MC Hammer
Stanley Kirk Burrell's screen credits are a fairly precise chart of what happened to MC Hammer. At the top of the curve, in 1993, he plays himself in Last Action Hero, which is what enormous fame buys you: a walk-on in a summer blockbuster, unexplained, because the audience is assumed to know who you are.
The music is the actual career, and it was built out of dance and spectacle as much as verses. Hooks lifted from records people already loved, choreography that needed a stage rather than a stereo, and the Hammer pants: pop rap as a mass-market format is largely his construction, and the backlash from purists arrived roughly in proportion to the sales. His Grammy came for a music video, which is the correct award for a performer whose visual presentation was half the product.
The later credits are the interesting part, because they are so honest. In 1996 he took real roles rather than cameos, Dexter Kane in One Tough Bastard and Haddox in Cheyenne, the sort of lean action work that pays. Private Parts put him back to playing himself. The Surreal Life in 2003 formalised the nostalgia and made it the job. By Zoolander 2 the joke is simply that you remember him, and Beat Shazam uses him as a music-trivia fixture. Read in order, the filmography is a short course in what happens to a performer after the culture moves on and decides, some years later, that it is fond of him after all.
Movies (7)
TV (4)
Where to start with MC Hammer
There is no great performance here to send you to, so choose by what you actually want. For the artifact, Last Action Hero catches him at the exact peak, dropped into a blockbuster with no introduction because none was needed.
For him doing the work of acting, One Tough Bastard is the one: a straight action part, no self-reference, and he is perfectly competent in it. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee is the smartest film on the list, a mockumentary about the industry's appetite for a replacement star, and his Roy Thunder fits its satire neatly.
Everything else is the persona in circulation. Private Parts and Zoolander 2 use him as a recognisable face, The Surreal Life turned that recognition into a format, and Beat Shazam is where the music knowledge finally became the point again.