THE CITY of Compton is exactly 24 miles southeast from my house, where the Pacific coastline makes a sudden left turn towards Palm Springs — as though the ocean itself is trying to run for cover.
I don’t go there often. If I want to find out what’s going on in America’s most notorious urban warzone, I usually drive to my local cinema instead. For a start, it’s a lot closer; more importantly, I’m allergic to semi-automatic gunfire.
Ever since the whites fled Compton in the 1950s (including one George H. W. Bush, who sold drill bits there), the entertainment industry has made billions out of Compton’s reputation as one of the Worst Places on Earth. Murder, after all, makes for easy and inexpensive drama. As a result, the Chinese Mann movie theatre on Hollywood Boulevard is where I do most of my important catching up with the boyz and girlz from the Compton ‘hood.
The latest Hollywood offering about Compton is a documentary called Rize, directed by David LaChapelle, a fashion photographer and former student of Andy Warhol. The unlikely star of the film is Tommy the Clown, a reformed drug pusher who paints his face with balloons, wears a rainbow afro wig and performs a complex, jerky dance routine at children’s parties. Tommy believes that his dance, called “clowning”, may one day bring peace to gangland.
But like all good dance crazes, clowning has a rival: “krumping”. To krump involves puffing up the chest, punching the air and shaking the legs, all at the same time, and all at the same blood-numbing speed. LaChapelle repeatedly assures his audience that the film has not been speeded up.
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Rize presents clowning and krumping as though they are new, but the routines will be familiar to anyone who has seen a recent Missy Elliott or Black Eyed Peas video.
And the film’s message, delivered with all the moral subtlety you would expect from a fashion photographer, is that the violence and poverty of Compton has produced a higher form of art. “It’s the ballet of the ghetto,” as one performer says.
LaChapelle is probably hoping that Rize will do for clowning and krumping what “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” — a 1975 feature in New York magazine — did for disco dancing. That article, about Vincent, a Brooklyn boy in a white polyester suit who transcended poverty by strutting his funky stuff at the 2001 Odyssey Club, ultimately became Saturday Night Fever.
There was, however, a catch: the article’s British author, Nick Cohn, later admitted that he had made it all up. “I conjured up the story and presented it as fact,” he said in 1997. “I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them.”
I couldn’t help but feel that Rize also suffered from a lack of sincerity. Although LaChapelle makes an honest effort to show the misery behind Compton’s crime rate, he ends up glamorising the violence all the same. After all, without the shootings and the urban poverty, the dancing wouldn’t be as cool.
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The film left me with the same nagging feeling I got after buying the last Dr Dre album: that the black residents of Compton die so that white people can be vicariously entertained. After all, as a brand, Compton is probably worth more than the cost of cleaning the place up.
As I watched Tommy in his clown uniform, performing for the white man behind the camera, Compton began to seem like some terrible circus, with Hollywood as the ringmaster. LaChapelle told Newsweek: “When I go over there (to Compton), I’m finding riches, not poverty. There is a poverty of the spirit in Beverly Hills.”
The worst that can happen you to in Beverly Hills is a bad nose job. In Compton, your 5-year-old might get his head blown off on your front lawn. Poverty of spirit seems like a pretty good deal.
I wish the clowners and krumpers would take a year off from defining American popular culture and apply their creative genius to getting rid of the crackhouses and the Kalashnikovs. Before that happens, however, I’m sure I’ll be back to the Chinese Mann for another ghetto update: I hear that Sly Stallone, the former Rocky star, is making a thriller out of the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.
I can hardly wait.
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War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres is published by John Murray.