REVISED: Cultural Criticism "Straight Outta Compton"

The album that I am looking at this week is very different from anything else I have looked at. This album is Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. Before this group, there was just hip-hop. After the release of this album the hip-hop world split apart into two parts: east coast hip-hop and west coast hip-hop. While east coast hip-hop features mostly jazz samples and utilize wordplay to produce heartfelt music about their struggle growing up in a tough environment, west coast hip-hop features mostly funk samples and often has utilizes more direct lyrics to glorify the gang environment they live in while reflecting on it emotionally.  N.W.A was not the first group to have this west coast style, but they were the group that forced a distinction between the types of hip-hop then popularized it. This is the group and the album that brought hip-hop to the national stage.

Before going into the dynamics of this album, I want to say something. For the most part, I can not relate on a personal level to most of the content of the songs. I grew up in an extremely safe community where the biggest crime was a teenager getting caught smoking marijuana.  The album was obviously not directed towards people like me; it is about black people living in urban areas. I think that even with this the album had a huge impact on its white audience. Ice Cube once said that thirty to forty percent of the people who own this album are actually white. This album allowed people who are unfamiliar with the urban lifestyle to get outside of their specific community. Music critics, like Matthew Duerston, have even gone as far to say that N.W.A. “supplied tantalizing fantasies of urban sleaze and violence to millions of white suburban teens.” With this album anyone and everyone can get a glimpse at the life of a black urban community and what they live through each and every day.

This album starts off with a bang! “Straight Outta Compton” not only sets the tone for the album, but has become on of the most iconic songs for the genre as a whole. The quick and powerful beat combined with the aggressive tone of the rap gives the music as a whole a very confrontational tone. The funk sound gives off an urban feel which works in unison with the lyrics about urban life. While listening to this, I quickly caught myself singing along, “When I’m called off, I got a sawed-off/squeeze the trigger and the bodies are hauled off.” I was literally getting into a song about shooting and killing people with a shotgun, yet I didn’t care. The music is that good. The song also uses a constant repetition of the phrase “Straight Outta Compton.” The group made up of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Mc Ren, DJ Yella, and Arabian Prince were a product of Compton. The Compton way of life became their perception of how people lived. This song, however, isn’t just about the neighborhood they grew up on; it is much bigger than that. It is “Straight Outta Compton” and not “Straight Into Compton” for a reason. The music, the lifestyle, the problems are bigger than just the 10.12 square miles that is Compton. This song is an anthem to the black urban lifestyle as a whole.

“Straight Outta Compton” talks about violence, but “Fuck the Police” takes it many steps further. It isn’t enough for them to rap about how they hate the police or how people shouldn’t let them take advantage of them, but they say how they want to kill the police. In fact, the phrase “Fuck Tha Police” was repeated 21 times in the song! Although N.W.A claims they were just describing existing social problems in urban neighborhoods, there is no doubt that this song was provoking violence towards police. N.W.A. became the most popular group in the Los Angeles area and with this comes influence. These hip hop stars are saying things like “Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got?/A sucker in a uniform waiting to get shot” and “a young nigga on the warpath/And when I’m finished, its gonna be a bloodbath”, it had to have an influence on the audience. This music created a society of people that wanted to disrespect police, fight police, and even kill police. It is not enough to say law enforcement felt threatened by this song. In a letter from the FBI to the record label of N.W.A., Priority Records, they expressed their distaste for this song saying “advocating violence and assault is wrong.” They even go as far as hinting that the release of this song in 1988 caused an increase the number of murdered police officers since there were more violent crime and police officers slain then any of the previous years. Along with this, some concert venues forbid the group from performing this song and when they didn’t comply they arrested them. I know I have made the officers seem like victims in this, but that wasn’t completely the case. Officers were getting away with endless counts of police brutality and unlawful search and seizures just because the color of the person’s skin. This song wasn’t just talking to the urban communities, but it was a message to the police force that they were not going to let this happen anymore. They were speaking up for the rights of people all across the urban community. This song was rallying point for fighting back for their rights.

With these two bold songs, the album takes a slight turn. Instead of confrontational tone to the songs, the group is more focused on “telling it as it is” as Ice Cube would say. The songs utilize similar beats, but the vocals don’t sound as aggressive leading to a completely different listening experience. A lot of what these songs do is explain how things work in an urban community and show some misconceptions about them. People all across the country would see the urban areas such as Compton on the news. They have a huge crack cocaine problem and gangs murder each other. These songs were there to say basically “yea, this is how we live, but it doesn’t mean our whole culture is about this”.

In the middle of all of this, N.W.A. throws the audience a curveball in “Express Yourself’. This song does not fit the album at all. There is no profanity and the song as a much more upbeat, playful feel to it. This song seemingly has the same message as the rest of the album, but just is the PG version rather than the NC-17 version. If any of the songs on this album were made with the thought of getting national radio play, it would be this song. A closer look at the lyrics shows that the focus is still on urban culture; however, this song is much more relatable for the rest of the country. It is a message to all people that they should not let society and expectations hold them from doing what they want to do or who they truly are. Its all about expressing who you are and not conforming. Dre sums it up in one line: “Its crazy to see people be/What society wants them to be, but not me.”