The 50th anniversary of hip-hop may have technically passed (August 11th, 2023), but we’re commemorating the landmark all month long. Today, we speak with Allen Hughes, an early pioneer in the world of hip-hop and film. Keep an eye out for all our Hip-Hop 50 content throughout the month, and check out our exclusive merch featuring our Hip-Hop 50 design at the Consequence Shop. A portion of proceeds from sales benefits Chance the Rapper’s SocialWorks.
This interview is also available as an episode of the Consequence UNCUT podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Director Allen Hughes has a lot of faith in the power of hip-hop. “Without hip-hop, we clearly don’t get Barack Obama,” he tells Consequence via Zoom. “We clearly don’t get Black Panther — because John Singleton was trying to make Black Panther 30 years ago and couldn’t get it off the ground. Without hip-hop, there’s a lot that doesn’t happen, but it’s going to take hip-hop to save us from these degenerate pieces of shit that are trying to make racism pop again.”
He says it’s up to hip-hop artists to “wake up and say something,” as he’s afraid creators of all sorts have strayed away from vocal activism in recent years. “You could say what you will about Tupac’s last 11 months with Death Row, but at least his first 24 years, he was saying something and he stood for something,” Hughes says. “Right now, outside of Kendrick Lamar and a handful of others, there’s no one’s really saying anything or standing for anything. And by the way, I mean that of our celebrities in general. You see what’s going on again with Roe v. Wade. You see what’s going on with voting rights. You’re like, where are the leaders in the celebrity space? No one stands for anything anymore, and everyone’s scared.”
It’s a comment that comes towards the end of a lengthy conversation about Hughes’ history as a filmmaker as well as his most recent project, FX’s Dear Mama (available to stream now on Hulu). The Emmy-nominated docuseries chronicles the life of Tupac Shakur, with whom Hughes has a complicated backstory — but the end result is a tribute to a legend, from an artist whose history with both hip-hop and film goes back a long time.
“You Can’t Be Something You’re Not”
Hughes tells the story of when he and his twin brother, Albert Hughes, discovered the power of film with the flair of an accomplished storyteller. “Me and my brother were 10, and our babysitter took us to see this movie, this period piece, with her boyfriend. We were kicking and screaming, like, we don’t want to see the fucking period piece… and when that boulder rolled down and chased after Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, we were like, holy fuck, what? That was the moment we wanted to become filmmakers.”
Right away, he says, “we would take Polaroid cameras and act like we were making movies. And then when my mother started making some money, she bought us a camera when we were 12, and that was all she wrote. That’s all we did, was learn how to make movies.”
The Hughes’ rising interest in film happened to coincide with how hip-hop, in 1984, was starting to break through with artists like Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J. “Some of my earliest movies, even in high school… because it was video, we didn’t do serious stuff back then. We would take like something like Miami Vice and we would do a send-up on it and call it Compton Vice and completely make it hip-hop. So hip-hop was always there, and film was there from the beginning.”
Allen Hughes Albert Hughes at the Menace II Society Premiere, photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
