Many black men will not like Netflix’s Roxanne Roxanne, a biopic of the mid-’80s, Queens rapper Roxanne Shanté. What the film makes clear is that her life would not have been as rough if even just one of the black men in her life wasn’t a great disappointment or total disaster. Her father only knows how to break the hearts of his daughters (we never see him); her mother’s boyfriend turns out to be a crook who takes all the family’s savings, and dreams of middle-class homeownership, and disappears (we never hear or see him again). And, finally her husband (who is played by Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali) physically abuses her and forces her to pay hard cash for her freedom.
The other black men in the movie are either sexually assaulting her or exploiting her fame and wealth. Even the producer who discovers Roxanne and makes her one of the most respected rappers of her time, Marley Marl, of the Juice Crew, is shady. There is no nostalgia in Roxanne Roxanne, none of that warm halo that surrounds The Get Down. The best times for hiphop were very bad times for Shanté: her mother imploding into alcohol addiction, her moments of homelessness, her bruises.
The film’s only hope for black male redemption is found in the fresh and promising face of a black boy named Nasir. He just might not end up like those other broken bums in the Queensbridge housing project. He might beat the oppressive system that crushes the souls of young black men into economic, emotional, and violent black holes. The boy recognizes Roxanne Shanté as a great artist and wants to be just like her. At the end of the film, we learn this boy is the rapper Nas. The real Nas even confirmed the biopic’s positive portrayal of him. He did look up to Roxanne, and her success in the mid-’80s inspired his success mid-’90s. Many consider Nas to be on the conscious (now called woke) tip and one of hiphop’s greatest artist (thanks to his American masterpiece Illmatic).
And then Kelis began trending on Twitter this morning, and when people clicked on the name of the brilliant and beautiful R&B singer (I once described her as a 21st-century Donna Summer—listen to Kelis on Timo Maas’s “Help Me“), they learned that she claims her ex-husband, Nas, physically abused her during their marriage. If the allegations are true, then he ended up just like the awful black men in Roxanne Shanté’s film.
During an interview with Hollywood Unlocked, singer-turned-chef Kelis detailed the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of Nas during their marriage. Kelis described the marriage as tumultuous and abusive, so much so that she would walk around with bruises all over her body.
Kelis reveals she suffered physical abuse at the hands of Nas during their marriage: https://t.co/zObRPMIdJ1 pic.twitter.com/qdCUiilKez
— The Root (@TheRoot) April 26, 2018
True, it would be wrong and even dangerous to dissociate the mental and bodily brutality of the black men in Roxanne Roxanne with the misogyny of Roxanne’s culture as a whole; but grasping this fact or concept, seeing the larger picture, does not stop the violence. Women are still getting knocked around all the time (you only have to read a week’s worth of police reports to see the ubiquity of domestic violence). And bruises and broken bones are not soothed by a deep understanding of one’s society.
