VH1 examines "Hip Hop and the L.A. Riots"

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Tonight's "Uprising" documentary doesn't actually say much about hip-hop as protest music or even prophecy.

By JON CARAMANICA
Published: April 30, 2012

Twenty years ago Los Angeles was burning, a conflagration that began with a videotape. Four police officers who had been captured on camera beating Rodney King were acquitted on April 29, 1992, and for days the city seethed.

More than 50 people died. Property damage was estimated at about $1 billion. All of it directly traceable to the power of video documentation.

That isn’t the sort of documentation promised by the title of the documentary “Uprising: Hip Hop and the L.A. Riots,” which has its premiere Tuesday on VH1. That hip-hop had foretold the events of those few days, and that it continued to reference them in the aftermath, is the animating principle of this film, which has plenty of vintage interview clips of Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice-T and more to demonstrate the point.

But what’s more notable is the seamlessness with which the director, Mark Ford, is able to recreate the early moments of the riots, using videos captured on the spot that still shock.

There is news footage, of course, like the images of Reginald Denny being pulled from his truck and savagely beaten, filmed from a news helicopter. But some of the most vivid belly-of-the-beast images came from Matthew McDaniel, a black filmmaker who was in South Central Los Angeles before the fires began; large parts of his work are reproduced here.

Bart Bartholomew, a photographer, was on the scene; originally embedded with police officers, he stayed after they evacuated. Before long he was assaulted as he tried to leave in his car. This, too, was caught on film.

Even though Mr. Ford has all this at his disposal, he becomes tentative when it’s time to do something besides play old clips. Often this film is too in thrall to its subjects, especially the still-aggrieved Henry Watson, one of the men convicted of beating Mr. Denny, who is given a disproportionate amount of time to hem and haw over his actions.

Even less regretful is the University of Southern California professor Todd Boyd, who says: “I didn’t shed a tear for Reginald Denny. He shouldn’t have been in that truck in that neighborhood at that time. That’s unfortunate, just like it was unfortunate for Rodney King.”

Mr. Ford does an admirable job of tracking down several principals, including Mr. King; several Los Angeles police chiefs, though not Daryl Gates, who was in charge then and died in 2010; and the filmmaker John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), righteously livid in news reports that day, and still so.

But Mr. Ford has little idea what to do with these strong personalities apart from letting them speak. He doesn’t offer a complete history of the events. There’s scarce mention until late in the film of how the riots affected other minority groups; the footage of Korean shopkeepers shooting at potential looters is some of the most striking in the film.

And though there are oodles of references to the seminal 1988 N.W.A. song with the aggressive, anti-authoritarian and unprintable title that’s presented here as the soundtrack to the riots, and to “Cop Killer,” by Ice-T’s rock band, Body Count, this film doesn’t say much about hip-hop as protest music or even prophecy.

In an old interview Ice Cube is incendiary and perfectly level: “The uprising in L.A., it’s just, you know, that’s the only way you can get white people to hear what black people got to say.” That aside, Mr. Ford is more apt to paint rappers as participants than respondents.

Snoop Dogg, who narrates this film, is anything but dispassionate. “Me and my homies were out in the riots,” he says. “We felt like we were taking a part of history.” Tupac Shakur drove through, a friend recalls, shooting a gun in the air, then signed autographs for looters of a record store.

The closest Mr. Ford gets to an argument comes on the matter of Dr. Dre’s album “The Chronic,” which was released in December of that year and became hip-hop’s key crossover document. “We were ready to move on,” Snoop Dogg says, “and the music spoke to that.”

But two songs on that album sample tirades from some of the same firsthand footage that Mr. Ford uses, stealthily broadcasting that rage, keeping it alive with each play.