The Defiant Ones is a different kind of music… | Little White Lies

Film Music

The Defi­ant Ones is a dif­fer­ent kind of music documentary

26 Mar 2018

Words by Al Horner

Two individuals sitting together, one wearing a black jacket and cap, the other wearing a maroon shirt.
Two individuals sitting together, one wearing a black jacket and cap, the other wearing a maroon shirt.
Direc­tor Allen Hugh­es opens up about the chal­lenge of cap­tur­ing Dr Dre and Jim­my Iovine’s Amer­i­can Dream.

Jim­my Iovine doesn’t like music doc­u­men­taries, because music doc­u­men­taries are like Bar Mitz­vah videos,” the sto­ried record pro­duc­er com­plains, break­ing into his best impres­sion of a dot­ing Jew­ish matri­arch. “‘He did this! And then he did this! And then he did this, and then…’ Blurgh, nope, can’t do it.” Luck­i­ly for the 65-year-old sub­ject of The Defi­ant OnesHBO’s acclaimed retelling of his and hip-hop mogul Dr Dre’s adven­tures in the record indus­try – direc­tor Allen Hugh­es’ mini-series bare­ly fits the genre.

Sure, it’s dri­ven by the usu­al talk­ing heads for­mat: Eminem, Ste­vie Nicks, Ice Cube and Bruce Spring­steen lead a star­ry list of col­lab­o­ra­tors reveal­ing the sto­ries behind songs, the hedo­nism behind hit albums. But The Defi­ant Ones, as Iovine puts it, has a big­ger scope” – one that, true to its name, defies expec­ta­tions. What could eas­i­ly have been a four-hour chronol­o­gy of their careers is instead a tale of suc­cess, excess and America.

I wouldn’t have done it if I couldn’t do it on that lev­el,” says Hugh­es, whose series jour­neys from 1960s New York docks to mod­ern day Sil­i­con Val­ley board rooms via the Los Ange­les race riots and Columbine high school mas­sacre. The idea was always for Jim­my and Dre to be the prism we saw the whole cul­ture through. I always knew that the sto­ry was much big­ger.” The doc­u­men­tary recounts how Dre and Iovine lift­ed them­selves out of racial­ly-charged, low-income neigh­bour­hoods on dif­fer­ent sides of Amer­i­ca to become major music indus­try play­ers: Dre ini­tial­ly as a found­ing mem­ber of West Coast rap provo­ca­teurs NWA and Iovine as pro­duc­er to John Lennon, Tom Pet­ty and more.

Like two audio­phile For­rest Gumps, The Defi­ant Ones sub­se­quent­ly finds the pair involved in almost every major moment in Amer­i­can musi­cal his­to­ry over the next 30 years. I still get acid reflux watch­ing the third episode,” jokes Iovine, who, grow­ing up in work­ing class Jew­ish Brook­lyn, nev­er envis­aged hav­ing to leave the house in a bul­let-proof vest dur­ing the gangs­ta rap wars revis­it­ed in the documentary.

Hugh­es – who has known Dre since he was 19, hav­ing co-direct­ed music videos for 2Pac and LA artist Tone Lōc before cre­at­ing the cult clas­sic Men­ace II Soci­ety – had oth­er stip­u­la­tions for mak­ing The Defi­ant Ones. I’m a fem­i­nist. I was raised by a fem­i­nist. You wan­na talk about some­thing that I’d have shelved the movie over? Not deal­ing with Dee Barnes.” Barnes was a pop­u­lar rap jour­nal­ist who front­ed Fox hip-hop show Pump it Up!’ dur­ing NWA’s late 80s hey­day. On 21 Jan­u­ary, 1991, Dre assault­ed her over a seg­ment fea­tur­ing Ice Cube, who had depart­ed the rap crew months ear­li­er in a bit­ter row over the group’s finances. A Rolling Stone report from the time alleges that Dre, picked her up by her hair and began slam­ming her head and the right side of her body repeat­ed­ly against a brick wall near the stair­way as his body­guard held off the crowd with a gun.”

Close-up of a serious-looking Black man with a pensive expression, photographed in black and white.

When 2015 biopic Straight Out­ta Comp­ton glossed over the attack, there was anger among those who felt Dre – a pro­duc­er on the film – had man­aged to sweep the event under the car­pet. After 27 years of silence on the mat­ter, break­ing that silence to joke about the inci­dent on Eminem’s 1999 sin­gle Guilty Con­science’, the rap­per final­ly address­es his actions towards Barnes in The Defi­ant Ones. He knew going into mak­ing this I need­ed to make her part of the nar­ra­tive,” says Hugh­es. Not as a vic­tim, but as a very vibrant and an amaz­ing per­son who was a lit­tle sis­ter to the cul­ture.” Dre describes his actions as a major blem­ish on who I am as a man” in the series, adding that he was out of my fuck­ing mind.” It’s a moment telling of Hugh­es’ insis­tence upon warts-and-all hon­esty while mak­ing The Defi­ant Ones.

There was no way I was gonna make a trib­ute piece, a fluff piece, cos who gives a fuck? These are great sto­ries about some of the great­est artists of all time and some of the great­est records of all time. The film­mak­ing has got­ta meet this shit,” he says. I was like, we’re not doing this unless you’re show­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The good, the bad and the ugly. It’s the ugly – the alche­my of bad going into good – that brings about inspiration.”

You might won­der if Barnes’ pres­ence in the series was demand­ed by the cur­rent cli­mate: The Defi­ant Ones was released in the US last July, months after the Inter­na­tion­al Women’s March, and now arrives on Net­flix as the #MeToo move­ment con­tin­ues apace. Hugh­es reveals that although the cul­tur­al nee­dle has def­i­nite­ly shift­ed” in the last three years, The Defi­ant Ones was in fact made pri­or to that shift, but held up by sen­si­tiv­i­ty” from the estates of rap­pers The Noto­ri­ous BIG and 2Pac, who was signed to Iovine’s Inter­scope record label.

The bit­ter West Coast ver­sus East Coast rival­ry that boiled over in the run-up to 2Pac’s death in 1996 has sel­dom been spo­ken about by friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors, and doing so was cathar­tic, says the direc­tor. That’s the first time in the record busi­ness where peo­ple were los­ing their lives,” he explains. Puff Dad­dy told me that you were safer being in the mafia than being in the record busi­ness in the 90s. Now we’re 20 years removed, it’s like: shit, how did we get to the point where moth­er­fuck­ing artists were los­ing their lives?! I want­ed to decant that. These were more than inter­views. They were ther­a­py sessions.”

So how is it that a sto­ry about the inner work­ings of the music indus­try – a tale that begins with a busi­ness deal, Dre and Iovine sell­ing their Beats head­phones empire to Apple for $3bn – struck a chord with such a wide audi­ence? Iovine’s the­o­ry is that it’s because the doc is real­ly not about those things: it’s about the mind­set that allows suc­cess. I think it’s a les­son that you have to have the focus to keep going and keep striv­ing for what you want. I got this feed­back that it wasn’t about our indi­vid­ual sto­ries – it was about that.” Hugh­es con­curs. The fail­ures Jim­my and Dre were brave enough to show sends a mes­sage. We all have fuck­ing corny, embar­rass­ing shit. Peo­ple can be like, if Dre can get over that, who fuck­ing knows – maybe I can too.”

The Defi­ant Ones is avail­able to stream on Net­flix now.

You might like