Beats, Rhymes and Cin­e­ma: CB4

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 Nas opened his 1996 album ​‘It Was Writ­ten’ with the line ​“Fake thug, no love, you get the slug, CB4 Gus­to,” it cre­at­ed a dan­ger­ous rift between the New York rap­per and his West Coast con­tem­po­rary 2Pac, who took the lyric as an insult aimed square­ly in his direc­tion. You see Gus­to, the main char­ac­ter in Tam­ra Davis’ 1993 rap mock­u­men­tary-cum-com­e­dy CB4, is a fake gangs­ta rap­per who lies to sell mil­lions of records. And although the film had only been out for a few years when Nas rapped these bars, to be brand­ed a ​“Gus­to” was already among the biggest insults in Amer­i­can hip hop cul­ture. Or, as West Coast rap leg­end Ras Kass recalls: ​“If you com­pared your ene­my to Gus­to then you were ask­ing to get shot!”

CB4 tells the sto­ry of three mid­dle-class teenage friends, Albert (Chris Rock), Euripi­des (Allen Payne) and Dearon Thomp­son (Otis), who are strug­gling to get a record deal. The rea­son? Their group’s clean-cut image sim­ply isn’t mar­ketable enough. How­ev­er, when local gang­ster Gus­to (Char­lie Mur­phy) is sent to prison, Albert has the inge­nious idea of steal­ing his crim­i­nal iden­ti­ty and using it as a rap per­sona. He suc­cess­ful­ly rebrands him­self as ​“MC Gus­to” while Euripi­des and Otis trans­form into Dead Mike and Stab Mas­ter Arson. Step for­ward CB4 (named after the prison block where the group was sup­pos­ed­ly formed); gangs­ta rap’s hottest new property.

Nel­son George, who co-wrote CB4 along­side Rock, says the ini­tial idea was to do the rap equiv­a­lent of Eric Idle and Neil Innes’ bril­liant Bea­t­les-par­o­dy­ing com­e­dy sketch The Rut­les. Yet this idea quick­ly evolved into some­thing root­ed more in the ever-increas­ing com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of rap music. ​“I remem­ber vis­it­ing Chris on the set of New Jack City and us talk­ing about mak­ing a rap Spinal Tap,” George says. ​“But things evolved a lit­tle and we want­ed to make a film that embod­ied how rap music had become just like pro­fes­sion­al wrestling.”

He fur­ther explains, ​“In the 1990s, the per­sonas these rap­pers were cre­at­ing to sell records became so exag­ger­at­ed in terms of their aggres­sive­ness that it was just like watch­ing Hulk Hogan or the Ulti­mate War­rior going at it! It didn’t seem real anymore.”

With their Jheri curl hair­styles, bean­ies, sun glass­es and hit sin­gle ​‘Straight Out­ta Low­cash’, CB4 are an obvi­ous par­o­dy of 1990s gangs­ta rap group NWA, with the latter’s Eazy‑E (who is the spit­ting image of MC Gus­to) even hav­ing a cameo in the film. How­ev­er, George insists the Comp­ton-based group were com­plete­ly on board with his sto­ry: ​“Chris and I actu­al­ly ran into Dr Dre and Eazy at a club in LA, and we shared with them our idea. I found Eazy incred­i­bly fun­ny and charm­ing, and I instant­ly realised a lot of what he did on record was just com­e­dy and about push­ing but­tons; he def­i­nite­ly under­stood the busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties involved in what they were say­ing. Eazy found the idea of CB4 very fun­ny as I believe on some lev­el the media con­tro­ver­sy around NWA’s ​‘dan­ger­ous’ gang­ster per­sona was a bit of a joke to him.”

Even though clever satire is pow­er­ing the sto­ry, CB4’s jokes don’t always hit their mark. For exam­ple, while the film’s par­o­dy of mil­i­tant polit­i­cal rap strikes gold – thanks to the hilar­i­ous­ly repet­i­tive song ​‘I’m Black Y’all’ – its ques­tion­able por­tray­als of women (or rather, ​‘music video hoes’) and the politi­cians look­ing to ban rap music feel more like offen­sive toi­let humour than bal­anced social com­men­tary. Still, it’s hard to argue with the fore­sight and pre­science of CB4’s core writing.

At one point in the film, CB4 per­form their song ​‘Sweat From My Balls’, with its sil­ly lyric ​“You can feel the sweat from my balls” dri­ving the crowd wild. Just 10 years lat­er, Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz scored a num­ber one hit in the US with ​‘Get Low’, which con­tains the eeri­ly sim­i­lar cho­rus: ​“To the win­dow / To the walls / Til’ the sweat drop down my balls / All these bitch­es crawl”. For George, things had come full cir­cle: ​“We want­ed ​‘Sweat From My Balls’ to be so dumb and ridicu­lous that it would nev­er be a hit record – but fast for­ward a few years and the num­ber one record in the coun­try is all about sweaty balls! I guess rap ven­tured a lit­tle into self-parody.”

And when major label rap­per Rick Ross was exposed in 2008 for steal­ing the per­sona of a real drug deal­er and exag­ger­at­ing his crim­i­nal past (pre-fame, Ross in fact worked as a prison cor­rec­tion­al offi­cer), many laughed at the sim­i­lar­i­ties with CB4’s plot. ​“CB4 had a longer shelf life than any of us expect­ed,” laughs George. ​“It helped cre­ate the phrase ​‘stu­dio gang­ster’ in hip hop cul­ture, which is an insult based around the idea of a guy mak­ing up rhymes about a life he doesn’t actu­al­ly lead.”

Dylan Cave, part of the cura­to­r­i­al team at the BFI Nation­al Archive, believes CB4 has achieved cult clas­sic sta­tus because it taps into the foun­da­tions of what hip hop cul­ture was built on: name­ly, the notion of keep­ing it real. ​“At its best, CB4 real­ly takes its tar­get around what Main Source referred to as ​‘fak­ing the funk’ and this idea of the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of rap,” he explains. ​“With hind­sight, CB4 plays like a warn­ing as it came out just before you had Puff Dad­dy and the ​‘Shiny Suit era’, and rap becom­ing this bil­lion dol­lar busi­ness where it was less about say­ing some­thing authen­tic and more about sell­ing records.”

Twen­ty years on, CB4 remains a pow­er­ful moment in hip hop his­to­ry, with its sto­ry cap­tur­ing the imag­i­na­tion of the mass­es far more dis­tinct­ly than the sim­i­lar Fear of a Black Hat, which was released two months ear­li­er. In fact, CB4 more than dou­bled its $15m bud­get, with impres­sive box office tak­ings of $36m. So, what about a sequel that par­o­dies some of today’s lead­ing rap­pers such as Migos, Drake and Kanye West? Sure­ly, with their frag­ile egos and over-reliance on auto tune vocal effects, these artists are ripe for big screen satire?

George admits that he and Rock have been approached about mak­ing a sequel to CB4, but con­cedes ​“noth­ing has come togeth­er yet”, some­thing he blames on mod­ern rap­pers tak­ing them­selves ​“far too seri­ous­ly.” He con­cludes: ​“Peo­ple like Eazy‑E rev­elled in the humour but nowa­days I reck­on we would get sued as it isn’t as thick skinned a world any­more! I guess Kanye would be the per­fect sub­ject for a CB4 2 but could he real­ly han­dle us mak­ing a movie about him? I’m not sure if his ego could take it!”