In Spaces: Encounters With Three 6 Mafia & Mach-Hommy

I spent Black Friday evening watching Three 6 Mafia: Choices – The Movie at Brooklyn's collectively-run Spectacle Theater. Originally released in direct-to-video fashion back in 2001, which was the style at the time, this Memphis-set film stars first-time actor Rodney "Pancho Villa" Wickfall in the lead role, with supporting parts played by Hypnotize Minds artists DJ Paul, Juicy J, La Chat, and Project Pat.

Nothing about Choices is particularly novel. Written by Tyrone McClain, who subsequently went on to helm his own DVD-first feature Rest In Peace, Cuervo Jones, the all-too-familiar story covers a freshly freed ex-con who attempts to stay on the straight and narrow for the sake of his family before succumbing to the temptations associated with his former criminal ways. As the title itself suggests, he has choices to make–and none of them are good.

The soundtrack, of course, bangs.

F. Gary Gray and Hype Williams each leveraged their music video prowess into feature filmmaking debuts with Friday and Belly. Yet Choices director Gil Green lacked that type of resume. Studying film at New York University in the 1990s, the Miami native made clips for his own hip-hop duo Backlive, selling his car and creatively appropriating a student loan to finance the operation. (Those who used to watch The Box may recall the "1000 MCs" one, which largely took place on an NYU branded bus.) Though he eventually became a go-to director for some of hip-hop and R&B's biggest and dopest, Green didn't really see his career in the format truly take off until after this movie's release, building a reputation working for Michel Gondry's Partizan and then running his own 305 Films.

With amateurs in front of the camera and aspirants behind it, Choices doesn't exactly meet the requirements for a great feature film. It has its charms, particularly in the natural cinéma vérité hustle and flow of La Chat and Project Pat, who play a cocksure gun-running wild card and an elusive Avirex-clad kingpin, respectively. The attitude present in their raps translates directly to the screen, though the fact that the two "Chickenhead" spitters share zero screen time here feels like a missed opportunity. Again, the soundtrack bangs, but when held up to superior stories and even modestly bigger budgets from other rapper-led flicks of that era, Choices doesn't quite warrant critical reassessment.

That said, I absolutely loved watching this movie in the space where I saw it. Amid the ramshackle intimacy of Spectacle's small screening room, my precious WordSound varsity jacket unceremoniously crammed down by my worn Adidas, elbow-to-elbow with others in a narrow row of evidently repurposed theater seats, I met Choices on its own terms.

Given the original DVD format, most who have ever even seen this movie assuredly did so in their bedrooms or living rooms, perhaps in stoned solitude or in the company of a scarce few. In the YouTube era, it's likely that many others saw it on their laptops or even phone screens, again probably all alone. On my own, I can embrace a bad movie if it meets certain criteria, or if the sativa hits my brain just right, but in a group setting it can take on a whole new quality. In this sold-out little theater, I felt like I was doing something illicit with some 40 strangers for the low, low price of $5. And, perhaps, on some level, I was.

Indeed, Choices does open with a scene of two nondescript people getting it on–and then swiftly getting offed–at night in a car. And, repeatedly, the action circling the central heist takes place in a strip club setting, soundtracked by such gems as "Slob On My Knob." So when the women next to me on my right hooted and giggled, it provided implicit permission to react genuinely to what I was seeing. At some stage, it didn't matter that camera angles and the line reads didn't pass motion picture muster. By the time the montage of DJ Paul and Juicy J conspicuously spending their ill gotten gains started to unspool, we were all committed to the journey of these characters, no matter how predictable or janky that might be.

Sure, some of the laughter heard in the room that night seemed to be at the movie itself, which raises some questions and causes me lingering discomfort. But nonetheless, Choices succeeded in that communal setting because of the setting, not in spite of it. Maybe someone once hoped this would get a theatrical release, but during some stage of its production, the finished product and its distribution were clearly destined for home entertainment exclusively. Now, decades later, transferred against its nature to a semi-public space imbued with conspiratorial secrecy, it transmuted into another thing altogether, made bigger by its very smallness.

Two nights prior to the Choices screening, I sat in rapture of Mach-Hommy during his extremely rare (and historic) live performance in the Appel Room at Jazz At Lincoln Center. Despite my enjoyment of his prior projects both solo and with Tha God Fahim, I hadn't fully appreciated his most recent album #RICHAXXHAITIAN until I experienced it live–which as a frequent rap concert attendee is admittedly not typical. With attendees' phones magnetically sealed inside dismal Yondr pouches at the artist's insistence, the show lacked the usual barrage of personal videography and screenlit distraction. In effect, Mach forced us all to be present and mindful in the moment, befitting the momentousness of the occasion.

The Appel Room is a beautiful space, its very existence funded by millionaires and corporate donors. Situated directly behind the stage, massive floor-to-ceiling windows look out upon Columbus Circle and Central Park's southwest. Further eastward, the view gestures across Manhattan's 59th Street where street lights, headlights, tail lights, stop lights, and emergency lights on ambulances and police cars shine back from below and afar. Inspired by Greek amphitheater architecture, the venue is meant to showcase jazz greatness while quite literally acknowledging the genre's hallowed place in New York City history.

What The Appel Room was decidedly not designed for, however, is rap music.

World famous trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis, Managing & Artistic Director for Jazz At Lincoln Center, is not a fan of hip-hop. Chalk it up perhaps to his mentorship under the combative yet brilliant scribe Stanley Crouch, as both jazz giants are on record as deeply critical of that other NYC-born genre. Among the mud Marsalis has slung at rap music, the phrase "ghetto minstrelsy" sums up his disgust for it succinctly. So it seemed especially prurient to witness a two-turntables-and-a-microphone show where one was fundamentally, existentially, explicitly unwanted.

Beyond overhearing some second-hand murmuring that suggested so, I can't say definitively whether or not Mach-Hommy's was the first rap show in the Appel Room, or for that matter, any of the rooms at Jazz At Lincoln Center. (The actual Lincoln Center, located less than a mile north, has been more openly welcoming towards the genre in its programming.) Surely rappers have performed on its stages in some capacity over the two decades it's been open at the former Time Warner Center. In 2016, trumpeter Keyon Harrold headlined the relatively intimate Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (late capitalism!) for a Miles Davis tribute and, having seen him downtown at the Blue Note once or twice, I know he tends to bring rappers out as guests. Others who've played there, like singer Lila Downs, count hip-hop among their influences, which apparently didn't preclude them from getting the big gig. But it appears unlikely that a straight-up hip-hop concert centering a single rapper has ever been part of the calendar there.

That is, until Mach-Hommy.

So how did a Haitian-American emcee from Newark, New Jersey pull off such a revolutionary act for this, his first proper NYC concert? The abundance of professional cameras–photo and video–in use last Wednesday suggests that answer may eventually emerge. But in the meantime, his artistic defiance of the space's constraints should be seen as purposeful provocation, at least, or to these eyes and ears nothing short of radical reclamation.

Among the willful acts Mach engaged in onstage, his land acknowledgement for the Lenape people–displaced from the area long, long ago–marks the most overt rejection of this moneyed Manhattan skyscraper and the indulgence it represents. His sneering at the Christopher Columbus statue five stories below came as he recounted the relationship between Ayiti and the controversial "explorer." At times, he draped himself in Haiti's bicolor flag, a wordless statement that felt nearly as profound as the unprecedented removal of his signature bandana mask. Colonialism, displacement, gentrification–all such forces were damned by each carefully crafted Mach-Hommy bar spat live into the mic.

Even if only for a couple of hours, hip-hop occupied an unlikely, unwelcome space. The soundtrack banged, and it felt like home.