It’s 1993, and dream hampton is in a studio called Hit Factory with a Cheshire-cat-grinning Notorious B.I.G., filming the Brooklyn MC recording a freestyle about toting guns and hopping yachts as a new-money rapper. Later, a 22-year-old hampton coordinates a phone call between Bad Boy Entertainment head Sean “Puffy” Combs and Snoop Dogg, who’s eager to broker a deal for himself and West Coast producer Warren G to appear on Mary J. Blige’s follow-up to What’s the 411? The footage, originally shot for hampton’s NYU film class, forms the backbone of her latest documentary, It Was All a Dream, a verité snapshot of hip-hop’s golden era, when the genre’s most culturally significant rappers — a generation hampton poignantly described as “kamikaze capitalists who just happened to be teenagers” — were coming of age. It also just so happened that hampton grew up alongside them, one of the many girls charged with protecting the bright, foolish boys they instinctively loved while interrogating their misogyny and trying to protect girls in the process.

Scenes of hampton challenging Biggie over lyrics about a guy who called himself “the rap rapist” (“For the record, I am o-fucking-fended,” hampton exclaims on camera) or bluntly asking Gang Starr’s Guru, “Why do niggas wanna kill bitches?” provide a real-time portrait of a hip-hop feminist working to dismantle the genre’s toxicity from within. And yet the film is notable for its absence of present-day commentary, a choice hampton made to avoid overly coloring the past. This approach is neither valorizing nor bleary-eyed but keeps the documentary eerily suspended in a time when hip-hop was transmogrifying into a capitalist beast and women found themselves in the crosshairs. The voiceover instead draws from articles hampton wrote between 1993 and 1999 for The Source, Vibe, The Village Voice, and other publications, with footage sourced from personal archives she uncovered in the summer of 2023 while clearing out a storage unit with her daughter. Ahead of the film’s June 2024 premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, hampton discussed the making of the documentary and its dual narrative about hip-hop’s assimilation into a fraught American dream and her own beginnings as a writer, filmmaker, and feminist activist whose name remains synonymous with a bygone era of giants.

Clover I want to start when you’re inside the renowned L.A. coffee house and jazz spot 5th Street Dick’s, in Leimert Park, interviewing its owner, Richard Fulton. You tell him, “Fifty years from now, I’ma still listen to hip-hop.”

dream [Laughs] Oh, that was a lie! I wouldn’t even be listening to it 10 years after that.

Clover This film seems to capture the breakdown of your personal dream of hip-hop as a potential space for claiming “land and liberation,” as you’ve said in the past. When did you notice that dream start to dissolve?

dream Honestly, back then, politically I probably would’ve thought of myself as a Black nationalist, and our greeting was “Free the land.” I didn’t think hip-hop would be part of some Black nationalist project. Or maybe I did! I don’t know. But it’s so laughable now. And by the way, the debates already happened a generation before, with Karenga versus Huey. I’m not saying the Panthers did anything better around gender than hip-hop. In some ways, we reify so much of the cultural nationalism. If you’re looking in real-time, you would say that Huey won those debates. But the truth is, Kwanzaa is more widely celebrated than the Black Panther program. One of the videos I remember so clearly from high school was Keith E. — Guru from Gang Starr — at a podium cosplaying as Malcolm X. When I first fell in love with hip-hop, it was the era of African medallions. I love the Jungle Brothers’ first album, Straight Out of the Jungle, and Done by the Forces of Nature was as much of a part of my formative thinking as De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. In so many ways, hip-hop is a failed project. It certainly failed in that it’s not even radical. I was once in a debate with the scholar Tricia Rose. Michael Eric Dyson had invited me to argue on the side “for hip-hop.” It was a silly little thing that happened in London. But Tricia won the whole debate. She was on the opposite side, and she won the debate with one line when she said hip-hop has turned into the cultural arm of capitalism. Any expectations I had of hip-hop being radical, let alone revolutionary, I abandoned pretty early on.

Clover Were there points in the past when you thought about releasing any of this footage?

dream No. I had licensed some Biggie footage for VH1’s “Behind the Music” episode on him, but I didn’t even look at it. It was literally in a box locked up in a storage space. I wasn’t thinking about it. I don’t know what made me say, “Let me get this small crew together and see what we have.” I thought we had a short. And then we started going through all the tapes and saw that we had a feature. It’s hard to look at your 22- and 23-year-old self, but there are times when I’m wildly impressed with her. Looking at that footage at 5th Street Dick’s was my first time seeing it since I shot it. A couple of members of Jurassic 5 were performing that night with Felicia Morris, also known as The Poetess. I saw myself at 5th Street Dick’s, and then I saw Richard come on camera. He’s since passed away. He was one of the architects of Leimert Park, which has had its own kind of renaissance and feels like 1990s Brooklyn right now. Richard was a formerly unhoused brother who had been given this space with the promise that he would renovate it. I’m just so happy I got him on tape. I made a temporal commitment to stay in that era. I would have loved to not have any voice-over — I didn’t want to be editorializing as a 50-something-year-old to that self or any of us.

Clover The film shows this tension of you being a Black feminist hip-hop writer raging against misogyny while having a personal relationship with these dudes who are sexist and lovingly holding their feet to the flames. At what point was balancing work and friendships the most difficult in that era?

dream They didn’t see me as a writer back then. My very first feature was on Snoop, and when I met him, he understood me as a filmmaker, not as a writer. I had access to Biggie because he was my neighbor, and I was a filmmaker. I was never a reporter. Me and Q-Tip became friends after he was so mad about my Midnight Marauders review. Me and Jay-Z became friends after I called him a hypercapitalist with cartoonish, misogynistic lyrics.

Clover And you captured it on tape.

dream That has to do with space. That has to do with me being in New York. I could’ve captured raging misogynists in my family. I could’ve done it on my block in Detroit. People call Puff “Diddy” now, and I’m getting way too many questions about what’s happening with him. But I know that my first response is that I don’t need celebrity to look at these questions. It just so happens that in my early 20s, instead of being home with my deeply misogynistic brother, I was in New York City. I have never, as a feminist, written off Black men, even though there are a zillion reasons to write off cishet Black men who are so resistant, decades into their lives, to unlearning patriarchy. The best that I can muster — and it’s a low-ass bar — is at least to be talking back, as bell hooks said. To not be passively taking this in. When I look at a 22-year-old dream, do I wish I wasn’t giggling sometimes? Yes, but I have some compassion and empathy for that girl. I don’t know that I’m as social as that girl was. Me now isn’t about to argue with Drake. I’m not going to get into a back-and-forth with Dave Chappelle. I’m not going to argue with any of these men, not just rappers. I’m going to let some trans girl read him after his third special. But back then …

Clover Back then, you were going back and forth with Method Man about the divide between Black men and Black women.

dream That was some Five Percenter shit. Girl, I try never to get into a debate with damn Five Percenters. Would I do that now? Nooo. Can you imagine? What if you have a heart attack while you are having an argument about who’s the sun and who’s the fucking moon?

Clover [Laughs] Did those types of conversations ever feel futile? Like you were hoping for a shift in thinking that would never happen?

dream I did hope for a shift in thinking. I believed it back then. I believed we were all in this project of thinking together. I thought we were in a project of exchanging ideas that would grow us. I thought we were all in a project of reading books. This is when, on Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street in front of the basketball courts, you could pick up C.L.R. James or Maryse Condé and talk to the brothers waiting to get tapped into the game about the book you were holding. Even ridiculous books like The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman, we would have rigorous debates about them. We were reading bell hooks. We were reading Octavia Butler and Walter Rodney. We were engaging. I’m not talking about all the MCs I knew — many of them weren’t. But me and my peers were. bell hooks in particular was about trying to apply some of these principles to your everyday life, and I remember trying to do that. Again, God bless little dreamy. Now I understand it’s not like some of these men haven’t had a chance to unlearn. No, they are doubling or tripling down on this patriarchy. It serves them. Being an oppressor or being at the top of the food chain in an oppressive hierarchy is not a problem for them. I’m not saying they need to be thrown away by society or that they need to go to jail, but I’m down to not spend the time I have left on the planet engaging people who have created moats of basicness around them.

Clover Hip-hop is now at a point where violence against women is gradually getting out in the open, most recently with the shooting of Megan Thee Stallion and the Diddy allegations. Even in the Drake versus Kendrick beef, women are collateral damage. What, if any, conversation is this film having with the current moment?

dream My analysis of the current moment is cursory at best. I dip in and out, in that I’m on Twitter to see what’s happening, and that’s when I catch a bunch of Drake and Kendrick strays. What I can see is that, yes, women are collateral. With Kendrick and Drake, I tweeted out, “Patriarchy makes targets out of women who ‘belong’ to men.” That’s just a patriarchal construct. That’s ancient. I would also like to say that in that epic beef from my era between N.W.A, Dr. Dre credibly alleges that Eazy-E robbed him of millions of dollars as that group fell apart. So does Ice Cube. None of these three men have fights. But who ends up being brutally attacked during that beef? Dee Barnes. A five-foot-three, 110-pound person. Then I see Kendrick’s wife, Whitney, invoked by Drake.

You brought up the allegations against Puff. To see 50 Cent acting as if, somehow, he’s some defender of women [laughs]… It’s not a real opportunity for him to have a conversation about the way these men not only are harming women in their own lives but how, through their contributions to the so-called culture, they perpetuate all kinds of violence against women. What he’s saying about Puff is not what he’s saying about Russell Simmons. It’s just that one of those men is his enemy. So that’s not interesting to me. Maybe the conversation is louder because we have social media; more voices are jumping in, and men are weighing in who aren’t rappers, aren’t music executives, aren’t engaged in this high-stakes, hypercapitalist play that is so-called culture and capitalism at this level. The fact that my film feels so right now is actually sad to me.

Clover You talk about the importance of men in hip-hop holding each other accountable at one point in the film. That issue came up around your Lifetime docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, and you suggested that what would have impacted the culture is if R. Kelly apologized and took accountability.

dream And those two things are married. During the time depicted in this film, Joan Morgan wrote an epic piece reporting on the Mike Tyson trial in Indiana for The Village Voice. What happens after Mike Tyson was convicted? Spike Lee goes to visit him. Not to hold him accountable but to let him know that there’s still love out in the streets for him. So it’s the opposite. Mike Tyson comes out of having done that bid with no better understanding. I believe no one had a conversation with Mike Tyson about consent as a child, and that in many ways, he was suspended in a particular mind-set as an athlete and exploited and used in all these ways. That does not mean he is innocent of being responsible for the harm he caused Desiree Washington. I don’t think Spike Lee had a conversation with Mike Tyson about consent when he went to visit him. I’m going to put $100 on that. And when Farrakhan was giving some speech about how culpable Desiree Washington was in her victimization, I don’t think he had some private conversation with Mike Tyson about his responsibility in raping her. That was 30 years ago. Dee Barnes was in a club that had almost everyone in the industry, including Tupac, in the room when she’s dragged into a bathroom and beat up by Dr. Dre. And that doesn’t even start to address all the things we witness when folks in our family cause harm.

Clover Diddy appears in the documentary in a studio scene with Biggie and then later on when you call him to connect him with Snoop. What do you think Diddy’s so-called reckoning and his failed apology mean for the MeToo movement in hip-hop, if anything?

dream I didn’t watch the video or his apology. I don’t know what it would’ve been like if someone had video of Dre beating up Dee Barnes. People I follow on Twitter are like, “This is what restorative justice is not.” We’ve introduced these terms that are perverted to the point where they don’t mean anything. It happens on the left, too. Those conversations just don’t seem earnest. Puff is loathed. Loathed. So people are going to have a different conversation about him than Russell Simmons.

Clover Did having the camera as a 20-something give you back some of the visibility you lost at the time? A sense of control? What did the camera give you?

dream Looking back at this footage that’s 30 years old, I had to remember how new it was. Now we all pull out a camera. People are so used to being filmed. A whole generation has had a camera in its face its entire life. We didn’t have camera phones back then. At one point, Snoop tells Warren G, “She’s doing a documentary about us.” He’s excited. I’m shooting Meth in the car, and that footage feels so different than when I give my camera to my cameraperson, Emir Lewis. Immediately, Meth goes into shouting out all the members of Wu-Tang and talking about all their names. He gets a little bit more performative. People are still trying to figure out, in that era, how to act in front of the camera. They’re all so new to celebrity, but we’re also new to this kind of technology. Cameras aren’t new. But having the camera in their faces is new, especially in a verité way that’s not about Let me sit you down in a studio with Fab 5 Freddy on Yo! MTV Raps, and you tell us about your latest project. It was Yo, I want to follow you around and just be yourself, and when you can forget about the camera, do so. There are times when Biggie is absolutely acting like I’m not there. I’m taping him on phone calls. There are times when I disappear, and there are times when I do something else. If I’m following Frederick Wiseman’s strictly verité style of filmmaking, I would never come from behind the camera and be like, “What the fuck? What’s up with you?” But I’m also in relationship with some of these men outside of the moment when I’m filming them. Not all of them — I didn’t have a relationship with Method Man or Onyx. But some of the access they’re giving me is because they weren’t getting that attention in that moment.

Clover Watching it, I felt like these men need therapy [laughs]. They’re working out their internal struggles through you and the camera. What were you hoping to capture as a filmmaker at the time? Do you think you achieved that?

dream I wonder what I hoped back then. When I was watching Wiseman’s Titicut Follies in film school, we talked about how it was impossible to be a true fly on the wall. I’ve known this from pulling out a microcassette recorder. It just changes. The entire time I interviewed Tupac, for instance, I never pulled out my tape recorder because he was so onstage all the time that to pull out a tape recorder was to put him in a particular mode. I would have to run to the bathroom or run to my hotel room after our interview and write everything down because I knew that the recording device itself would bring out another side of him. And so there’s the attempt to make fly-on-the-wall Frederick Wiseman verité filmmaking. I was interested in how it might look to do that with my friends. My friends happened to be New Yorkers in the ’90s who were making hip-hop; some became famous like Biggie, and some never blew up. I had friends on the West Coast I was shooting, too. I didn’t even want to be a documentary filmmaker at first. The first thing I made after film school was I Am Ali, a scripted drama with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. I wasn’t like I want to be a documentary filmmaker. I was watching Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. Those films were so radical and dope to me that I was like, Let me try that approach.

Was I failing? Yes. Because Frederick Wiseman doesn’t get in front of the camera. I was toggling back and forth. I don’t know that I had real goals for what I hoped to achieve, but I knew it was important to keep the camera rolling even in that moment with Biggie in the club with Kim, where it’s clear they’re having a private moment. I’m at a little bit of a distance, shooting them. It’s not TMZ-style. They were aware the camera was on. But they’re having an argument, and Biggie makes this gesture where he picks up a chair and slams it on the ground, which indicates that there’s violence in their relationship. And I was thinking, Wow. I kept shooting. In a less charged moment a few minutes after that, I’m onstage with Biggie. I’m trying to make my way through a sea of men onto the stage to shoot his performance. I fucking stayed with this shit, got up on that stage through 30 dudes, and got the shot. One of those is obviously a very loaded moment, and another is just: Look at me keeping the camera in my fucking hand and getting the shot. The goal back then was to keep rolling. And then it takes time for that footage to breathe to know what I have.

Clover And what do you have?

dream What I have isn’t a single perspective. It’s more than a diary entry. This is a collective, shared moment. This is Snoop before he’s aware of whatever persona he’s going to create. Biggie not aware of a near future that’s fatal. Kim not aware of who she’s about to become. I’m sure Guru, who was older, didn’t think death was around the corner for him. Prodigy was well aware that he had sickle cell disease that could cause his death. I think about how clear and focused he is in the moment as he’s recording The Infamous.

Clover Do you remember what you thought the moment you saw Biggie with the chair?

dream I was wondering what I was thinking when I kept the camera rolling. I was witnessing, and I didn’t turn away. And I’m glad that I didn’t. Because looking back on it, I think that’s evidence of what Kim has described. I didn’t include it to be an indictment of Biggie. I don’t know who Biggie would’ve become.

Clover Are you worried about inadvertently valorizing the artists who played such a big role in making this genre misogynist?

dream I hope that my portrait isn’t a valorization. Certainly not for me — I’ve never valorized other human beings. But in terms of presenting it in the now, yes, of course, there are things I worry about, but that part of me had to let my editors do their job because I was so dedicated to the film remaining in that era, not me with this wisdom of 30 years who knows what’s coming.

One of the B stories is watching Biggie and Snoop make these albums. I say in the film that these albums set up what ends up being a fatal standoff between the coasts. But in the moment, we didn’t know that. In the moment, I’m putting Snoop on the phone with Puff for the first time. And I did have a sense that they needed to talk. I am moving between these spaces. As a Midwesterner, I’m not married to any coasts. As a woman, I’m not in their beefs.

Clover What I see is these boys in hip-hop finally getting a chance to be men and not knowing what to do with that. How much awareness and compassion did you have with them at the time?

dream Oh, my gosh. I love what you just said about them becoming men and not knowing what to do with it. I think of so many memoirs. I think about Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver. I grew up on Donald Goines’s books. I think about Darnell Moore’s memoir No Ashes in the Fire, about growing up in Camden, New Jersey, as a young queer Black boy. All these testimonies of a perilous, precarious journey into manhood and this failed project that is America, let alone the failed project that is hip-hop, and how impossible it often seems. Does that invoke some kind of compassion in me? Certainly. Not just compassion but empathy, because I know how impossible it is to come into womanhood in the same failed project that is America and that is hip-hop. But we’re also hard-wired, growing up as Black women, to — the only word that comes to my mind is coddle. To privilege and prioritize these brothers’ pain and struggles. I wrote about Dee Barnes, but all my activism was against police terror. I was living in New York then, so a lot of that looked like organizing around and against the NYPD. It’s not like women don’t receive direct violence from these same players and actors — meaning the police and the state in general — and not just secondhand. Women are abused by the police, but most of that is happening to Black boys and men, so my organizing at the time and today still centers Black men in a particular way because the state continues to center and target them. It’s that work that we have been talking about since we got here as Black women where we are exceedingly open to remaining in relationships, no matter how much it hurts. We’re open to being a place of healing, a soft landing for these men, whether they’re our brothers or friends, our lovers.

Clover “We love them to death” is what you say in the film.

dream We love them to death. And we were trying to love them into healing. But the way that I’m wired, that love doesn’t come without some talkback. Yeah, I could focus on the men who are absolutely stuck in saying the same misogynist, homophobic, basic-ass shit that they were saying back then. But there are so many people I know who’ve grown. Some are famous rappers, and some are just the men in my life who’ve grown from being engaged with women like me. But there are so many women like me. I’m not the only one. I just happened to have a camera back then.