![]() ![]() Public Enemy’s Chuck D once said that “rap is black America’s CNN,” making N.W.A the profane LA correspondents in Raiders gear and dark denim. Proud of South Central culture, the quintet lent the rest of America a new vocabulary - jacking, static, the eight, the benzo and the sweet chariot, the six-four. Gangsta rap, set in motion by Ice T and Philadelphia’s Schoolly D, became a household genre under the authority of N.W.A. Rappers have witnessed the trials of the ghetto since The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, but it was N.W.A that first reveled in the decay. Breaking out of the NYC grid, N.W.A opened up future employment opportunities in cities like Atlanta, Houston and Memphis. Geography has always been vital to hip-hop - it’s not just the sneakers that are important but which streets those Adidas step on. Previously dominated by New York, N.W.A scored one of the first rap mega-hits outside of the five boroughs. Even on the cover, staring at a body, or mic, dropped on the ground, N.W.A knew they rewrote the rulebook of hip-hop. In 1988, Dre, Cube, Eazy-E, Ren and DJ Yella released the album Straight Outta Compton. The danger here is that Straight Outta Compton might confuse N.W.A lyrics for a transcript of the rappers’ lives - the same way people may confuse images from the Selena movie with events from her real life.Ī heavy-handed N.W.A fiction would be a shame, given the cultural importance and gripping thrills of The World’s Most Dangerous Group. That is a recipe for some serious retroactive myth-making. Dre - the remaining oligarchs of N.W.A - produced the movie, helping to determine how the story of their teen and twenty-something years will be told. In less than 140 characters, Ren summed up the potential dangers of Straight Outta Compton. In June, MC Ren, one of the least visible of Niggaz Wit Attitudes, tweeted his dissatisfaction over the upcoming N.W.A biopic - “Man fuck these bitches at universal pictures leaving me out the movie trailers tryin to rewrite history.” Dre – the actors playing N.W.A in Straight Outta Compton, at least. (From left) MC Ren, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DJ Yella and Dr. ![]()
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