sadgit's Full Review: Straight Outta Compton [PA] [Remaster] by N.W.A.
Ladies and gentlemen, the annual Hip-Hop Appreciation week is upon us. This is a time to sit back and reflect upon the state of hip-hop culture, to bask in the glow of talent generated from the true lyricists and to curse the massive negativity generated from the many "gangstas" that populate our artform. With this in mind, Madtheory has sent us all a mission: Make Hip-Hop respectable again. This years write-off theme? Responsibility.
I have already written one preceeding piece on this Write-off, and one following on. Links below:
In the mid-80's, Hip-Hop music really achieved popularity with Run-DMC's fusion of Rap and Rock music in their infectious singles "Rock Box", "It's Tricky" and their biggest hit "Walk This Way", and began to appeal hugely to white middle-class kids. However Hip-Hop music began to also become quite adult and negative as the now infamous group, N.W.A. amongst others, began to pioneer what is now known as 'Gangster Rap' with taunting violent and pornographic lyrics with misogynistic attitudes.
N.W.A.'s underground album, "Straight Outta Compton" in 1988 has since gone on to become regarded as one of the most socially-politically important albums of the 20th century and has subsequently been re-released digitally remastered with a few bonus tracks including remixes and a few singles that were not originally part of the album, such as their woman-hating "A B**ch is a B**ch". O.K. so you're wondering why then I've picked this group to represent the idea of responsibility, well I'll get to that in a bit.
Anyway the social statement made by this album was driven by a misanthropic rage and powerful hard noise of sonic drumbeats and horn blasts. The songs "Straight Outta Compton" and "Gangsta' Gangsta'" presented vivid stories of life in the Los Angeles ghetto through the eyes of a typical street gang-viweing and participating in shootouts in nightclubs, and living like there was no tomorrow. A far cry from the positive, role-model aesthetics of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Kool Moe Dee before them. In effect, N.W.A. had taken Hip-hop's customary two-fingers "Peace" sign, flipped it backwards and around in all directions, dropped the index finger to make one big, directionless "F**k You!"
But the group also occasionally took a moral stance. Though they had presented Gang violence and anti-social behaviour in a glorifying and quite amusing way, their central message on the surprisingly positive and mellow song "Express Yourself" was about being your own person and following your heart and not any peer pressure, which could easily mean the peer pressure to be part of a violent gang. "it's crazy to see people be what society wants them to be, but not me!" The song itself also has a remixed version on the album's bonus tracks- a much crisper and more flowing version with a nice infectious pumped-up base.
Furthermore the tracks "F**k Tha Police" and "Dopeman" found the group taking on an almost Panther-esque stance and scorning and raising their fist against desperate crack addicts (this is actually one of the few Gangster Rap albums to contain profound anti-drug messages) and ruthless drug dealers and racist policemen for tearing apart their community and making a bad situation worse.
"If you smoke 'caine, you a stupid motherf*cker
Known around the hood as the schoolyard clucker
Doin that crack with all the money you got
On your hands and knees, searchin for a piece of rock"
"Knucklehead n**ga, yeah you turned into a crook
but swear up and down boy that you ain't hooked
You beat your friend up, and you whupped his *ss long
cause he hit the pipe til the rock was all gone
You robbin and stealin, buggin and illin
while the dopeman's dealin, what is healin yo' pain
Cocaine, this s**t's insane"
"F**k the police comin straight from the underground
A young n**ga got it bad cause I'm brown
And not the other color so police think
they have the authority to kill a minority"
The group's misogyny and violence however, quite rightly didn't go unchallenged. In the pure context of their album they were taking on the persona of a gang and talking about women and guns the same way and with the same language as a typical gang would have- conveying the moral and sexual depravity of that type of life. However there were many general feelings and attitudes in N.W.A.'s environment that life by the gun and a distrusting view of women was natural. N.W.A.'s album had invoked the feelings on "F**k Tha Police" that many black teenagers in Compton became criminals because the police labelled them as such, and they resented women because as described in the song "I Ain't The One" those teenagers didn't have the money to fulfill economically driven relationships.
The rage and misogyny of N.W.A.'s new brand of Rap music and its subsequent following acts, were also driven by the historical heritage of African Americans. Rage at the past and present years of racism, violence, restriction, unemployment, terrorism, and a misogynistic distrust of women born from the old pre-civil rights days when black men would be hung as punishment for engaging sexually with white women. Not that the white woman would necessarily be the one to cry rape since back then most women had just as little say as black people. Furthermore black communities in the past have often rejected feminist movements as nothing but a means to give white women a greater powerbase over them.
But one of the main factors that changed Hip-Hop music was the fact that it started to have potential as a mainstream music. Now if you're black and you're in the mainstream you can unfortunately become restricted in how you present yourself because the general public are used to seeing stereotypes. Ever since D.W. Griffith's 1915 movie "Birth Of A Nation" with extremely racist overtones, was shown on a cinema screen, racial stereotypes about black people have been set in stone
The film depicted images of black men as subservient Toms happily appeasing, obeying and protecting their white masters, and savage Bucks rebelling and rapeing white women-images that gave white people their perspective of superiority over black people- both political superiority and moral superiority. After all the cinematically inexperienced and racially segregated white majority of the film goers had no other view of black people than these images and they weren't comfortable seeing black charicatures any other way.
Such images became so constant that they became generic components of nearly all art which depicted an image of blackness. Including art made by black artists themselves, and in music it has as well. Whether intentional or not, many black musicians in R'n'B and Soul music had played the part of Uncle Toms in doing music which seemed to express the view of the happy subservient blacks who didn't feel the need to challenge white society for its ills. An approach which had its roots in Black gospel music and the church who believed in appeasing white racism by trying to forge understanding and peace through the sugar-coated humanity of their music. Even early mainstream rappers like Run-DMC and Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince did simmilar sugar-coated music. This is not to the detriment of early black music itself which actually creates and crafts very well a world of positivity, love and happiness.
But N.W.A. offered something different in the only way possible- they became the most notorious Bucks of Black musical art reveling in the image of black men as violent sub-human savages and particularly a threat to women. And testament to White America's comfortable familiarity of this Buckish image of blackness is the fact that the album REALLY sold to huge numbers of a quantity ranging to 3 million sales, and sold largely in white suburban areas. The album became THE party record of choice for shock hungry suburban white teenagers.
It set a trend for most Rap record companys such as Death Row Records, Rap-A-Lot, Bad Boy Records and Murder Inc to produce Gangster Rap acts such as Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Notorious B.I.G. which sold hugely to suburban white teenagers who were still familiar with this stereotypical view of how black people act and behave violently and promiscuously and were embracing them as the rebelious anti-heroes they had always idolised. Which calls into question whether the answer to Hip-Hop's controversial thuggish artists is to hold them personally responsible for simply following generic conventions of black art laid down by racial myths. Maybe that's an easy way out of challenging the blatantly espouted sexism and violence of their album, but then again blaming this kind of music for encouraging crime and misogyny is also an easy way out of looking at the more real and unavoidable causes of crime, such as problems in society and in the family.
Yet nowadays the majority of Hip-hop heads are fed up with the Gangster image in Hip-Hop. The music of contemporary Thug Rappers like Ja Rule, Nelly and Master P sounds absolutely tired and repetitive and has none of the political coscious edge that had made Gangster Rap music so important. Most Hip-Hop heads prefer the underground Hip-Hop scene, where Rappers like Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Blackalicious genuinely Rap from the heart and don't try to aim for mainstream success and album sales, and therefore have no interest in playing stereotypes.
But back in 1988, N.W.A.'s rage and nihilistic rebeliousness offered many black and working class people a sense of empowerment by the anti-establishment stance N.W.A. had taken. Even though they cast a totally negative light on black people and their community and did so in quite a stereotypical and demonising way.
"Beat a Po-lice out of shape
and when I'm finished.... bring the yellow tape!"
"I'm the motherf**ker that you read about
taking a life or two, that's what the hell I do
you don't like how I'm livin' well F**k you!"
A simmilar sense of empowerment that allowed the 70's Blaxploitation films and its anti-hero black characters such as Shaft, Dolamyte, and Superfly to be largely accepted by the black community, despite the negative stereotypes such characters evoke. Negativity aside, they were a step above from the previous black stereotypes in films which had degraded black people and portrayed them as the constant losers in the fight against white oppression, and within the stereotypical Gangster cartoon view of the world were certain undeniable truths about urban existance, crime, poverty and racism. And for Hip-Hop's "Keep it real" aesthetic at the time, it was real enough.
Make sure you read the entries of these other participants:
andrewtarr, anthony06511, bigd99999, brotherman, cletta1201, ekidd911, heirograffiti, matthos, mrjulius, PacManY2J, paulyoungotti, roheblius, konspirator01, boffie, speeddemon531, sun_tzu, youngchinq
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