To report, to vent and to shock. Those were the imperatives of five black teenagers in late-1980s Compton, a crime-infested city south of downtown Los Angeles. Brimming with hip-hop aspirations, tired of routine harassment at the hands of the LAPD, they decided to let it all out in the studio. All the better if they could provoke some outrage and make some cash along the way.
On one hand, it's hard to believe that 27 years have passed since N.W.A. dropped Straight Outta Compton, the pioneering gangsta rap missive that lends its name to the new biopic about the group. The album maintains its paint-peeling intensity and "Did they just say that?" shock value even today.
On the other hand, those days belong to a different universe, where underground music could bubble up, break out and send the entire country into a tizzy. The FBI even sent the group a letter voicing its displeasure with the sledgehammer protest song "[Expletive] Tha Police." Angering your parents with rock 'n' roll? That's one thing. A warning from the feds? Quite another.
"Of course, we had some awareness that this was cutting-edge," says Ice Cube, N.W.A's main lyricist and a producer of the movie, by phone. "It was raw. But we really thought it was going to stay underground. We never knew that the hip-hop outlets of the day would blow it up. We thought it would stay on the underground particularly because it was so hard and dirty."
They were wrong. Straight Outta Compton quickly became an international sensation and provoked much media handwringing over violence and profanity in entertainment. As the movie reminds us, however, N.W.A. wasn't all about calculated provocation. That was just the shock part. It's the reporting and the venting that remain most pertinent today.
Public Enemy leader Chuck D famously described hip-hop as "CNN for black people." N.W.A. filed dispatches from the front lines, where they lived. They wrote songs about gangbanging ("Gangsta Gangsta"), the cancer of drugs in black communities ("Dopeman"), and, of course, police harassment ("[Expletive] Tha Police"). They were accused of glorifying the subjects they dramatized, in a tone far more damning than that aimed at, say, Martin Scorsese's ribald treatment of gangster life on the big screen.
"You have to be blind not to see that nothing has changed," Ice Cube says.
The most penetrating scenes in Straight Outta Compton, the movie, arrive in the first half, before Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren and DJ Yella have become stars. We see them get stopped, frisked, slammed against the ground and generally humiliated, all for fitting the profile of someone who might possibly be doing something illegal. We see them watching footage of the Rodney King beating on the news. The action unfolds in the late '80s and early '90s, but the movie is a crystal-clear reflection of America in the here and now.
"You have to be blind not to see that nothing has changed," says Cube. "The police still prey on us. It's been happening since before N.W.A. We've been trying to solve this problem for over 400 years. People gotta stop pretending like they don't know what's going on."
Of course, when you're living the story, it's hard to report objectively. That's where the venting comes in.
In the biopic, we see the members of N.W.A. taking a break from recording Straight Outta Compton outside a Torrance, Calif., studio. The police swiftly have them facedown on the cement, fingers locked behind their heads, as their manager Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) talks about complaining to the mayor's office. Once they're released, they get their revenge in the studio as Cube writes out "[Expletive] Tha Police" and the group lays it down over a beat already in progress.
It's a moment for the movies, a flash of lightning in a bottle that encapsulates near-daily shakedowns from law enforcement. The song conjures the frustration of getting roughed up "cause I'm a teenager/With a little bit of gold and a pager." That's the context for the most explosive revenge fantasy ever recorded.
"When you're from the hood, you're always somewhat affiliated with everything that's going on in the hood," says Cube. "You know people. They're your neighbors. But we was trying to do music, and we was sick of the cops messing with us and harassing us simply because we was young and black."
Eazy-E was the only former dopeman in the group. (Eazy's death from AIDS is just one of the tragedies dramatized in the movie. The other big one involves Dallas' own D.O.C., a rising star in the N.W.A. crew whose vocal cords were wrecked in a 1989 car accident.) They used their music to get off the streets and to chronicle what they saw there. In this sense, N.W.A. represents the aspirational quality of hip-hop, the ability to rise from the bottom, survey it from the top and continue to evolve.
If little has changed in the country, plenty has happened for N.W.A.'s leaders.
Production mastermind Dr. Dre is now a near-billionaire after selling the Beats by Dre company to Apple. Cube stars in everything from family movies (the Are We There Yet? franchise) to action films, a few of which, ironically, find him playing cops. Twenty-seven years ago, they were dodging bullets and badges. Now they have their own Hollywood biopic.
Not bad for five kids from the mean streets.
