Fogarty & Evans/Movies, Moves and Music, 4. Space, Authenticity and Utopia in the Hip-Hop Teen Dance Film

The hip hop teen dance film flourished in the 2000s. Drawing on the dominance of hip hop in the mainstream music industry, films such as Save the Last Dance (Thomas Carter, 2001), Honey (Billy Woodruff, 2002) and Step Up (Anne Fletcher, 2006) combined the teen film’s pre-existing social problem and musical narratives. Yet various tensions were created by this interweaving of representations of post-industrial city youth with the utopian sensibilities of the classical Hollywood musical. These narratives celebrated hip hop performance, and depicted dance as a bridge between cultural boundaries, bringing together couples, communities and cultures. These films used hip hop to construct filmic spaces and identities while fragmenting hip hop soundscapes, limiting its expressive potential. This chapter will explore the hip hop teen dance film’s celebration of, yet struggle with, hip hop by examining the soundscapes of particular films: specifically the interactions between sound, narrative and form. It will engage with these films’ attempts to marry the representational, narrative and aesthetic meanings of hip hop culture with the form and ideologies of the musical genre, particularly the tensions and continuities that arise from this engagement with musical utopian qualities as identified by Richard Dyer (1985).