Brow Beat

Saturday Night Live Presents Rare Archival Footage of Rap Pioneers the Soul Crush Crew

This week’s Saturday Night Live had two period pieces—a pitch-perfect 1990s R&B  video and this episode of “Rap History,” which is better yet. A mix of contemporary interviews, vintage footage, and “vintage” footage, this is about as complicated structurally and stylistically as a Saturday Night Live sketch gets, but the whole thing hangs together, and is hilarious besides. Pete Davidson plays “Lil Doo Doo,” a contemporary rapper whose knowledge of the genre begins in 2009, while Kenan Thompson, Chance the Rapper, and Chris Redd play hip hop pioneers the Soul Crush Crew: “DJ Grand Wizard Karate,” “Kool Kenny Blade,” and “Chief Bronco,” respectively. The actors in the Crew have a harder go of it than Davidson, who just has to act dumb: Thompson, Chance, and Redd have to play their characters both as old men complaining about “Lil Doo Doo” and young men taking the musical world by storm. They pull it off, although the bald cap Chance wears as Kool Kenny Blade raises more questions than it answers.

But it’s the interviews with real people who put this one over. Questlove feigning ignorance of the Soul Crush Crew is good, but Common’s wry delivery of his recollections of the Soul Crush Crew—“They’re the only rappers I know that are pro-crack”—is perfect. (They should put that guy in a John Wick movie or something.)

A lot of Saturday Night Live sketches are already boiled down to minimum viable premises: there’s no simpler version of “there’s a dead body floating outside our underwater honeymoon suite” than the one they filmed. What’s interesting about “Rap History” is that there are five or six simpler, worse SNL sketches buried within it. This could have been about the Soul Crush Crew as a doomed pro-crack act, set entirely in the 1970s and 1980s. It could have been about the elderly members of the Soul Crush Crew and their resentment of the present—they’ve hung sketches on thinner hooks than Thompson taking offense at the thought that Lil Doo Doo might not have a DJ. It could even have just been about Lil Doo Doo encountering people who didn’t have specific, rap-history-related reasons to resent him—“eccentric guest on a talk show” has a special place in the history of mediocre SNL sketches. Instead, they packed a whole episode’s worth of premises into a single skit that jumps from era to era and joke to joke without missing a beat.

And speaking of beats, here’s Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s video for “The Message,” a clear visual reference for the sketch. See, Soul Crush Crew? You don’t need to smoke crack to have a good time.