The 2Pac Vehicle Above the Rim Is 1994 in Film Form and that is a Very Good Thing — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Some movies come with soundtracks. And some soundtracks come with movies. With this second breed of film, the music isn’t just important; it’s more essential than the film itself. =

1994’s Above the Rim is such a film. I was fortunate enough to come of age during the G-Funk era. My heroes were all criminals, convicts, gang members, and renegades who lived their lives on the wrong side of the law and often died young, violent deaths.

I have a lot of love and affection for Above the Rim’s double platinum soundtrack. The street basketball drama’s first single is arguably the greatest song ever recorded and the unquestioned apex of Western civilization: Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate.”

“Regulate” was released as a single from both the Above the Rim soundtrack and G’s debut, Regulate… G Funk Era on April 23rd, a day before my eighteenth birthday so I like to think of it as a birthday gift from the Hip Hop Gods.

Above the Rim is a movie that you listen to as much as you watch. The soundtrack is filled with Death Row All-Stars like Snoop Dogg, Warren G, Dr. Dre, and Nate Dogg, along with B-listers Tha Dogg Pound, Jewell, and Lady of Rage.

Watching Above the Rim took me back to my high school/group home days when I lived vicariously through the lyrics of my favorite rappers, who were as fearless and cocky as I was scared and insecure.

Above the Rim combined three of my teenage obsessions: Hip-Hop, movies, and basketball. When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1990s, there was a basketball player named Michael Jordan who was really good. He was so good that he got to star in a movie with Bugs Bunny.

He was so good, in fact, that his name became short-hand for being the best of the best. Needless to say, Michael Jordan was the Michael Jordan of basketball.

I was fortunate to live in Chicago and be a Chicago Bulls fan when they won six championships. Michael Jordan and his championship Bulls ruined me for all other basketball teams and players.

Then I went away to college, lost my virginity, and started smoking weed, and suddenly sports didn’t seem all that important to me.

My love of Hip-Hop receded as I got older. I still dig Hip-Hop, but I love the stuff I’m familiar with and make no effort to check out new stuff. Why would I? I’m a forty-seven-year-old househusband in suburban Georgia.

But I still am quite fond of movies. I write about them fairly often on this website. I think Tupac Shakur is the most overrated rapper in history but also an underrated actor.

Tupac’s deeply imitable voice is all over the film’s soundtrack. That could be distracting, considering that that voice also belongs to one of the film’s main characters, but it works here because his music perfectly fits the film’s aesthetic. In many ways, 2Pac’s music is the film’s aesthetic.

Duane Martin was pushing thirty when he played Kyle-Lee Watson, a high school basketball phenom being pulled in antithetical directions by very different father figures.

His high school coach, Mike Rollins (David Bailey), wants the talented hoopster to play for him in a streetball tournament and then get a scholarship to Georgetown so he can play for the Hoyas.

The kindly white coach is the angel whispering in his player’s ear to do the right thing and become a role model rather than a cautionary tale.

Tupac Shakur plays Birdie, the charismatic devil whispering ominous advice into the suggestible young man’s other ear.

Birdie introduces Kyle to a nighttime world where the rules don’t apply, the women are loose, the drugs are plentiful, and money comes easily.

Chris Rock made an indelible impression as a crack addict in New Jack City, which Above the Rim co-screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper co-wrote. In Above the Rim, another of the all-time great comedians plays a desperate drug addict: Bernie Mac. In a movie full of scene stealers going all in, none can compete with the poignancy and dark humor of Mac’s riveting turn as Flip, a homeless man and the target of vicious bullying from multiple sources.

Mac was a great comedian, but he might have been an even better comic character actor. As with Tupac Shakur’s acting career, we’ll never know what they would have accomplished in long, full careers because they both shocked the world by dying young.

Mono-monikered Leon of Cool Runnings and Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video costars as a once great high school basketball player whose promising career ended in tragedy, death, and jail time.

He’s a sad, lost man haunted by his past who leads a quiet life as a security guard at the high school he once ruled. To our protagonist, he’s a cautionary warning of all that can go wrong in a gifted young athlete’s career as well as a real motherfucker, on account of the handsome security guard having sex with his young and attractive mother.

Marlon Wayans, who is much better as a dramatic character actor than he is as a comedian or comic leading man, fills out a cast full of ringers as Bugaloo, a clown who wants to be a killer.

Finally, Wood Harris of Paid in Full and The Wire plays Motaw, a wild card and loose cannon for whom murder is both fun and easy.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of music in Above the Rim. There is not a single musical instrument onscreen but the wall-to-wall soundtrack of mid-1990s Hip Hop and R&B is the fuel that powers this overachieving b-movie.

Above the Rim is undeniably a product of a very specific cultural moment that I have enormous fondness for, because I was eighteen when it came out, and for some reason that age seems more important and transformational than all others.

But it’s also a throwback to gritty, socially conscious 1930s Warner Brothers melodramas about friends or brothers who are pulled in opposite paths as they get older and come of age.

Above the Rim puts a Hip Hop spin on that old chestnut, but it also benefits from an exhilarating element of moral ambiguity. Before a tragedy befalls Flip, Kyle, and Bugaloo are real assholes who treat others with shocking callousness and cruelty.

They’re not good people, necessarily. They’re merely less terrible than out-and-out villains like Birdie and Motaw, but once they understand the gangsters’ true evil, they’re scared back onto a straight path.

Above the Rim follows a well-trod path, but it succeeds due to a terrific soundtrack and a wildly overqualified cast, particularly 2Pac and Bernie Mac.

But the truth of the matter is that I enjoyed Above the Rim for the same reason I’m going to have a lot of fun with movies for the project: they ALL hit me right in the nostalgia sweet spot. I was miserable in 1994. I was a lonely, depressed teenager with undiagnosed, untreated autism and ADHD, and I lived in a group home.

My only real escape was the three Ms of adolescence: music, movies, and masturbation. Above the Rim is devoid of masturbatory fodder, but otherwise, it embodies the entertainment that allowed me to survive those bleak teenage years.