Beats, Rhymes and Cin­e­ma: King of New York

This essay series looks at how five films released dur­ing rap’s gold­en era – King of New York, New Jack City, Juice, CB4 and Men­ace II Soci­ety – helped to shape Amer­i­can hip hop cul­ture. We speak to film­mak­ers, rap­pers and his­to­ri­ans to find out why these icon­ic works con­tin­ue to endure.

When Bronx-born direc­tor Abel Ferrara’s King of New York pre­miered at the 1990 New York Film Fes­ti­val, the first reporter to ask a ques­tion after the screen­ing barked: ​“This film is an abom­i­na­tion. Why aren’t you giv­ing the pro­ceeds to some drug rehab pro­gram?” Such was the out­rage among the audi­ence that night that screen­writer Nicholas St John was booed off the stage.

Yet while crit­ics refused to embrace the bru­tal gang­ster film, which glam­or­is­es the rise of drug lord Frank White (played with Shake­speare­an swag­ger by Christo­pher Walken), the hip hop com­mu­ni­ty wel­comed it with open arms, enshrin­ing it as a cult clas­sic. In White, a char­ac­ter that spreads phil­an­thropy and vio­lence in equal mea­sure, here was a fig­ure who seemed to per­fect­ly encap­su­late gang­ster rap’s many con­tra­dic­tions. When The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G. start­ed refer­ring to him­self as the ​‘Black Frank White’ in vers­es, the film gained a rev­er­ence in hip hop cir­cles com­pa­ra­ble to Bri­an De Palma’s Scar­face.

King of New York’s con­nec­tion to hip hop cul­ture is evi­dent from the get-go. The film opens with drug deal­ers Jim­my Jump (Lau­rence Fish­burne, all ani­mal­is­tic rage) and Test Tube (Steve Busce­mi, with a name that’s sup­posed to ref­er­ence his ugli­ness), who are both on the White pay­roll, mur­der­ing a Columbian gang in a botched cocaine deal. The pair’s cloth­ing, which includes hom­burg hats, black track­suits and flashy gold chains, are an obvi­ous nod to New York’s Run DMC – a rap group syn­ony­mous with hip hop fash­ion in the late 1980s.

Mean­while, White’s crew is made up almost entire­ly of African-Amer­i­can men and women – a fact not lost on the mafia, who repeat­ed­ly refer to White as a ​“nig­ger lover.” When White lat­er goes to Lit­tle Italy and mur­ders a racist Ital­ian mob­ster in cold blood, it’s an incred­i­bly sub­ver­sive act, which mir­rored how the black­ness of rap music had start­ed to elim­i­nate the white régime that had pre­vi­ous­ly dom­i­nat­ed the pop charts, accord­ing to Dylan Cave, part of the cura­to­r­i­al team at the BFI Nation­al Archive. ​“Frank White is replac­ing the old patri­ar­chal régime with this new egal­i­tar­i­an way,” he notes.

Some of the film’s rap cul­ture metaphors are inten­tion­al, accord­ing to Joe Delia, who cre­at­ed the music for the film. ​“Abel was com­plete­ly in tune with how hip hop was impact­ing New York,” he explains. ​“He always loved Bob Dylan and was see­ing the same kind of poet­ry and social com­men­tary com­ing out of the mouths of rap­pers.” Sub­se­quent­ly, Fer­rara, who has also direct­ed grit­ty inde­pen­dent films such as Driller Killer and Bad Lieu­tenant, struck up a friend­ship with Philadel­phia rap­per School­ly D, a man Ice‑T once cred­it­ed as being the first gang­ster rapper.

Dur­ing the film’s cli­mat­ic night­club shootout, White nods his head to School­ly D’s jazz-enthused street anthem ​‘Am I Black Enough For You?’, a song which con­tains the defi­ant dec­la­ra­tion, ​“All’s I need is my black­ness, some oth­ers seem to lack this.” Accord­ing to Delia, who reveals that Fer­rara want­ed nat­ur­al sound through­out the film in order to cap­ture the ​“grim­i­ness of New York,” Walken picked up a lot of man­ner­isms from School­ly D, which in turn cre­at­ed an authen­tic­i­ty. ​“Chris already had this incred­i­ble move­ment and motion, but sub­tle things such as the hip hop dance he does ear­ly on in the film were pos­si­bly inspired by School­ly vis­it­ing the set,” he reveals.

Frank White is a walk­ing con­tra­dic­tion. On the one hand he wants to build a hos­pi­tal in Harlem; on the oth­er he unapolo­get­i­cal­ly dis­trib­utes cocaine direct­ly to the city’s poor­est cit­i­zens. How­ev­er, Delia believes this is part of rea­son why White – who at one point tells the police, ​“I’m not your prob­lem, I’m just a busi­ness­man” – res­onat­ed with rap­pers like The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G. at the time. ​“He has both this hunger to be a Robin Hood kind of char­ac­ter and also to make a prof­it out of fear,” Delia says. ​“Frank tries to empow­er women yet also objec­ti­fies them; his con­tra­dic­tions mir­ror so many gang­ster rap­pers [such as Biggie].”

Accord­ing to West Coast rap leg­end Ras Kass, the film’s por­tray­al of law enforce­ment is anoth­er rea­son for its appeal with­in the rap com­mu­ni­ty. At one point David Caruso’s crooked cop hatch­es an auda­cious plan to mur­der White, with var­i­ous NYPD offi­cers behav­ing in an aggres­sive man­ner more typ­i­cal of Fishburne’s unhinged street gang­ster. ​“If you had Walkie Talkies, guns and heli­copters, you’d feel like a bul­ly too,” Kass says. ​“The film showed us the police were the biggest gang of them all.”

Accord­ing to urban leg­end, Walken once left a voice­mail on The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G.’s phone, jok­ing: ​“I am the real King of New York!” And Kass believes his per­for­mance, which he calls ​“an ode to hip hop”, has allowed the actor to tran­scend race: ​“Yeah, he’s white, but Walken comes across as total­ly hip hop. When­ev­er I used to go to New York, I’d hear sto­ries about him real­ly being about that gang­ster life too. Walken’s per­for­mance just felt so authentic.”

The King of New York is acknowl­edged as one of the first exam­ples of hood cin­e­ma, with its hip hop-heavy sound­track and visu­al style set­ting the tone for sub­se­quent genre touch­stones like Boyz n the Hood. Yet the film’s lega­cy is per­haps best gauged in rela­tion to its impact on hip hop culture’s com­petive­ness. When The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G. rapped, ​“Chop­pin rocks overnight / The nig­ga Big­gie Smalls tryin’ ta turn into the black Frank White!” it cre­at­ed a sit­u­a­tion where the port­ly rap­per had to embrace the role of rap’s King of New York fig­ure. And after Biggie’s death in March 1997, oth­er New York rap­pers such as Jay‑Z and Nas jos­tled for this title via a series of vicious bat­tle raps.

Whether inten­tion­al or not, the char­ac­ter of Frank White became a bea­con for lyri­cal suprema­cy among the east coast’s elite rap­pers. To them, the pow­er, mon­ey and respect that came with becom­ing the ​‘King of New York’ meant absolute­ly everything.