Beats, Rhymes and Cin­e­ma: New Jack City

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.

His­tor­i­cal­ly, no sub­stance has changed the social dynam­ic of America’s inner cities more than crack cocaine. Many have not­ed how the drug spread like a plague in the 1980s, with crack’s high puri­ty and low prices chang­ing America’s drug sup­ply chain overnight. And thanks to Pres­i­dent Ronald Reagan’s infa­mous War on Drugs, just about every­body asso­ci­at­ed with crack was vil­i­fied by the main­stream media. Deal­ers, addicts, crack babies – the drug cast a ​“dark cloud” over Amer­i­ca. But while the hard­line media agen­da was to demonise crack cul­ture, America’s bur­geon­ing hip hop cul­ture was busy human­is­ing those caught up in it.

The rise of rap music went hand-in-hand with America’s crack epi­dem­ic, with some rap­pers warn­ing against the drug (Kool Moe Dee’s 1986 song ​‘Dee Crack Mon­ster’ refers to the drug as the ​“dev­il”) and oth­ers paint­ing its deal­ers as entre­pre­neur­ial fig­ures (such as NWA’s 1988 sin­gle ​‘Dope­man’). Direc­tor Mario von Pee­bles’ 1991 film New Jack City bold­ly did both, expos­ing how crack could lead to a path of oppor­tu­ni­ty as well as destruction.

The film doc­u­ments the ascent of Nino Brown (a career-defin­ing turn by Wes­ley Snipes), a ris­ing Harlem drug push­er who quick­ly realis­es crack’s lucra­tive poten­tial. He is hunt­ed by Scot­ty Apple­ton, an under­cov­er detec­tive played by gang­ster rap­per Ice‑T, who wants to turn foot­sol­dier-turned-addict Pook­ie (Chris Rock) into a weapon against Nino’s ​‘Cash Mon­ey Broth­ers’ drug empire.

Thomas Lee Wright based the film’s orig­i­nal script on real-life ​’70s hero­in traf­fick­er Nicky Barnes. How­ev­er, after his SPIN arti­cle about Baltimore’s teenage crack gangs made waves, free­lance jour­nal­ist Bar­ry Michael Coop­er was approached to mod­ernise the screen­play. ​“I was broke and work­ing part-time at the docks load­ing trucks,” Coop­er recalls. ​“George Jack­son [an exec­u­tive pro­duc­er with Richard Pryor’s Indi­go films] called the load­ing bay and asked me to take a look at this screen­play. I knew instant­ly I had to change the sto­ry from hero­in to crack, and from then to now. The film need­ed to be a social doc­u­ment of what we were sur­round­ed by.”

The film’s most emo­tive social com­men­tary comes through Pook­ie, a twitchy drug phene who cries at how, ​“the crack keeps call­ing me and call­ing me!” Harlem-born Coop­er reflects, ​“When I was 18, I had one foot in the library and one foot in the street. I thought it was cool to sniff coke, so I’d go down to 123^rd street and occa­sion­al­ly buy off the deal­ers. Pook­ie was based on the return cus­tomers I used to meet. A lot of them were Viet­nam vets: just good guys who couldn’t escape this chem­i­cal slave mas­ter that held so much sway over their lives.”

Rock’s brave per­for­mance asks audi­ences to empathise with crack addicts rather than dis­miss them. His hon­est por­trait of a black drug addict opened the doors for sim­i­lar char­ac­ters such as Andre Royo’s ​“Bub­bles” in The Wire and even Dave Chappelle’s Tyrone Big­gums, with the lat­ter mir­ror­ing the livewire comedic ener­gy Rock brought to the role. ​“I remem­ber watch­ing the dailies and the scene where Chris is in rehab and says ​‘I don’t want to die’ had us all cry­ing,” Coop­er adds. ​“He should have been nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar, but the idea of a black film about crack ter­ri­fied most of white Hol­ly­wood back in 1991.” New Jack City made over $50m at the US box office, show­ing a side of Amer­i­can soci­ety that main­stream audi­ences had rarely been exposed to before.

If Rock’s Pook­ie is the heart of the film, then Snipes’ per­for­mance as Nino Brown is its soul. Coop­er want­ed to write the char­ac­ter as a walk­ing con­tra­dic­tion, a man whose heart­en­ing social con­scious­ness (in one scene, he hands out turkeys to the poor) is only matched by his bru­tal ambi­tion (he lat­er boasts, ​“You got­ta rob to get rich in the Rea­gan era!”). This dual­i­ty, much like 1990’s King of New York and its com­pli­cat­ed pro­tag­o­nist Frank White, intel­li­gent­ly mir­rors the con­tra­dic­tions of rap music itself.

But look a lit­tle deep­er and Nino is just as much a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the para­noia felt by black Amer­i­ca dur­ing the 1980s. When he pas­sion­ate­ly declares, ​“Ain’t no uzis made in Harlem! There ain’t no pop­py fields in Harlem! This is the Amer­i­can way!”, he points to hid­den forces hav­ing had a hand in New York City’s crack epi­dem­ic. ​“Why is it all the drugs come from only one area in Harlem?” Coop­er asks. ​“The film is about how there was a clev­er­ly designed strat­e­gy behind every­thing going on from the drugs to the gen­tri­fi­ca­tion. We now know the CIA might have been involved in crack cocaine traf­fick­ing, and I want­ed to also show that Nino was some­body cre­at­ed by a white pow­er structure.”

There is a com­ic book qual­i­ty to New Jack City’s visu­al style, with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Fran­cis Kenny’s gar­ish colours evok­ing Tim Burton’s Bat­man. When we first see Nino’s man­sion, it is filled with goth­ic art­work and atmos­pher­ic can­dles. In fact, it looks more like the lair of Count Drac­u­la than a Harlem drug lord. Accord­ing to Coop­er this was com­plete­ly inten­tion­al: ​“What Nino is doing to his com­mu­ni­ty is vam­pir­ic as he’s suck­ing the blood out of his peo­ple, only via crack. We want­ed where he lived – from the fur­ni­ture to the can­dles – to show he was a mon­ster just like Dracula.”

Yet even if a cau­tion­ary tale around the ​“mon­ster” of Nino Brown is appar­ent with­in New Jack City, its impact on hip hop cul­ture has been any­thing but cau­tion­ary. As rap­per Daryl ​“DMC” McDaniels, one third of the leg­endary Queens rap group Run-DMC, puts it: ​“The film kind of made every­one think drug deal­ing was a good thing. Thanks to Nino’s con­fi­dence, style and swag­ger, every­one want­ed to be like him. They loved him and all these drug deal­ing rap­pers were inspired by him. Nino Brown became the black Scar­face! He gave the drug deal­ers a black ​‘hero’ to look up to. That was ill.”

Coop­er inter­jects: ​“Look, Nino dies at the end of the movie because it’s a cau­tion­ary tale. I’ve heard some peo­ple have recut the film so Nino doesn’t die – it’s a weird feel­ing man, but I’m just glad peo­ple still have so much love for a movie that’s near­ly 30 years old.”

From Jay‑Z to 50 Cent vers­es, New Jack City remains one of the most ref­er­enced films in rap his­to­ry, its lega­cy most evi­dent in Cash Mon­ey Records, a record label whose block­buster ros­ter of artists includes Drake, Lil’ Wayne and Nic­ki Minaj, and whose name and com­pa­ny logo is an obvi­ous ode to Nino’s Cash Mon­ey Broth­ers – ​“Lil’ Wayne owes me a cheque!” jokes Coop­er, who is cur­rent­ly writ­ing a book called ​‘The Diary of Nino Brown’.

Although New Jack City may have unin­ten­tion­al­ly glo­ri­fied drug deal­ing to the hip hop com­mu­ni­ty, Coop­er believes that the film’s true mes­sage has been ampli­fied by the cur­rent administration’s approach to tack­ling America’s drug prob­lem. ​“The way Trump is being oppres­sive towards the black and Lati­no com­mu­ni­ties is just like the Rea­gan era, and it means anti­heroes like Nino Brown will only rise again. It’s sad that that’s the case, but it is what it is.”