He wrote the liner notes for the Straight Outta Compton 20th-anniversary release. Young suburban white America ate up every bit of it.īut it wasn't all about sensational marketing, according to Soren Baker, executive editor of hip-hop magazine The Source. It took all the taboos - sex, drugs, violence, lots of swearing - threw them in the back of a tricked-out '64 Cadillac and floored it down the fast lane. gangsta rap forefather Ice-T, N.W.A had little interest in cautionary tales. With Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A put up its own brand of hardcore rap - devoid of both politics and apologetics. They added their friends MC Ren and DJ Yella, and Eazy named the band "Niggaz With Attitude." Two years later, at the end of 1988, N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton on Eazy's Ruthless Records. Dre enlisted O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson, a master at writing so-called "gangsta rap." Their songs were narratives about the street hustler's life of drug dealing and murder - a lifestyle Ice Cube and Dr. Dre" Young, then a teenage father with a solid reputation as a disc jockey and producer. So in early 1987, he teamed up with Andre "Dr. He had the cash to start a hip-hop label, but he needed talent. He had a vision and he followed through with it."Įric "Eazy-E" Wright was a well-known Compton drug dealer who wanted to break into the rap game. was so in tune to how to market himself and N.W.A. Mack knew N.W.A and agreed to air the group's early music when nobody else would. Greg Mack co-founded the station KDAY, one of hip-hop's few L.A. Dre, Ice Cube and the late Eazy-E.īut N.W.A's biggest coup was the way its members got fans to believe they were all cold-hearted gangsters. The disc got almost no radio play and still went double-platinum. N.W.A pulled some impressive artistic and marketing stunts with the release of Straight Outta Compton. And this is the part of L.A., ghetto America, that mainstream America and media ignored. Ignore it at your peril.They wanted to talk about what they were going through, seeing. Straight Outta Compton still retains its power to shock, delight, and enlighten. Relentlessly violent and willfully outrageous, Straight Outta Compton arose from Los Angeles’ sprawling swap meets and dilapidated suburbs like a biblical plague, serving warning to all that hip-hop could no longer be ignored by the musical mainstream. The adrenaline surge of the title track, the blaring sirens of “Fuck tha Police,” and the roughshod drums of “Gangsta Gangsta” comprise one of the most bracing opening sequences in music history, and if what follows fails to live up to the impossibly high standards set by these tracks, it is only a testament to their lasting power. Dre’s simple, but impeccably equalized production, Ice Cube’s powerhouse flow and incipient Black radicalism, Eazy’s sneering nihilism, and MC Ren’s stolid ice grill turned the hip-hop world on its ear, swiftly shifting the focus of the hip-hop universe 3000 miles west and leaving old-school West Coast heads wondering where they went wrong. from a local phenomenon into a nationally feared public menace. Coming hard on the heels of 1987’s excoriating “Dopeman” 12-inch, and Eazy-E’s career defining hustler narrative “Boyz-n-the Hood,” Straight Outta Compton was the album that would turn N.W.A.
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