Queer America on Film: PICK UP THE MIC Screening

Screening of the 2006 documentry PICK UP THE MIC as part of Queer America on Film series at Bernie Grant Arts Centre.

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PICK UP THE MIC

Queer Hip-Hop: it’s a lot more than a stylish oxymoron in this surprising, fast-paced documentary on the world of queer rappers. Featuring searing public performances and raw, revealing interviews with the community’s most significant players, the film captures an unapologetic underground music movement just as it explodes into the mainstream - defying the music industry's most homophobic genre in the process.

PICK UP THE MIC features more than a dozen contemporary hip-hop artists, representing a striking range of sexual and ethnic diversity. Shot over a three-year period, the film traces their intertwining relationships from San Francisco’s underground music scene of the early ‘90s through performances as recent as 2005. It was recorded in such major cities as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but breaks down coastal stereotypes by also covering performers in such diverse areas as Houston, Minneapolis, and Madison, Wisconsin – and a particularly memorable outdoor gig in the Ozarks. The artists are followed rehearsing, performing, and struggling – always revealing their raw, most intimate feelings, including experiences with homophobia, gender identification issues, and suicide.

PICK UP THE MIC reveals these artists and producers as they attempt to express their lives through hip-hop music - a medium from which they’ve often felt alienated because of it’s widespread misogyny and anti-gay rhetoric. But their stories resonate far beyond the music industry and queer communities, reminding us all of the surprising resiliency of the human spirit.

PICK UP THE MIC is not only a captivating record of a burgeoning culture, but is ultimately – and perhaps more importantly - an inspiring exploration of the universal desire to voice the passion and pain of one’s individual existence.