How Hip Hop Changed The World
Channel 4, 10.25pm
There is a great documentary – hell, no, a great series of documentaries – to be made on the history of hip hop. This isn’t it, I’m afraid. It’s a typical Channel 4 culture doc that plays up its “streetness”, strikes a few attitudes (courtesy of actor and MC Idris Elba who’s presenting), offers received opinion (such as, laughing at Wham’s Wham Rap and, inevitably, Vanilla Ice) and touches all the familiar bases (yes, Blondie’s Rapture features).
Even so, for all its faults – of omission and commission – this two-hour slice of airtime makes a decent case in arguing that “hip hop is the revolution that succeeded”. It changed the way we speak, the way we make music, even the way we sell breakfast cereals (as early as 1985 Weetabix was branding itself using graffiti tags).
Along the way it notes the co-opting of street art by Warhol and the uptown New York arterati, the importance of John Barnes’s rap on New Order’s World In Motion in the battle against racism. It also at least acknowledges the form’s misogyny, sexism and violence. And the music is good, obviously – Lauryn Hill, Outkast, Run DMC, Missy Elliott – there’s just not enough of it.
At the business end of the programme the likes of Jay Z, 50 Cent, P Diddy turn up. Not the best rappers, but the most successful. So in the end it’s all about the Benjamins. Well almost. Because at its most audacious the programme argues that without hip hop there would be no President Obama.
Public Enemy once sang: “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back”. But that was then.
Beyonce At Glastonbury
BBC4, 9.40pm
proof, surely, that Glastonbury doesn’t make any sense any more, if you ask me.
Not because Beyonce shouldn’t have been there in the first place. No, not at all. But because she is clearly so much better than all of those dreary, dreary guitar bands who made up the rest of the bill.
This, Coldplay, 30 Seconds To Mars and White Lies, is what you call a performance.
Chilean Miners: 17 Days Buried Alive
BBC 2, 9pm
Powerfully affecting. Angus Macqueen’s documentary reveals what the 33 miners trapped in a Chilean mine went through during the first 17 days of their time underground last year.
We all know the story’s happy ending, but it’s their personal accounts of what it was like to be trapped in the dark that bring home what it was like to be lost in the dark.
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