Entertainment
A Grammy-winning producer. An incarcerated father. And a 'fairy tale' reunion
Snoop Dogg’s private, self-branded Doggyland casino resides in an unmarked building in Inglewood, and on a mid-January on Monday, its paisley print blackjack table and Indoggo branded bar were commandeered by Buffalo, N.Y., rapper Benny the Butcher for a video shoot.
With cameras rolling, Snoop and Benny cackled in drunken laughter at the center of the scene, while rapping along to their forthcoming collaboration. To their left sat Hit-Boy, the song’s producer, while Big Hit — Hit-Boy’s father — served as a human money counter on their right, throwing bills and twisting fingers.
“Big Hit, what up?” Snoop Dogg exclaimed as the two exchanged a dap in between shots. “I just bought your album again. Too damn important.”
Later that same week — on the other side of a quick Las Vegas sprint that found them in an impromptu session with Ty Dolla Sign — Hit-Boy and Big Hit hunkered down at Chalice Studios, bobbing heads in unison while watching and rewatching the final product. Once they’ve soaked in every shot to their satisfaction, Hit-Boy plopped in front of his computer and scrolled through his assortment of samples; as soon as he settled on a vocal chop, Big Hit worked through a verse idea, freestyling references and metaphors while trying to catch the beat.
“All of this is a dream come true,” said Big Hit, 52. “It feels like a fairy tale.”
“I lost everything,” says Big Hit of his time in prison. “The struggle is real in there.”
(Walter W. Brady / For The Times)
This freewheeling schedule of studios, shoots and A-list shoulder-rubbing is now the norm for Big Hit, born Chauncey Hollis Sr., who’s fast-tracking the rap career he’s long envisioned in tandem with his son. But it’s also wholly unfamiliar. Big Hit has spent most of his adult life in prison on drug-related charges — from 1991 to 2004, with intermittent stints to follow — laying his head in a cell as Hit-Boy (Chauncey Hollis Jr.) established himself as one of hip-hop’s dominant producers.
While shuffling through the system, Big Hit says, he survived a brutal jumping at the hands of authorities that left him flatlined and strapped to a gurney as doctors questioned if he’d survive. “They had us standing from cell to cell for like a week, waiting to get a bed,” he recalled. “We made a plan to stand up for our rights, and got screamed on and boo-bopped. They went overboard with me, because I was the one who wouldn’t stop.”
In prison, he contracted COVID three separate times. Workouts required cramming letters into bags to facilitate bicep curls; he learned to stuff his bed sheets in the vents to catch the dust and protect from respiratory illness. When he was released in May 2023, he brought home his final prison meal — two slices of bread and bologna — as a spoiled reminder of the conditions he survived, and the place he can’t allow himself to return.
“I wish I had somebody to really tell me the other side of the dope game,” he said. “It was all true — the glitter, the girls, the cars, the money, and all that. But people wouldn’t lace you up on the darker side of the situation. I lost everything. The struggle is real in there.”
Meanwhile on the outside, Hit-Boy, 36, dove headfirst into music while stashing earnings to send to his father and care for his mother. His most commercially successful creations are as thunderous as they are unavoidable: Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “N— in Paris,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle,” Beyoncé’s “Sorry,” Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode.”
Hit-Boy attends the Grammy Awards in 2022.
(Johnny Nunez / Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
This February he’ll return to the Grammys, where he’s again nominated for producer of the year, and for the first time in his career, he’ll walk the red carpet with his mother, father and 3-year-old son.
It’s a moment he and his father have long visualized.
“I’ve won three Grammys, but my pops has never been out to see it,” Hit-Boy said. “We want that producer of the year award. Not too many Black people have even been nominated — let alone won — so being considered is already dope. It’d mean a lot to the younger me; ‘you really did what you wanted to do.’ ”
But beyond the gold trophy, Hit-Boy’s primary focus has been helping his father establish a new life, rehabilitated through the music rather than the streets. It’s a dream birthed in 2014, when Big Hit featured on Hit-Boy’s posse cut “Grindin’ My Whole Life” and caught a local hit through the waterworks-inducing “G’z Don’t Cry,” but the candle was snuffed out after Big Hit committed a hit-and-run in Humboldt County, sending him away once again, this time for nine years. (Big Hit says he was robbed after the crash and fled the scene as gunshots rang out, and didn’t know someone in the other car had been gravely injured.)
“He’s been out eight months,” says Hit-Boy, right, of his father, left, “but it’s really 30 years of programming. A lot of his life was taken from him.”
(Walter W. Brady / For The Times)
Rather than working side-by-side in the studio, Big Hit wrote rhymes in prison, plotting an eventual debut album that would be produced by his son. In December 2023, the vision was realized through “The Truth Is in My Eyes,” which wraps a lifetime’s worth of street tales into a triumphant body of work. On this album (and on “Paisley Dreams,” a collaboration project with the Game), Big Hit spits each word as if the mic could be snatched away from him at any moment.
The studio has become a safe haven for Big Hit as he acclimates himself to an entirely new world. It’s a task easier said than done, but those with a front row seat are already seeing the shift in his mind set.
“I sat with him in the studio for hours when he had been out for maybe 10 days, and the yard was still on him, in terms of his energy,” said DJ Hed, host at the Inglewood-based Home Grown Radio.
“He was ready to go back to what he knew how to do, to get some money,” DJ Hed continued. “I had to tell him, ‘Your son is really a legend out here, and if you go all in with the music, I think it’ll work out for you.’ I saw him at his release party, and he told me he was all for the music now, offers on the table, making money. It was a moment that reminded me why I do what I do.”
“It’s years and years of him being desensitized, thinking to himself that if he’s not seeing it right here right now, it’s not happening,” Hit-Boy said. “He’s been out eight months, but it’s really 30 years of programming. A lot of his life was taken from him.”
“What we’re doing is miraculous,” says Hit-Boy, right. “I’ve had people say, ‘Y’all made me reach out to my dad again.’ That’s priceless to me.”
(Walter W. Brady / For The Times)
Big Hit endured a rough upbringing in Pasadena. His father, who grew up an orphan, smoke and drank with him. Big Hit was an alcoholic before he reached his teens.
He calls himself a “young brat” who made a habit of cussing out his teachers and getting into fights.
“By the time [my father] saw I was out of control, it was too late,” he said. “That beast had been shaped and molded in me. I remember one day we were on the porch, and he said, ‘You want to be just like your daddy, huh.’ I looked him in the eyes, and he told me, ‘N—, you scaring me.’ He tried to change it, but it was too late.”
Big Hit ran away at the age of 11 and turned to the streets; a natural hustler, he advanced through the ranks quickly. In 1991, he was caught with 3 kilograms of cocaine, more than a dozen guns and bundles of cash.
Hit-Boy had just turned 5 years old when his father was convicted and sent to prison for what would become 13 years, and although the two did their best to stay in contact, he felt the pain of his dad’s absence. Hit-Boy and his mother moved around Los Angeles, sleeping on floors or at friends’ and relatives’ places; at one point, the family resided in Upland, where a 2-for-99-cents promotion at Arby’s became their daily sustenance.
Hit-Boy’s uncle, Rodney Benford, was a member of Troop, the Pasadena R&B group who scored a smattering of R&B hits in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Some of Hit-Boy’s earliest memories were nights at his uncle’s house, giving him a firsthand look at the life a successful music career could facilitate.
“I’d go to prison to see my dad, and then I’m going back to my uncle’s house, and he’s throwing a party,” he said. “I saw the worst of the worst in prison, and the best of the best with my uncle.”
Hit-Boy tried to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and create a rap group, until his collaborators pushed the founder out of the picture. He took his future into his own hands instead, learning how to produce with a cracked copy of FL Studio and rapping into a USB microphone.
Navigating the business has proved the toughest part of the journey; seeking quick cash, Hit-Boy signed a production deal with Universal Music Publishing Group in 2007, to which he remains tied after more than a decade of fighting.
“I realized it was a bad deal in 2011, when ‘N— in Paris’ came out,” Hit-Boy said. “I thought I had my hit, it was all over the radio, so I went to UMPG, saying I need a check. They were like, ‘You already signed this contract, so it’s nothing we can really do for you.’ ”
(Thanks to help from Jay-Z and Roc Nation Chief Executive Officer Desiree Perez, he was able to finally secure an end date to his UMPG contract that will soon allow him to move on.)
Recently, he’s hit a hot streak on his joint albums with Nas, the first of which (“King’s Disease,” 2021) earned the Queens legend his first Grammy. But other high-profile collaborations have been bittersweet — Hit-Boy and his manager said the producer is still chasing royalties from a number of multi-platinum records made with major label artists.
“You’ll help someone have one of their biggest moments, and they’ll act like they don’t even know you,” Hit-Boy said. “I’ve won Grammys with people I can’t get in contact with.”
Stories like that are one reason why Hit-Boy and his dad are attempting to chart a new path, betting on themselves and building it all in-house. Nothing about what they’re doing is conventional — a 52-year-old rapper, releasing his debut album executive produced by his son. For them, releasing “The Truth Is in My Eyes” exclusively for purchase on Bandcamp, rather than making it available for streaming on Spotify and other platforms, was another empowering move, allowing true supporters to connect with the music in a deeper way.
But even more important than the album’s sales is the impact it’s already made in the community.
“I was talking to the Game, and he was telling me how many people have tried to put their cousin, or their uncle, or their family on, and it did not work at all,” Hit-Boy said. “What we’re doing is miraculous. I’ve had people say, ‘Y’all made me reach out to my dad again.’ That’s priceless to me. That’s the success.”
I watched Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia before I watched the original. I was in my early twenties. I thought the film was fine and I moved on. It took me until Second Sight dropped this 4K edition to find out what fine had been covering up for twenty four years. I feel pretty bad about that. Not bad enough to not tell you to skip Nolan and start here, but bad.
Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 original is a Norwegian thriller about a Swedish detective named Jonas Engström who goes to Tromsø to investigate a teenage girl’s murder and instead dismantles himself in daylight. Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas. He is not a good man doing a bad thing. He is a man who was already doing bad things who then does a worse one, and the film is about watching him hold that together under a sun that will not go down.
The Sun Is the Monster Here
Skjoldbjærg called it “a reversed film noir with light instead of darkness as its dramatic force,” and that is exactly right, and also a polite way of saying the Arctic summer is doing something genuinely horrible to this movie. Tromsø in June means no night. No dark corner. No 3am where you can tell yourself it was a dream.
Cinematographer Erling Thurmann-Andersen shoots the whole thing overexposed and grey, and in the new 4K restoration that greyness lands like a fist. Every interior feels too bright. Every window is a problem. Jonas cannot sleep, cannot hide, cannot find a single hour that looks different from the one before it. That is the film’s horror, and it is more effective than it has any right to be.
What Skarsgård Actually Does
The performance does not announce itself. That is the whole thing. Skarsgård plays Jonas going still when he should flinch, pausing a half-beat too long before answering simple questions, watching every room he enters with the focus of a man who needs to know who in it already knows. He is calculating. He is also dissolving.
Roger Ebert compared the film to Dostoevsky when it opened stateside in 1998. The Crime and Punishment parallel is real, with one difference, Raskolnikov is tormented almost immediately. Jonas keeps choosing not to be. That is the colder read and the better film.
What Nolan Did With It
The 2002 remake moved everything to Alaska, added about 20 minutes, and made the detective a fundamentally decent man destroyed by circumstance. Al Pacino does the thing Pacino does. Robin Williams is genuinely unsettling in a way the film earns. Hilary Swank does more with her role than the script deserves. It is a competent Hollywood thriller and I have not thought about it since I watched it.
The key structural difference, in Nolan’s version, the detective dies. Some weight lifted. In the original, Jonas lives. Goes home. Carries it. That is the correct ending and the more disturbing one, and I will not call it a spoiler because you needed to know.
About This Release
Second Sight did not cut corners. The 4K restoration carries a director-approved HDR grade with Dolby Vision, and Thurmann-Andersen’s washed-out oppressive whites have never looked this punishing. The dual format edition puts the feature and bonus material on both the UHD and Blu-ray, which is a small detail that collectors notice and appreciate.
The physical package is a rigid slipcase with new art by Peter Strain, a 120-page book with essays from Jenn Adams, Mitchell Beaupre, Barry Forshaw, Francesco Massaccesi, Priscilla Page, and Travis Woods, and six collector art cards. The book reads like it was commissioned from people who actually watched the film. That sounds like a low bar. It is not.
What Is on the Discs
The audio commentary with Skjoldbjærg and co-writer Nikolaj Frobenius is the feature you will come back to. A director revisiting his debut nearly thirty years out has usually dropped the defensiveness and kept the honesty, and this one has that quality. Two new interviews accompany it: “Running on Instinct” with Skjoldbjærg, and “Falling Into It” with producer Petter J. Borgli. The producer interview fills in context the film itself never bothers to explain.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas contributes a piece called “Private Prisons” that treats the film analytically without treating it as a sacred object. Three of Skjoldbjærg’s short films are included: Spor, Close to Home, and Near Winter. Watch those first if you want to know where Insomnia came from.
Buy It or Don’t
If you have never seen this film, the answer is yes. Full stop.
If you own the Criterion edition and you are doing upgrade math. The restoration is the definitive visual presentation and the commentary is new material unavailable anywhere else. Whether that moves the needle depends on you.
Insomnia is a Norwegian film about guilt dressed as a detective story. Jonas Engström did not need the midnight sun to lose his mind. He was already most of the way there.
Ronald LaPread, a co-founder and former bassist of the funk and soul group the Commodores, has died. He was 75.
“It is with a very heavy heart that I must announce that my father Ronald LaPread has passed,” LaPread’s daughter Soraya LaPread shared on her Instagram story. “If you know me you know my dad. I am devastated. A piece of me is gone from this world.”
Soraya did not share details about her father’s death, but the New Zealand Herald reported that the longtime resident died of a “sudden medical event.” The Commodores took to Instagram to share their condolences, writing that LaPread “will always be a Commodore.”
Thomas McClary, Milan Williams, William King, Ronald LaPread and Walter Orange in 1986 — the year LaPread left the group.
(BSR Entertainment / Gentle Look / Getty Images)
“Ronald was a phenomenal musician, an accomplished songwriter and a vital part of the Commodores’ sound and success. His contributions to our music and his friendship enriched our lives beyond measure. We were grateful to perform with him again last fall in New Zealand,” the Commodores shared on Instagram. “His legacy lives on through the music he helped create and the countless people he inspired.”
LaPread began playing with the Commodores in 1970 alongside Lionel Richie, William “WAK” King, Milan Williams and Thomas McClary while they were students at Tuskegee Institute. The band initially played shows around campus, performing covers and a handful of original songs.
Their manager Benny Ashburn spent his summer organizing shows for the Commodores on Martha’s Vineyard to test-market the band. In 1971, the group opened for the Jackson 5, helping them gain national exposure and leading them to sign with Motown Records in 1972.
The band released their debut album, “Machine Gun,” in 1974 and reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100. They released a quick succession of albums — “Caught in the Act,” “Movin’ On” and “Hot on the Tracks” — catapulting the band to mainstream success. LaPread played bass on the band’s most memorable songs, including “Easy,” “Three Times a Lady” and “Brick House,” the latter a song that LaPread insisted they put on the album.
“They say, ‘Oh man, it’s too Black.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. I tell you what, I will give this song to the group. Just put it on the album.’ They say, ‘Okay,’ and they put ‘Brick House’ on the tape recorder,” LaPread explained in a video recently shared on his personal Instagram. “They went crazy. When you hear a hit song, it sends goosebumps all over your body. Before anything happens, you feel it, and that’s the history.”
After working on 11 albums with the band, LaPread left the Commodores in 1986 and moved to New Zealand. During his time with the Commodores, the group earned nine Grammy nominations and won an award for their song “Nightshift.”
LaPread joined the Commodores onstage last October during a tour stop in Auckland, New Zealand. On Instagram, the band called performing with LaPread the “highlight” of their shows in Australia and New Zealand.
In addition to his daughter, LaPread is survived by his wife, Farideh; and children Mark and Ronald Jr.
Surrealism is not my favorite film genre, but I will make a massive exception if it’s in the hands of Boots Riley. Not unlike his debut, Riley’s latest feature, I Love Boosters, is a weird, vibrant, funny, thoughtful, hopeful thesis on collective action and workers’ rights. At a time when satire is almost impossible (an episode of The Boys where the key villain announced that he was God aired just days after the president of the United States posted an AI meme of himself as Jesus), Riley manages to create something just bonkers enough actually feels like it has something to say, and is bright and colorful enough to demand your attention.
Corvette (Keke Palmer) is struggling to get where she wants to be in life, so poor that she’s squatting in a closed chicken restaurant. She and her friends, Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), steal clothes from the high-end boutique Metro and resell them at a lower price to people in their community. As part of their desire to get better at boosting, the three take jobs at Metro, hoping to figure out how to clear out an entire store.
But one day, while they are being reprimanded by Grayson for wearing last year’s Metro line from designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore), they leave the meeting to discover that someone has beaten them to emptying the store. They track down Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a Chinese woman who has a teleporting device that allows her to send the clothes back to China, where they are manufactured, hoping to force Christie to give them better wages and safer working conditions. They realize that they need to work together if they are going to see the changes they are striving for.
Also, LaKeith Stanfield plays a character who is so sexy, I can never watch this movie with my family.
At a time when so many trailers give away the entire movie, I Love Boosters is so wholly unique that if someone explained every plot point to you, you would still need to see it in order to fully grasp everything happening on screen. Like Corvette’s full-to-bursting pink tracksuit, this movie is stuffed with ideas and colors and characters, but it somehow all manages to stay together, creating an absolute feast for your eyes and ears.
The performances in this are absolutely spectacular from top to bottom. Keke Palmer sparkles, even as we see her running away from a literal ball of her problems. Demi Moore gets to play the opposite side of her role in The Substance, this time as the person trying to amass more wealth at the expense of those beneath her, primarily other women, and she tears it up. Don Cheadle is almost unrecognizable as Dr. Jack, a man Sade idolizes for his Friends Being Friendly pyramid scheme. Will Poulter is absolutely hilarious as Grayson, a Metro manager who has fully embraced everything Christie Smith is selling.
One thing you can glean from the trailer is the film’s overall look. Christie works in monochrome, so each location is filled with a single color. But even so, the colors are bright, not like the relentless desaturation that we are cursed with right now. Even when we are taken to the sweatshops in China, everything is bright and colorful. We are drenched in color and unique styles in I Love Boosters, but it is always singular, which is a fascinating way to show the uniformity that is often the hallmark of a hyper-capitalist society that is torn between conformity and individuality.
What makes this movie special is that in the midst of all of the hilarity, bright-but-monochromatic costuming, and a sex demon, there lies a deep philosophical examination of capitalism through the lens of dialectical materialism. This complex ideology isn’t dumbed down in any way, but is instead told to us through a magical device that is able to show us the world beneath the glitz and glamor of the fashion world. And sometimes what is underneath the literal skin of some of the people seeking to prop up the system as it is.
There are some issues with this film that don’t quite come together. The whole LaKeith Stanfield arc is very funny, but doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the movie. Taylour Paige is fantastic in her role, but there is more depth between Sade and Corvette, leaving less for Paige’s Mariah to do. But the messiness is so minor compared to the rest of I Love Boosters that it tends to get swept away in the maximalist filmscape that Riley has created.
Throughout the movie, Christie Smith has a lot to say about creating art and how her clothes allow people to become art themselves. At one point, someone tells her that people don’t want to be art, they want to make art. And that feels very much at the heart of this film. Most people want to create something beautiful that helps their community, but are constantly chased by the pressure to simply survive. To put a roof over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back. I Love Boosters says this dream is possible, but we might have to significantly change how we look at things and recognize that we’re stronger together than apart.
I Love Boosters is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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