March 3, 2006
Dave Chappelle and his movie Block Party
Two years ago on a gray September day, the comedian Dave Chappelle held a noon-to-night concert in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Scores of New Yorkers were bused in from Manhattan and had no idea where they were going — they didn’t care.
Kanye West, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, the Roots, Common, Big Daddy Kane, and Talib Kweli were among those who performed in the wind and rain. The next day the blogs, and later the magazines, were in a tizzy over the Fugees, who had recovered from Lauryn Hill’s nervous breakdown and Pras and Wyclef Jean’s spatting to consummate a reunion.
Being there must have been special. But watching this all happen in ”Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” is better. For one thing, you won’t get wet. For another, Michel Gondry, the music-video magician and director of ”Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” was on the scene with a camera crew. The movie they’ve assembled is in the vein of 1973’s ”Wattstax,” but it’s much more than a concert documentary. It’s a jubilant, civic-minded lollapalooza.
Yes, each performance is more transcendent than the last. Badu literally flips her Afro wig, then surfs the crowd. Dead Prez confirms that it’s as crucial as Public Enemy, but in double time. Hill is as willowy-fabulous as 1970s Diana Ross. (When Pras says hearing her sing makes him want to cry, all I could think after seeing her do a luscious ”Killing Me Softly” was ”Me, too!”) And had there been a house that day, Jill Scott would have brought it down.
But the more indelible contributions to the film are from the so-called little people.
The movie is indeed a block party, that great, seemingly bygone Saturday event when a street shuts down to celebrate itself. And because it is a block party, the artists in Chappelle’s platinum hip-hop-R&B lineup are but a few stars in a neighborhood constellation that includes less famous folk. The community here is synthetic insofar as some of its members come from the workaday Dayton, Ohio, region, where Chappelle still lives; he goes back to cajole his neighbors to come east for his weekend shindig. But it’s a community nonetheless. We can feel the love.
On the streets of Dayton, Chappelle hands out Willy Wonka-style golden tickets good for a round-trip bus ride to the show and a hotel stay, choosing black people and white people alike. This includes the woman who runs a local corner store and an affable pair of teenage Chappelle fans who tell Gondry they decided not to beat up a racist because the ensuing trouble wouldn’t have been worth missing the party. Watching the Daytonites, most of whom didn’t know each other before this invitation, asleep on the New York-bound bus is a wonderful moment of peace and harmony.
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Amigo9
05/18/2007 at 7:26 am
Dave Chappelle is a funny mofo comidian.