Friday, August 14, 2015

Straight Outta Compton - a white boy remembers

I don’t really much like rap/hip-hop. So much of it is just plain terrible, or kitschy, or ignores the basics of things like meter, rhyme, depth. Admittedly, the same thing can be said about most genres of music but rap in particular I never really got. The best stuff I had heard once I got into the real world and moved to Los Angeles for college was Grandmaster Flash. White Lines, The Message… great songs. I didn’t even much Blondie’s “Rapture” much when it came out but the groove was infectious and I slowly came to love it.


I’ve been watching with great interest the stories and development of the new movie Straight Outta Compton, which tell the story of the rise to fame of NWA, the West Coast’s first superstar rap group. For me the story is one Straight Outta Memory, because I lived in Los Angeles at the time that NWA was starting their rise and it was an amazing thing to see, even from a distance as I did. They’re household names now, but back then referring to people as “Easy-E”, “Dr. Dre”, “Ice Cube” just seemed strange to me. But if you read the underground weeklies (what we once called newspapers) you’d see stories about these young men and how they were trying to rise from pretty much nothing. Easy-E and Dr. Dre sold CDs as swap meets and by hustling in various neighborhoods. Ice Cube was a performer with the rap act C.I.A. and serious rage in his lyrics. Ice-T was part of this scene too, rising to glory from having been a pimp.


College and underground radio played a lot of music from each of these artists after Easy-E founded Restless Records. You could hear a lot of potential there but when they released their actual first studio album as a group, Straight Outta Compton, all hell broke loose.


Ice Cube (and MC Ren) was given free reign on lyrics and he wrote songs about he violent childhood and neighborhood, a place all Los Angelenos knew about and tried to avoid; Compton. Compton scared the hell out of white people and in the early to mid-1980’s it was a dangerous place. A sizeable chunk of the city’s alarming homicide rate came from Compton. The gangs – the original Bloods and Crips – came from Compton. Ice Cube’s lyrics caught the anger just about perfectly. He wasn’t polite. He said “Fuck tha Police” without irony or reservation. With this album Gangsta Rap was put on the map.


But there was more – Dr. Dre handled sampling and production and unlike other artists of the time who were sampling rock records (Run DMC, etc) he sampled well-respected black artists to create the grooves. The title track samples James Brown, Funkadelic, Ronnie Hudson, Wilson Picket and more. Between the lyrics and the sound West Coast Rap was born as a direct counterpoint to what was coming out of the East (Public Enemy, Run DMC, The Beastie Boys).


In the 1980s there were only 7 rap songs I listened to more than once; Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome”, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and “White Lines”, The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and the first three songs on Straight Outta Compton. They are a power punch of the best of rap. “Straight Outta Compton” is hands down one of the best "this is who I am - deal with it" songs ever. It’s angry, unapologetic, tells you where they're from and it's in your face. “Fuck tha Police” is a no-holds-barred look at police brutality and racism. “Gangsta Gangsta” tells the rest of the world what life is like for these young men and you’d better pay attention. Although there is anger present in the other stuff I listened to, no one hit as hard as NWA.


Straight Outta Compton was one of the first records struck with one of Tipper Gore’s Parental Guidance labels. The wording on those things hadn’t been standardized yet.


West Coast Rap doesn’t happen without this album exploding into the world.  Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Suge Knight, the list is actually pretty long.


NWA didn’t last long. Ice Cube wrote a lot of that album and got into a royalties dispute with the rest of the band and left, starting a strong solo career in music and film. The band got new management and a game of divide and conquer was played and Dr. Dre was left out in the cold (I think Dre survived it all – you DO know who he is, after all). Easy-E got sick and died of AIDS at age 31. MC Ren put out a few more albums and then started making movies. DJ Yella stayed in music for a while and then became a stupidly successful porn producer.


I barely knew the music at the time. I don’t know it well now outside of those first three tracks. I do know however that rap became much greater because of that band, that album. I do know that Los Angeles was a more exciting place to live because they contributed to it. Even though I never attended a show, never bought an album, never got into that style of music, I can tell you that the local scene was more exciting because of their presence. I’m not sure they ever integrated into it or we even accepted them, but their influence was impossible to ignore and I for one am grateful for it. Hell, there’s a track on my first album that probably never would have happened if they hadn’t opened the door to using so much profanity on record.


As for the movie, from what I’ve seen it looks great. Members of the band are involved. It’s getting critical acclaim. I don’t give a rats ass that it’s a “black” movie. It’s a MOVIE, with a great cast and director, and I plan to see it. And maybe, just maybe, relive some of the excitement that was in the air back then - because rap really doesn't seem have it anymore. Then again, what the hell do I know? For those of you who do like rap, compare it to this:



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