay, who witnessed it all as one-half of the Good Life duo Figures of Speech, to see how she found herself cast in the middle of a movement it took hindsight to truly appreciate.
When most people think about West Coast hip-hop in the ’90s, gangster rap is the first thing that comes to mind. Did the Good Life scene spark as a direct alternative to that?
They were really running parallel. But the thing is, at the time in Los Angeles, the Good Life scene was the big deal in town. If you lived here, and you were into hip-hop at a certain age, you had the Good Life, you were about that type of lyrical styling, styling really fast, that moving, kind of creative lyrical quality. Gangster rap was kind of corny, but that was what the radio was loving and that was what people were seeing from us. But if you lived here and you were into hip-hop, nobody was really trying to do that.
That’s kind of like Atlanta now. The sound that Atlanta is known for nationally and internationally, people in Atlanta who are really into hip-hop are like ‘This is so corny.’
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They’ve been called the black Eurythmics. They even ate pancakes with Prince.