“Straight Outta Compton” chronicles the rise of the rap band N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude), billed as “the real-life story of the world’s most dangerous group.”
Critical to the formation of gangsta rap and the slew of record labels that have since branched into various offshoots and birthed the hip hop stars of today, the movie is a half-historicized, slightly fictionalized, mostly redacted version of the story of rappers Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Ice Cube (played by O’Shea Jackson, Jr—yep, Ice Cube’s son), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge), and DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr). It’s still a gritty stew of violence, drugs, music, and swagger. Or as the Compton boys tell it: business as usual in the ghetto.
After your dive into the stew of South Central Los Angeles and the downtrodden, California black neighborhoods, cushion your fall with the key tracks that have made gangsta rap history, influential not only to the future sons and daughters of the genre, but also to the cultural gestalt that is the rougher, criminal side of hip hop.
From the heyday of West Coast from the late ’80s to its decline in the late ’90s, here’s some attitude for your `hood.
WARNING: ALL THESE TRACKS CONTAIN PROFANITY AND EXPLICIT LYRICS!
Eazy-Duz-It was the first N.W.A spin-off album and the ill-fated, Eazy-E rose to immediate superstar status with this debut. Although he wasn’t the most talented MC, he did do brilliant arrangements. Yes, this is where the title of the iconic black comedy movie takes off from.
Dr. Dre’s 1992 solo debut is now hailed as an historic moment in hip hop genius which transformed the entire sound of West Coast rap with its G-Funk stylings, funkadelic beats, old school soul backing vocals, partnered with live instruments in the rolling basslines and synths. The inclusion of the drawly, chilled out rhymes of Snoop Doggy Dogg adds tasty crucial texture to Dre’s often blunt attacks to verse.
Dr. Dre’s 1992 solo debut is now hailed as an historic moment in hip hop genius which transformed the entire sound of West Coast rap with its G-Funk stylings, funkadelic beats, old school soul backing vocals, partnered with live instruments in the rolling basslines and synths. The inclusion of the drawly, chilled out rhymes of Snoop Doggy Dogg adds tasty crucial texture to Dre’s often blunt attacks to verse.
The “Doggystyle” LP truly broke out Snoop as one of the most gifted and inventive MCs in hip hop. His trademark smooth and almost-bored delivery of rhymes are an absolute contrast to the blunt force trauma approach of Dre, Ice Cube, Nas, and other proponents of gangsta rap. To this day, albeit many have tried imitating him, Snoop takes his time and relishes the texture of his words and beats in a minimalist show of eloquent mastery and melodic sensibility that is his signature.
It was in the album following this one that Ice Cube would utter the lines “Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K. / I got to say it was a good day” on the track “Today was a Good Day.” But this track on his debut LP “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”, right after splitting with NWA, would foreshadow many of his “live by the gun” anthems and, in many ways, is still the most authentic and least posturing of them all when he reports from street level: “It’s a shame, that niggas die young / But to the light side it don’t matter none.”
As the beef between West Coast and East Coast gangsta rappers were at its height in the mid 1990s, Nas and Dr Dre decided to make this bridge of verse and rhyme as an olive branch to both sides of the war.
Said Nas about the formation of this missing link: “People were talking about this East Coast–West Coast shit but Dre called me and was like, ‘I got this record for you.’ He played the sample over the phone for me and I went crazy. We just wanted to show that a New York rapper could rap on a Dr. Dre beat and it’s all love. That was our position on that one.”
This pioneering neutral ground between East and West on the LP “Nas Is Coming” proved prescient and instrumental in opening talks and further collaborations between artists from both sides, putting down their Uzis and going into the studio to record mash-ups.
Associated more with the Bomb Squad group of MCs, Ice-T, with his South Central L.A. roots and vocal political activism declared himself the chronicler and king of all things gangsta with this track, now a certifiable gangsta rap classic, and arguably the most realistic, unvarnished representation of a world Ice-T was the first to document on record. Now that everybody and their grandmother claims they were “O.G.” the cred of this term declines each year.
On the iconic album which bears the film’s title, “The world’s most dangerous group” turned on a light in one of America’s darkest places and have, ever since, proven unmatched in their attack, intelligence, and charisma since; even by the members themselves in their solo careers. To this day, this shit is still dope.
All photos courtesy of Universal Pictures.
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