Today, Straight Outta Compton is a reminder of brighter days in hip-hop's most notorious left-coast 'hood. The two lobbed disses at each other until just before Eazy-E died of complications from AIDS in 1995. Dre split with Eazy two years later over money issues. Dre gets loose on the mic for the album's only profanity-free cut: "Express Yourself." There's a dance track ("Something 2 Dance 2") tacked on to the end. What probably helped Straight Outta Compton do so well was that it wasn't all gangsta gunplay. Off-duty police officers refused to provide security during N.W.A's national shows, effectively shutting down the group's concerts. The original Straight Outta Compton release has 13 songs, including N.W.A's most infamous track, "F- Tha Police." The single was recorded as a protest against police brutality.Īt the time, the FBI sent a letter to N.W.A's label, Priority Records, saying that the song encouraged cop-killing. "And this is the part of L.A., ghetto America, that mainstream America and media ignored." "They wanted to talk about what they were going through, seeing," Baker says. 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. They wanted to talk about what they were going through, seeing.
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