Surveillance was on my mind on Super Bowl Sunday. The three-hour onslaught of A.I. is good and chill, bro commercials left me feeling so queasy that I couldn’t be moved by the optimism and mild defiance of an elaborate Bad Bunny production that lightly touched on the power of community. A now-viral ad for Ring—the inescapable Amazon-owned “home security” device—was the most sinister of the bunch: It introduces a new add-on where, if you lose your dog, you can upload a picture of it and A.I. recognition software will alert the other Ring cameras in the neighborhood to track them down. “Millions of dogs go missing in the U.S. every year—and options for finding them are often painfully limited,” wrote Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on X (his hilariously vague bio reads, “big sports/music/film fan”). “Our Ring team saw an opportunity to use our community and technology to help, so they built Search Party.” But if Amazon is using artificial intelligence to autonomously connect a network of cameras to locate a lost dog, what barriers are in place to prevent them from surveilling humans without their knowledge? Is this a dogs-only feature? In the surveillance state that has been rapidly advancing since Ferguson, I doubt it.
Loosely based on Reginald Hudlin’s upbringing in East St. Louis, House Party’s unnamed city suburb feels so alive. It’s a portrait that supersedes class distinctions. The director looks at both Sydney and Sharane’s homes with honest, lived-in reflections. Sydney’s in a large two-story suburban crib, and her parents were guests at the aforementioned bougie backyard party that Kid crashed. The shots of the house have an almost nostalgic glow but seem a little lonely. In Sharane’s overcrowded project apartment, her family is a little emotionally distant but around: Her grandmother seems to be a permanent fixture on the couch; her brother is making her a new batch of Kool-Aid with mad sugar. There’s no rose-colored glasses; it’s just the way it is for two best friends who probably live about 10 minutes away from each other.
Meanwhile, Robin Harris hunts through the tree-lined streets for Kid who snuck out to go to Play’s party despite being grounded. Harris is immediately stopped by the same pair of cops we’ve seen harassing Kid earlier. They say there’s been a disturbance in the neighborhood. “Man, the only fuckin’ disturbance is you fuckin’ with me,” he snaps, fed up. Afterward, Harris busts up Play’s party, still looking for Kid. You can tell he knows half of the teenagers there, and he starts roasting them like they’re hecklers at his stand-up show before just letting them resume their get-together, though he hilariously notes, “All be ashamed of yourselves, messing up these folks house, know it ain’t paid for.”
The hater on the block is John Witherspoon as Play’s fast-talking, cranky old-head neighbor. He pokes his head out of the window and whines about the noise of the party. His half-asleep wife tells him to stop overreacting, but he calls the cops anyway. “Look, Officer, I spent $15,000 on my house,” he yells, choosing to think about his unaffected property over the safety of the kids. “I don’t want to hear no goddamn Public Enema around here.”
My favorite scene of them all, though, is the final cruise through their stomping grounds as Play, Kid, and their friend DJ Bilal (Martin Lawrence) drop Sharane and Sydney off at their cribs after bailing Kid out of jail. The dreamy mood is set by a lush R&B melody that I’ve never been able to find in full and has a real sweetness. It’s easy to remember House Party as the lighthearted teen dance movie, but the heart is in how the Hudlin’s saw the Black neighborhood: as a flawed but self-sufficient ecosystem that, at its most effective, could build some sort of shield from the outside forces trying to upend it. That’s the sort of idyllic vision our political powers-that-be and tech overlords fear more than anything.
Beats, hoops, and gyros in Bedstuy
Last Saturday, I braced the frostbite to catch a stacked lineup of producers lay down beat sets at the record shop Loudmouth in Bedstuy. Put together by Long Island’s Theravada in celebration of his T90 Gyro EP, it was cool to be in a room where everyone was locked in on the intricacies of instrumentals instead of lyrics for once. Personal favorites of mine were Daniel’s drum machine improvisations and August Fanon’s wonky remixes of Roc Marciano and ODB, which I nodded along to while UNC’s upset of Duke was projected onto a screen and the smell of gyros right off the spit had my stomach grumbling.
R&B Rewind: Digital Black’s “Luv In My Mind”
