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A Look Back at Vin Diesel's Early Hip-Hop Career

Before he was the biggest action movie star on the planet, Vin Diesel was just your average guy making a rap song with experimental cellist Arthur Russell.

First off, anyone who says Vin Diesel isn't a hipster is wrong. In XXX, a 2002 documentary about Vin Diesel's life that was erroneously mislabeled an action-adventure movie by the studio, Vin Diesel wears Vans sneakers, drives a convertible off a cliff to make a political statement about the societal worth of violent video games and rap music, hangs out with Bam Margera in a loft that has a half pipe in it, buddies up with an evil anarchist by quoting Vandals lyrics at him, goes to two raves, parachutes four times, evades a hailstorm of bullets by doing dirt bike tricks, and causes an avalanche with dynamite then races said avalanche on a snowboard. I think we all know only a true hipster would do this stuff.

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Even if I told at least two lies in the above paragraph––Vin Diesel is definitely not a hipster, and, as much as I want it to be a documentary, XXX is no more than your run-of-the-mill extreme sports/spy movie––there is one greater truth to be hard here, and that truth is this: Despite being a 50-year-old bald dude who became a millionaire by appearing in beautifully absurd movies about cars and explosions, Vin Diesel is almost as real hip-hop as Ludacris, one of his many costars in The Fate of the Furious, the new Fast and Furious movie that comes out tomorrow and is stylized on the poster as F8.

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