But the music he makes is weirdly sticky and slick: A grown-and-sexy Broadway approximation of rap. His career arc has parallels with Jay Z, moving from drug-dealing and recording in shitty makeshift studios to becoming fabulously, insanely wealthy. I’m not exactly sure what sort of rapper Lucious is supposed to be. But if you need a refresher: Howard plays the excellently named Lucious Lyon, a rapper and musician and record-label mogul who, at the beginning of the first season, realizes that he’s dying of ALS and that he’ll have to pass his label on to one of his three sons. Since Empire is a runaway surprise smash, pulling in more ratings than anything this side of a Republican primary debate, chances are good that you already know the particulars. But by now, it has absolutely picked back up, and that’s all because of Empire. Those allegations haven’t stopped since Howard’s career picked back up again. For years, he faced a long string of domestic violence accusations and arrests for bizarre behavior, like assaulting a flight attendant after she insisted that he put his seatbelt on.
#Whoop that trick scene movie
The brief moment when he seemed to be a movie star decisively ended. He was in a lot of bad movies: Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Idlewild, Sabotage. He turned up in the first Iron Man, as the character who would become War Machine, but he got into some kind of squabble with the producers, and Don Cheadle had replaced him by the time the second movie came around. Things started to go badly for Howard not long after.
And for a while, that seemed like it would be the unquestioned highlight of his career. Terrence Howard got his own Oscar nomination for Hustle & Flow, presumably for reasons that went beyond his rapping skills. Longtime Memphis underground fixture Al Kapone wrote the song, and it still gets played at Grizzlies games. But it’s fun to watch, and Howard acquits himself nicely when delivering the song, his voice a grizzled rhythmic blurt that actually works in a Memphis rap context. You don’t invite your hooker employees in so that they can help chant the hook when you’re finishing up that’s even more ridiculous. You don’t rap over the song while the producer is still making the beat that’s crazy. Rap recording sessions don’t look like that, even at the most DIY level. Together, the three of them, in two minutes flat, bang out a head-slam crunk anthem called “Whoop That Trick,” and it’s the song that goes on to be Djay’s signature track, the thing that guards rap at him when he (spoiler) goes back to prison at the end of the movie. And in the movie’s best scene, he’s holed up in a homemade studio, egg crates taped on the walls, with sweaty awkward white guy DJ Qualls playing a producer and Anthony Anderson playing his overexcited manager. Terrence Howard’s place in rap history would’ve been safe if he’d quit after “Whoop That Trick.” In the 2005 movie Hustle & Flow, Howard played Djay, a Memphis pimp trying to go straight by turning to a rap career.
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