Roll Out, Cowboy
Directed by: Elizabeth Lawrence - U S A - 75 min.
film website
His tour van is broken, he bought his house for a thousand bucks, and the small farming town in which he lives is disappearing faster with each passing year. Roll Out, Cowboy’s Chris Sand is the face of the dying American West. Except for one thing: He raps.

The Woody Guthrie protégé looks like a cowboy, talks like a cowboy, but writes songs like Dr. Dre. When hip hop music hit the airwaves of the North Dakota badlands, where Sand grew up, he learned to rap and rhyme to the pulse of baling machines and irrigation pumps. The result? A music fusion in the raw--country/hip hop/folk/rap/cowboy. Whatever you call it, it’s unique, fresh, sexy, and distinctly western.

Roll Out, Cowboy follows Sandman the Rappin’ Cowboy as he embarks on a national tour during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. He travels from red state to blue and back again, blending discordant music genres into a style uniquely his own. Through him we see a part of America that remains immune to marketing campaigns, record labels, and consumerist politicking; as if it were the truth. We witness band break-ups, small town groupies—even a brief flirtation with commercial truck-driving, when a particularly impoverished Sand needs to make ends meet.

This is not the romanticized, Roy Rogers version of the American frontier. This is Sandman. The cowboy who raps.

8:00 pm
Friday, August 20, 2010
Carter Center
$8



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