Dream Hampton’s compelling hip-hop memoir

At the start of the documentary It was only a dreamveteran music journalist and filmmaker Dream Hampton (stylized in lowercase in homage to scholar Bell Hooks), wanders through the offices of The source magazine, filming his colleagues. The hip hop periodical was, in its beginnings, a source of understanding of the emerging genre. “I learned to be a fan and critic of some of the greatest artists of a generation,” Hampton says in a voiceover that accompanies brief scenes of debate among writers and interviews with editors. Originally from Detroit, she moved to New York in 1990 to study film at NYU and a few months later joined The sourcethe staff.

Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, It was only a dream chronicles Hampton’s early years in New York. THE Surviving R. Kelly (2019) the executive producer extracts footage from her personal archive (shot between 1993 and 1995) and compares these clips to poetic extracts from plays she wrote for The Source, Spin, Village Voice And Atmosphere between 1993 and 1999.

As a young Hampton navigates the streets of Brooklyn with Biggie Smalls, today she recites her early thoughts on hip hop as a genre of “kamikaze capitalists” and young black boys “who quickly expanded their worlds tightly bound and then set them on fire. » Her meditations are sketches, testimony of a feminist thinker and guardian of the genre in the making.

Hampton grapples with the reality of hip hop’s commercial appeal and misogynistic impulses. The doc is driven by his unbridled enthusiasm for tackling big questions of gender, capital and craft. She interviews Biggie, Method Man and Snoop and holds court with Nikki D, Hurricane G and LeShaun. On the discussion table: albums, aspirations and unrequited love between men and women of the genre.

More than a time capsule of an exciting moment in hip-hop, It was only a dream makes a compelling argument for tedious documentation and preservation, particularly in music journalism. (Hampton recently directed an episode of the Netflix documentary series about female rappers, Ladies First.) The film is a wealth of information about some of the early days of a genre that some thought would not survive. It shows how contemporary conversations about distribution and misogyny extend into the past, where they were also the subject of fervent debate.

When Hampton gets together with rappers like Nikki D, LeShaun, and leaders like Tracey Waples to talk about building a community of women in hip hop, it adds an exciting layer to the current landscape, which includes, for example, collaborations next generation between Megan Thee. Stallion and Cardi B.

An interview with…