What Dad Wants You to Know About ’90s Hip-Hop Soundtracks
The energy can’t be duplicated
New Jack City makes me feel nostalgic.
My partner and I watch — and, at times, laugh — while Wesley Snipes delivers his tragic, Shakespearean performance. While we watch, I am talking about Christopher Williams’ acting debut and singing “I’m Dreamin’” louder than our Bed-Stuy apartment’s walls can take. I’m talking the rising tide of the New Jack Swing era and how Teddy Riley’s production is the backdrop for the lives of 1980s babies. The 1990s were the landscape for my upbringing: how I lived, loved, talked, and ran the streets. It’s why all of my friends — and brothers and their friends — pulsed through our hood like renegades.
I stood up during the ending credits after Nino Brown got his just due; I held my child while doing the Roger Rabbit during Aaron Hall’s scene in a nightclub filled with sweaty bodies. It made me realize how much the ’90s and the music that became the backdrop of the films I loved as a kid shaped my role as a young Black teen in the Bronx. It also helped inform the role I now play as an artist and father to two young Black girls with very distinct personalities, both at different ages, growing up in their own worlds.
The soundtracks of ’90s films — Who’s the Man?, Deep Cover, Above the Rim, New…
