A quarter of the way through House Party, Kid—half of the dancing-ass rap duo Kid n’ Play—is chased through the neighborhood by the scantily clad school bullies. The occasionally sociopathic Stab, Zilla, and Pee-Wee—the George brothers of the R&B fusion group Full Force—follow Kid through the bushes and into a backyard where they crash the shindig of bougie Black adults dressed like they’re in The Great Gatsby. Hearing the faint sirens of the white police officers who have been monitoring the area for no real reason, Kid attempts to blend into the party by grabbing the mic of the bored DJ—played by Parliament-Funkadelic’s George Clinton—to freestyle. The partygoers don’t really know how to react until Stab interrupts the performance to choke Kid out, and then everyone becomes horrified.

The screen fades to black, and then, seconds later, Kid and the bullies are on their knees with their hands behind their heads, facing a cop who has his gun drawn. “Look, Officer, it was just an accident,” says one of the older men at the function, and one of the women follows with, “They need discipline, not solitary confinement.” The police go on to mock and embarrass the teens (Full Force look about 37 years old but that’s not the point) as all of the bystanders groan, not moving until the cops let them go. Kid and the bullies might be a bunch of knuckleheads who ruined the party, but their elders are still protective over them because they’re a part of the fabric of the neighborhood.

I hadn’t watched the movie since high school until last week, when I got my copy of Criterion’s new reissue of House Party in the mail. I fired it up immediately. It’s pretty rare that vintage hip-hop flicks get any sort of investment beyond Tubi uploads or thorough yet low-budget YouTube breakdowns. Despite some warts (the homophobic jail scene, for one), the Kid n’ Play star vehicle is still fun as hell. Robin Harris, as Kid’s slick-tongued, hard-working father, is on fire with his improvised one-man banter. Kid pulls off nerd-cool as well as any John Hughes-scripted Anthony Michael Hall character. And, of course, Kid n’ Play’s dance battle with the girls they were after, Sydney (Tisha Campbell) and Sharane (A.J. Johnson), set to Full Force’s “Ain’t My Type of Hype” remains an all-time musical number. But what I’d never picked up before was the intimate layers to the Hudlin’s depiction of the characters’ neighborhood, where Black people are trying to go about their lives while under constant surveillance.

Surveillance was on my mind on Super Bowl Sunday. The three-hour onslaught of A.I. is good and chill, bro commercials left me feeling so queasy that I couldn’t be moved by the optimism and mild defiance of an elaborate Bad Bunny production that lightly touched on the power of community. A now-viral ad for Ring—the inescapable Amazon-owned “home security” device—was the most sinister of the bunch: It introduces a new add-on where, if you lose your dog, you can upload a picture of it and A.I. recognition software will alert the other Ring cameras in the neighborhood to track them down. “Millions of dogs go missing in the U.S. every year—and options for finding them are often painfully limited,” wrote Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on X (his hilariously vague bio reads, “big sports/music/film fan”). “Our Ring team saw an opportunity to use our community and technology to help, so they built Search Party.” But if Amazon is using artificial intelligence to autonomously connect a network of cameras to locate a lost dog, what barriers are in place to prevent them from surveilling humans without their knowledge? Is this a dogs-only feature? In the surveillance state that has been rapidly advancing since Ferguson, I doubt it.

Loosely based on Reginald Hudlin’s upbringing in East St. Louis, House Party’s unnamed city suburb feels so alive. It’s a portrait that supersedes class distinctions. The director looks at both Sydney and Sharane’s homes with honest, lived-in reflections. Sydney’s in a large two-story suburban crib, and her parents were guests at the aforementioned bougie backyard party that Kid crashed. The shots of the house have an almost nostalgic glow but seem a little lonely. In Sharane’s overcrowded project apartment, her family is a little emotionally distant but around: Her grandmother seems to be a permanent fixture on the couch; her brother is making her a new batch of Kool-Aid with mad sugar. There’s no rose-colored glasses; it’s just the way it is for two best friends who probably live about 10 minutes away from each other.

Meanwhile, Robin Harris hunts through the tree-lined streets for Kid who snuck out to go to Play’s party despite being grounded. Harris is immediately stopped by the same pair of cops we’ve seen harassing Kid earlier. They say there’s been a disturbance in the neighborhood. “Man, the only fuckin’ disturbance is you fuckin’ with me,” he snaps, fed up. Afterward, Harris busts up Play’s party, still looking for Kid. You can tell he knows half of the teenagers there, and he starts roasting them like they’re hecklers at his stand-up show before just letting them resume their get-together, though he hilariously notes, “All be ashamed of yourselves, messing up these folks house, know it ain’t paid for.”

The hater on the block is John Witherspoon as Play’s fast-talking, cranky old-head neighbor. He pokes his head out of the window and whines about the noise of the party. His half-asleep wife tells him to stop overreacting, but he calls the cops anyway. “Look, Officer, I spent $15,000 on my house,” he yells, choosing to think about his unaffected property over the safety of the kids. “I don’t want to hear no goddamn Public Enema around here.”

My favorite scene of them all, though, is the final cruise through their stomping grounds as Play, Kid, and their friend DJ Bilal (Martin Lawrence) drop Sharane and Sydney off at their cribs after bailing Kid out of jail. The dreamy mood is set by a lush R&B melody that I’ve never been able to find in full and has a real sweetness. It’s easy to remember House Party as the lighthearted teen dance movie, but the heart is in how the Hudlins saw the Black neighborhood: as a flawed but self-sufficient ecosystem that, at its most effective, could build some sort of shield from the outside forces trying to upend it. That’s the sort of idyllic vision our political powers-that-be and tech overlords fear more than anything.

Last Saturday, I braced the frostbite to catch a stacked lineup of producers lay down beat sets at the record shop Loudmouth in Bedstuy. Put together by Long Island’s Theravada in celebration of his T90 Gyro EP, it was cool to be in a room where everyone was locked in on the intricacies of instrumentals instead of lyrics for once. Personal favorites of mine were Daniel’s drum machine improvisations and August Fanon’s wonky remixes of Roc Marciano and ODB, which I nodded along to while UNC’s upset of Duke was projected onto a screen and the smell of gyros right off the spit had my stomach grumbling.

On the heels of the T-Pain boom, Digital Black, of the Louisville R&B trio Playa, dipped his toes into Auto-Tune on his trend-hopping solo album The Autobiography of Benjamin Bush (amazing cover, he looks like he’s about to hand me a flyer to a poetry slam). I particularly love his use of the vocal modulation tool on “Luv In My Mind,” where it’s used in moderation as a way to push specific emotions to the edge. “It’s like I’m watching her movie/Everytime that she do me/And it’s all in my mind,” he sings, the last bar slathered in reverb to hammer home that he’s going fucking crazy for this girl. This wouldn’t be the last time a member of Playa fooled around with Auto-Tune. A year later Lil Wayne dropped “Lollipop,” featuring and co-written by the group’s mastermind Static Major.

When you’re an adult who doesn’t attend Newark high school homecomings or North Jersey Airbnb pool parties, the only way to hear DashonnQrantt’s gonzo Jersey club mixes is when he uploads one to SoundCloud every other month or so. His first of the year is almost 50 minutes of hardstyle dance battle club full of superhuman BPMs, gunclick madness, and reimagined samples of big ticket hits. To take it to another level, Dashonn is on the mic shout-monologuing throughout the whole thing about how nice he is on the decks and calling out all of the other DJs who think they can fuck with him. I gotta finally make my way out to one of his sets.

Chances are, if the Atlanta rapper sounds like they have a loogie stuck in their throat, I’ll probably like them. B5 and Zeeball? Yep—“Heist” might be the biggest omission from our Best Rap Songs of 2025 list. Rroxket? I still listen to his zooted-out Red Ranger regularly. Before I get carried away, let’s add Bby Kell to that list. Her new tape, Straight Pop, is cool as hell—it reminds me of Glokk40Spaz back when his bread and butter was belligerent dark plugg. Early favorite is “SPLURGINBAGS,” which gets off to a hot start with an amazing Kassgocrazy tag (“Shit was trash, kill your producer”) and Kell doing a bunch of Ken Carson-style grunting. And it keeps getting hotter: Tempo-shifting flows. Talk about her jeans. A blissed-out melodic interlude. Auto-Tune that’s out of control like the microphone with too much feedback at karaoke. I’m a sucker for this shit.

MoneyBagz Buzz puts the The Jacka beats on ice and rolls his post-Drakeo, post-Bris nervous introspection onto a The Alchemist classic. Wrapping two short verses around the Nina Sky bridge, Buzz gets hit with a simultaneous jolt of optimism and remorse, possibly brought on by the longing in Alc’s vocal loop: “Facing charges, it ain’t life, though I still keep a smile/Down bad for a minute, and it took me a while.”