Spin (October 1996) p.28
BELIEVE THE HYPE
Hip-hop video director Hype Williams has a view to a thrill.
by Chris Norris
For someone named "Hype," video director Hype Williams sure seems
immune to the stuff. "Last night I watched Pulp Fiction for the first
time," admits the congenial 27-year-old. "I finally just sat down and
said, 'Fuck it, I'm going to watch it.'" The verdict: "Man, I couldn't
believe he actually wrote that. Dude is just major."
Lounging in his rambling Manhattan loft, Williams half-watches as the
sienna tones of The Godfather play silently on the TV and a leg of lamb
reheats in the oven—clearly a man who knows a thing or two about
cocooning. A cherubic-faced post-B-boy ("Hype was his graffiti tag),
he is hip-hop's most visible video auteur, having given us such
magnificently cool images as the slo-mo, black-and-white vision of
representing MCs in Craig Mack's "Flava in Ya Ear (Remix)," as well as
(on the ubiquity tip) a madly zooming Busta Rhymes, a karate-board-
chopping Ol' Dirty Bastard, and a Road Warrior remake in which Tupac
Shakur and Dr. Dre assert California's knowledge of how to party.
Unlike Matt Mahurin, Samuel Bayer, and the other members of MTV's newly
emerging director coterie, Williams is a bit closer to his subject than
a preproduction coffee klatch. "I was a die-hard rap kid, plus I grew
up in S. Albans, Queens, so it was all around. LL Cool J went to high
school with me. Run-DMC was right there in Hollis." Although graf
skills and an art jones landed Williams at Adelphi University's film
school, that quickly lost out to the thrills of gofering at some of the
earliest rap videos. "Biz Markie's 'Just a Friend,' Big Daddy Kane's
'Smooth Operator,' Public Enemy's 'Night of the Living Baseheads'—I was
at all those shoots, fetching juice and shit."
Now hard at work writing his first feature-length film for Fine Line
("a real street drama"), Williams is poised to try the same jump
erstwhile video director David (Seven) Fincher recently made. Still,
he remains a staunch champion of the small screen. "Music videos are
really the only art form that's still being developed and explored," he
says, going on to give props to the old school. "I got, like, ten
years of favorite rock videos. I was an original MTV kid. Even though
I was living in Queens, I was right there with Judas Priest."
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