When hip-hop rose out of the streets of the Bronx in the seventies, it wasn't long before movies were made to capture the new sound and style, the early days of a movement that would become the biggest force in pop culture. Widely hailed as the first hip-hop movie, 1983's independently produced Wild Style featured Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, and Grandmaster Flash in the story of a graffiti artist who gets his big break when he's hired to decorate the stage for a rap show. The thin plot wasn't particularly important, though -- it was the backdrop of New York's hip-hop scene that made the movie something truly new.

Where trends go Hollywood follows, and after Wild Style became a cult hit, the studios responded. In 1984, two mainstream movies tried to cash in: Breakin', a West Side Story knockoff produced by the Cannon Group, best known for action exploitation flicks like the Death Wish sequels and American Ninja; and Beat Street, produced by Harry Belafonte and featuring performances by Grand Master Melle Mel, Doug E. Fresh, and Kool Moe Dee. The result was a watered-down, cartoonish version of the scene, but they helped spread the whole idea of hip-hop, giving it a nationwide audience.

In 1985, the first rap biopic surfaced: Krush Groove, a thinly veiled retelling of the rise of Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons' Def Jam records, featuring the real stars that made the label great: Run DMC (Run is Simmons' brother), LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Kurtis Blow, and appearances from Sheila E., New Edition, the Fat Boys, Chaka Khan, and Debbie Harry. The narrative may be melodramatic, but it's still a hip-hop classic, with unforgettable performances and a real feel for the cauldron that cooked the NYC scene. (Also released in 1985 was Mario Van Peebles' Rappin', which was ... not so classic.)

Concert movies and documentaries helped spread the new language of rap (particularly Style Wars, originally aired on PBS), and in the late eighties and early nineties, as hip-hop itself was diversifying, rap music and rap stars spread out into a range of movies -- lighthearted comedies like Kid 'n' Play's House Party series, gangster pictures like Boyz N the Hood (costarring N.W.A.'s Ice Cube) and Juice (starring Tupac Shakur), and sports movies like Above the Rim (Tupac again). But there weren't many movies actually about rapping -- the art, the performance, the culture.

The exceptions tended to be terrible, like 1991's Cool as Ice, which turned Vanilla Ice's cheesy rise to stardom into an even cheesier fictional version, or spoofs. In 1993, Chris Rock's CB4, about a hardcore gangster rap group that's really just three suburban posers, sent up groups like N.W.A, and a year later Fear of a Black Hat, featuring a band called N.W.H. did more or less the same thing.

But by the turn of the new century, the rap movie was getting serious. Rappers like Ice Cube and Ice-T had become legit movie stars, and studios seemed to be willing to give the medium its due -- not just as a soundtrack to a bank robbery or a candy-colored cash-in on a fad, but as fully realized drama.

In 2002's semi-autobiographical 8 Mile, Eminem played a Detroit factory worker and aspiring rapper juggling his chaotic home life with dreams of stardom. The combination of rap battles and serious drama won over critics and audiences alike; the movie made more than $240 million internationally, and Eminem won an Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Three years later, 50 Cent's semi-bio Get Rich or Die Tryin' was directed by the six-time Oscar nominee who directed My Left Foot, and Hustle and Flow, about a small-time Memphis pimp with MC dreams (costarring Ludacris) took rap movies to the awards circuit. It won the audience award at Sundance, and Terrence Howard was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

These days rappers like Mos Def and Common are serious actors, and old hands like Ice Cube have all but given up recording for life in front of the cameras. Next up? Notorious, a biopic of the late Biggie Smalls, due out January 16, which looks to be just the beginning. Biopics of Missy Elliott, Akon, and Cage (supposedly to star Shia LaBeouf) are all in various phases of development.

I'm not saying that Notorious will be cleaning up come next awards season. But is there a Ray or a Walk the Line waiting to be made about Lil Wayne, or N.W.A., or Tupac? Everything the cynics say about rap they used to say about jazz, country, and especially rock and roll. And the first movies out of that scene were pretty bad too.

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