Nwa Album Straight Outta Compton

[Juvencio Parise]

Lastweek I was buying some detergent at a local laundromat in rural Nebraska. This is what was occupying my mind: "See, I don't give a fuck, that's the problem/ I see a motherfuckin' cop, I don't dodge him." Now, based on my limited experience with law enforcement, I've found most cops to be cordial, beneficent protectors of the law. Yet, at that moment, I didn't just want to fuck tha police, both physically and figuratively; I wanted them lynched, drenched in gasoline, and burnt alive. It's one thing to get a catchy couplet stuck in teenagers' heads; it's another to convert half the nation into murderous psychopaths hell-bent on riot and rape. N.W.A. accomplished the latter.

Straight Outta Compton was not the first gangsta-rap album, nor was it the first album to use such disconcerting and scabrous blasts of sound, but the music was revolutionary for two reasons. First, Dre and Yella took the vitriolic, cacophonous rampage of Public Enemy and discarded all the motivation and history behind the anger; second, they sampled laid-back jazz, psychoastral-lovetron p-funk, sweetly romantic soul, nave doo-wop, Martha Reeves, Charles Wright and Marvin Gaye, and proceeded to lay it under the most gruesome narratives imaginable, dead ho's and cop killers. This is tantamount to using a "Happy B-Day, Grandma" Hallmark card to inform a family you just slaughtered their grandmother. It's cruel, duplicitous, perverse, horrifying, hilarious.

In some ways, Straight Outta Compton is the archetypal rap album, the one you would send into space if you wanted to ignite a stellar holocaust. It unites the paranoia of It Takes a Nation of Millions with the chill of The Chronic, while still retaining an old-school, Run-DMC-style playfulness. The opening squall of "Straight Outta Compton", "Fuck tha Police", and "Gangsta Gangsta" is still as confrontational and decimating as it was at the dawn of the 1990s. The bass throttles, the funk combusts, and the sirens deafen as Eazy-E dispenses with tired romantic clichs: "So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her!/ You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain't no sucker!" And this is the least misogynistic of N.W.A.'s albums.

In the remaining ten tracks, the group depicts a paranoid, conspiratorial wasteland where cops "think every nigga is sellin' narcotics," where they often are selling narcotics to buy gats to kill cops, where bitches have two functions in life-- to suck dick and get shot when they stop-- and where there are two only professions: bein' a punk and shootin' punks. The mind itself is a ghetto, and the ghetto is universal. A lot of people, for whatever reason, take offense to such ideas. William S. Burroughs writes the same thing and gets hailed as the greatest writer of the twentieth century. There is no hope, no messages, no politics, rarely an explicit suggestion of irony. The only respite is "Express Yourself", the sweetest anti-drug song to ever take place in a correctional facility. Musically, the rhythm pummels and the scratches are strong but sparse; lyrically, Dre says it best: "It gets funky when you got a subject and a predicate." For all the genius, there are some tracks that simply can't compare to the classics. "If It Ain't Ruff", "8 Ball", and "Dopeman" are triumphant rap songs, but they consist of minimalist beats and the silly battle raps that N.W.A. helped eliminate.

Efil4Zaggin, meanwhile, is about as close as you can come to a death metal/hip-hop hybrid. People will get hurt here. The group, sans-Cube, is simply trying to further their status as icons of shock-rap. Unlike someone like Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson, though, N.W.A. sound like they've actually gone insane: The song titles alone ("To Kill a Hooker", "One Less Bitch", "Find 'Em, Fuck 'Em and Flee") are enough to send some people into seizures. I have no idea what Eazy-E was doing between albums, but it clearly involved a lot of sadomasochism and PCP-- his lyrics are revoltingly unlistenable: "Yo, I tied her to the bed/ I had to let my niggaz fuck her first/ Loaded up the 44, yo/ Then I straight smoked the ho/ 'Cause I'm a real nigga." The main musical motif is the Psycho theme.

The songs here sound like the Bomb Squad in the graveyard Superfly got buried in. "Approach to Danger" is essentially rapping over a Halloween FX record. It's complexly debauched, fantastically jagged terror-hop that at its best challenges anything on Fear of a Black Planet and at its worst challenges anything off Dre's 2001. It's also much funnier than Straight Outta Compton. Eazy-E's Ten Commandments on "Appetite for Destruction" set the bar so high on his first command that he can barely think of enough vices to finish it. In the skit "Protest", an N.W.A. concert turns into a scene from Platoon. Eazy also sings on two tracks, one of which ("Automobile") may as well be titled "With a Little Help from Your Pussy". Ten seconds can barely pass before someone is murdered or raped. It's the sound of an expletive anger at its breaking point.

The reissues sound pretty tight, but high-quality audio was never really the point. The supplementary tracks are a more interesting point of discussion. Straight Outta Compton adds extended mixes of "Express Yourself" and "Straight Outta Compton". The former may be a better song, but only because it uses more of the Wright sample, whereas the latter regrettably decides to disturb the propulsion of the original by inserting spoken dialogue. The B-side, "A Bitch Iz a Bitch", however, is one of Cube's finest moments, beginning as a specification of what he means when he curses, and ending with a tirade against a "contact-wearin' bitch." Efil4Zaggin just adds the 100 Miles and Runnin' EP, which is fairly superfluous. The title track, though, is easily one of the best rap songs of all time-- N.W.A. if commissioned to write a James Bond theme.

Listening to these discs again just remind me how ludicrous the whole Eminem controversy was. More than a decade ago, N.W.A. was instructing suburbia to smash bitches' brains in with a cock in one hand and a glock in the other. In comparison, Eminem's harshest lyric ends up sounding like, "I may slightly disagree with certain tenets of popular ideologies." When Eminem rapes and kills his mom, it's because of a long-standing psychological disorder that relies on a complicated relationship with his family. When Eazy-E does it, it's because nothing good was on TV that night. These are the most nihilistic, apolitical recordings since the Nixon tapes.

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On September 9, 1989, Express Yourself, the first UK single from Los Angeles hip-hop group N.W.A., debuted at number 50 on the national singles' chart. Based around a sample of funk/soul act Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's 1970 single of the same name, with its upbeat, radio-friendly bounce, and rapper Dr. Dre's empowering, positivity-fuelled lyrics encouraging listeners to live their most true, authentic lives ("Don't be a sequel"), to a casual listener on BBC Radio 1, the song wouldn't have sounded entirely out of place on De La Soul's 3 Feet High And Rising album, which had gatecrashed the UK Top 10 earlier in the year.

In reality, the single was Straight Outta Compton's own Trojan Horse, an offering whose appealing surface aesthetics gave no indication of the violent, chaotic forces that would be unleashed from within. For from the moment it opened with the sombre proclamation "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge", Straight Outta Compton was a hip-hop album like nothing which came before it, an unflinching, unfiltered and uncompromising account of day-to-day survival in South Central Los Angeles, in which life was cheap, violence was endemic, women were "bitches", and the only good cop was a dead cop.

In July 1989, less than one year after it first hit the streets, N.W.A.'s debut set was certified platinum for one million sales in America, the first 'gangsta rap' album to achieve that distinction. That term didn't actually exist before Straight Outta Compton - N.W.A. themselves shunned the tag, and used the term 'reality rap' to describe their sound - but came into being as a direct consequence of the album's third track, Gangsta Gangsta, which found Ice Cube, MC Ren and Eazy-E bragging about their amoral lifestyles and aptitude for violence. "Takin' a life or two, that's what the hell I do," Ice Cube spat on verse one. "You don't like how I'm livin', well fuck you. This is a gang, and I'm in it. My man Dre'll fuck you up in a minute." To white, middle class music journalists reviewing the record from media offices in New York and London, N.W.A.'s lurid "street knowledge" was a pose - "This regressive nonsense will be passed off as social commentary by thrill-seekers all across the free world" sniffed the UK's permanently buttoned-up Q magazine in a disparaging review - but the brutality chronicled on Straight Outta Compton was all too real to the band members: around the time the album received its RIAA classification, while N.W.A. were on tour across America, Dr. Dre's half-brother Tyree was beaten to death in the neighbourhood.

"When most people think of LA, they think of palm tress and girls in bikinis, but there's another side to the city which is kept hidden from view," Ice Cube told Melody Maker in 1989. "That's where Compton comes in... Some of the things I've seen happening on the streets of Compton is like stuff straight out of a Vietnam war movie. I've seen people getting stabbed and getting robbed, people getting gunned down, people smoking all kinds of drugs. N.W.A. are reporting what's going on in our town and the things we're describing - the fighting, the poverty, the drug selling - aren't fairy tales."

"The parents, the police and the people of the local community are scared of what we say," he told Sunday Correspondent Magazine. "We use the same kind of language as the kids use every day. In the black community, the ministers and teachers don't deny that the problems we rap about exist, but they'd rather sweep it under the rug."

"The problem is that we're telling the truth, and that hurts."

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