Reactionary Reviews | Notes From The Underground
Notes is documentary in it’s truest form. It is a document that aligns to the ethos of what it is documenting. An act of reverence. Refraining from any examination or critique of that it is historicizing. It is here that it both fails and succeeds.
Following the recollections of Cape Town Hip Hop legends, Ready D, Rozzano X, Issac Mutant, Kim Possible and others, interspersed with the viewpoints of younger hip hop adherents, Lyrix, Driemanskap, and Dope St Jude, the film primarily focuses on the role of hip hop in the late struggle, the history of the Cape Flats from District 6, the beginnings of Cape hip hop, with a loose discussion on the provenance of afrikaans, and the Cape hip hop rhythms, none of this in great depth, but all of it with gravitas.
Staying true to the viewpoints of it’s subjects is one of Notes strengths. It is less a journey into the realities of Cape Hip Hop but the depth of feelings about it, a nostalgia for a time when it felt possible to change the world.
The films strongest moments are when it holds back and let’s it’s subjects speak. Ready D talking about the gummy rhythms of the first POC track, the occasional reference to Mr Devious, the moments where an old hip hop head spits in that old hip hop head rhythm, the honesty of these moments, the non-critical approach, and visual reverence for it’s subjects, the resistance to making poverty porn of the places the story takes place in, these are Notes’s triumphs.
But in visually evoking the nostalgia evident from the subjects, at times the environments seem too pretty, the light too gorgeous, it avoids any critique of contemporary living conditions of such revered elders.
There is an ache for more in-depth examination, at times it feels that the film gives only lip service to trans-culture, intersectionality and more contemporary concerns. In the starkness of it’s portrayal, in the weight of it’s representations, it does slyer, perhaps unconscious work, and simply portrays women in hip hop only in relation to men. And perhaps this was a wise decision as a history not a document of now, but without that critique it does rather feel that the filmmakers might not know Dostevsky at all.
To be lost in the significance of what was, to see how much of now is rooted in that, brings a dignity to the history, even as it allows us to wonder why the subjects live as they do, why the form has not changed radically in the decades since it emerged, without ever making a meal out of it.
Rich with excellent archive photographs and video, layered with contemporary footage of the landscape of the Cape Flats – a sequence of b-boying in different settings is close to transcendental. And in the final analysis, it is an automatic pass to any film that features the monumental sound clip from POC’s Die Stem… “Excellent, finally a black president.”
This is history spoken by the people who were that history and as such it is a beautiful thing that this history allows them their victories.