It’s hard to believe but “Straight Outta Compton” is now twenty years old. That’s right – it’s officially oldies.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPb4s0-QcI]
“Fuck Da Police” is something your dad might have listened to.
I was ten years old when that came out. Ten years old and living in the Canadian country; about as far away from Compton as one could ever hope to get. But the outrage over this album spread everywhere and continued for years. It created a slow-burning media fire that never quite went out. Sometimes it flared up.
Though hard to imagine now, in 1988, no one believed what these guys had to say about the LAPD.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiX7GTelTPM&feature=related]
Three years later, the Rodney King tape came out.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ikXImAk9Oc]
Then they/we believed it.
When the cops were acquitted, there was a riot. A big one.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvqiElZI43k&feature=related]
NWA helped create that. However brutal their lyrics could be, they created a media-situation where police racism had to be addressed. I don’t know that riots were the answer. Or that anything has actually been solved. I do know that the authorities had not caught up to the gestalt. The riots forced them to at least pretend they had. By presidential decree, those particular cops did get busted.
And I do know that during Katrina, I was wondering where the riots were. That screamed for an uprising.
But we lacked an NWA. No group had shifted the dialogue into an insane direction; somehow forcing confrontation with the truth. So nothing happened. People watched their televisions. Fiddy, Piddy and doe Diddy all had nothing to say. These great rebels had adopted the stupid, macho posturing of NWA and abandoned the anger. They had no fucking substance.
Pop star Kanye West came close to doing the right thing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pVTrnxCZaQ]
Then he apologized for stating the obvious. George Bush doesn’t care about black people. He doesn’t care about anyone. George Bush is an evil cunt. I think we all know that by now.
NWA never apologized for anything. Not even when they should have.
So yeah, I miss NWA. No one has filled the void they left. The world needs assholes like this to say the shit we don’t want to hear. Sometimes we need to be offended.
Sometimes we deserve to be shocked.
Instead we get the same bland media figures spouting the same bland platitudes: Be yourself, try for your dreams, buy more, drink this, smoke that, be nice to each other. It’s dull.
And it’s hard to believe how things turned out.
Ice Cube is now in children’s movies. Eazy-E died of AIDS. Dre’s beats sound cartoon-sinister-goofy. And has anyone heard anything from those other guys? And fuck . . . Ice Cube is in children’s movies!
As weird as it all went, NWA does have a dubious and continuing influence; one that reminds me of a bit from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
I prefer to bury them like this:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAmPhbpK6y8]
And if you want to celebrate/mourn the 20th anniversary of “Straight Outta Compton” in Toronto, The Fameless Collective is throwing a party at 751 Queen West. I’ll won’t be there as I’m working but that’s no reason for you to stay at home. At least, it’s not a good reason.
3 comments
The Silver Screen Kid
August 12, 2008 at 8:40 am (UTC -5)
Word!
Minister Faust
August 13, 2008 at 10:39 pm (UTC -5)
Roaks, you slay me. I remember *SOC* from 1989, though. Are you sure it was 88? In 88 my sister gave me BDP’s *By All Means Necessary*, which was the first political hip hop I’d heard (wouldn’t hear GMFATFF’s “The Message” for probably another year or so). Quite literally changed my life. NWA’s *SOC*… nope. Dre didn’t hit his stride as a producer until he did the DOC’s first record. But it’s weird to think of that album as stretching that far back. And now that *I* am a dad, if my daughter could read your blog, she could say, “Yeah, my dad listened to NWA. Weren’t they around with Little Richard or Scott Joplin?” She’s given to making such wise-asseries.
Ryan Oakley
August 14, 2008 at 5:45 am (UTC -5)
NWA, BDP and PE were just a a touch before my time. When I was a teenager, Snoop and Dre and all that was the going thing. Just didn’t get or like it.
I went to Montreal at 18, read “Bomb the Suburbs” on the couch in an anarchist book shop — actually bought it a couple of years later — and then went to Toronto.
Met some guys who were into hip-hop, heard some of the underground shit and actually related to/liked it. Really, it’s the same as punk, just a bit different.
The first hip-hop album I ever bought was “The Awakening” by Lord Finesse. Because of this track:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7nSZUrZGCY&feature=related
Hard to believe but it was the only KRS I could find other than what I or friends had taped off community radio. From there it was back to basics — Ice T, Cube’s Death Certificate — still one of my favourite albums, period — PE . . . And so forth.
And wasn’t Little Richard in NWA?