Fear of a black hat: is this spinal rap? - motion picture

Interview, June, 1994 by Dimitri Ehrlich

Is this Spinal Rap?

If you love hip-hop even half as much as Rusty Cundieff does, you won't be able to avoid several belly laughs during the course of Fear of a Black Hat, his satirical faux-documentary--or rapumentary, if you will. The movie, which Cundieff wrote, directed, and stars in, follows the career of Niggaz with Hats (N.W.H.), skewering acts like P.M. Dawn, Vanilla Ice, and 2 Live Crew with thinly disguised caricatures. While certain hyperbolic elements of hip-hop culture, like their counterparts in metal and country, are inherently so laughable they hardly need to be parodied, Cundieff has not pushed his subject into the realm of the ridiculous. (N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police," for example, becomes "Fuck the Security Guard.") Low budget (and it shows), Fear of a Black Hat probably won't have mass appeal--some of the jokes are too inside, and its reliance on ribald elbow-in-the-ribs humor is closer to Naked Gun than its "Spinal Rap" pretensions suggest.