Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  RUTHLESS VILLAIN

  In March 1988, at the familiar Skateland, N.W.A performed for the first time. “Just as they were getting ready to go out, Eazy walked up to me and said, ‘Man can you believe it, N.W.A at Skateland USA? This shit is epic,’ ” Skateland owner Craig Schweisinger recalled. “And I put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Eric this is truly going to be an epic night.’ He was a little guy, his stature wasn’t that dominant. But once he got on stage that guy was ten feet tall.”

  N.W.A’s aesthetic was no frills. All black was the look—black jeans, black jackets, and LA Raiders caps were the choice accessory. It was the most identifiable thing they wore.

  “Eazy was a hard-core little Crip. They brought him a Kings jacket and a Raiders hat and that’s how they performed when they were there not with Lonzo. They would come in anytime we were open, stay until we closed, and then they’d go in the DJ booth and start working with the mixing board while we’re cleaning up,” Skateland owner Craig Schweisinger remembered. “They’d be in the snack bar writing lyrics. They would roll an 808 in and cut and sample tracks.”

  “We just knew the image—that pirate, the silver and black—represented what we were all about more than any other team in Los Angeles,” Cube said. “We saw groups that was wearing Troop suits and we knew that wasn’t us. We had to kinda be in some way uniform and look like a group so we all decided whatever you do just come in black. And then we started putting on Raiders gear on top of that because the black matched so good.”

  MC Ren said the guys just wanted to represent where they were from, and it didn’t hurt that the Raiders’ colors were far less flashy and gaudy as the Lakers. “N.W.A in purple and gold? That wouldn’t have looked good on us,” he said. There was also the practicality of wearing all black—it kept them neutral among the sea of Crips and Bloods who were constantly at war.

  Before the Raiders moved to LA, the Oakland players were seen as the bad boys of football. They played rough and dirty, often finding themselves among the league’s lead in penalties for their unsportsmanlike behavior. A reputation of being nasty and mean, paired with their black-and-silver insignia, got them labeled the black sheep of the league. They were seen as thugs on the field, and it seemed like a football was the only thing that kept them from being considered an actual gang. The team’s menacing presence was enough to win over a young Cube, who worshipped them and called their move to LA in 1982 the happiest day of his life. He wasn’t alone. All throughout South Central, dudes represented the team, with its hard-edge appeal.

  Countless rappers have made their hometown teams part of their official look, but the marriage of N.W.A’s nihilistic music with a naturally violent sport and its toughest team was the perfect synergy. N.W.A, before one of their concerts, went to the team’s marketing director and persuaded him to give them jerseys and paraphernalia to wear onstage. Their request was gladly accommodated without the director knowing he was handing merchandise over to Gangsta rappers—not that he would have minded, considering how much the stuff was flying off the shelves as the group wore it everywhere.

  Uptick in merchandise aside—the LA Kings hockey team even adopted a black-and-silver motif to cash in on the popularity—the Raiders’ association with N.W.A became bad optics when violence erupted at games and gang members co-opted their colors. Things got so bad players stopped allowing their families to come to games, and the league hired a crisis PR firm to diffuse the negative press. In 1994 the team left LA to return to Oakland, but still to this day, the LA Raiders insignia is as synonymous with N.W.A as it is football. “N.W.A made the Raiders more official to LA than the Raiders while they were there,” Chuck D said.

  During the summer of 1988 as N.W.A worked on its debut, Public Enemy’s sophomore album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back dropped. It was the Long Island group’s attempt to make the hip-hop equivalent to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the soul crooner’s searing meditation on the conditions blacks faced in America. It Takes a Nation was instantly hailed for its production and the socially and politically charged lyrics, and would be named the best album of 1988 by the Village Voice. Three thousand miles away from Public Enemy, N.W.A, though obviously inspired by the group’s bombastic sonic, took a radically different approach to their record.

  While Public Enemy tapped into black rage and political revolt, the tracks N.W.A were recording were steeped in celebrating the hedonism of the streets. There was rage, but it was directed at “bitches and hos” and gave voice to the flippant street thug. N.W.A was political—even if they argued they weren’t—posturing as violent maniacs that needed to be feared. It was an image that had already been projected on black men for decades by white America so they figured, why not show the world what that nightmare actually looked and sounded like? It’s what made their record Straight Outta Compton feel like such a bold, potent assault. “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge,” Dre announced. It was a mission statement: We are punk rock personified through a gang of rap dudes looking to put our hood on. “It went right to the point. Wasn’t no sugarcoating. Nothing,” Yella said. “This is where we from. This is how it is.”

  It took just six weeks and cost $8,000 to make what would be N.W.A’s first album, also titled Straight Outta Compton. Grim, gritty, profane, and unflinchingly obscene, the bulk of the album was dedicated to capturing the ruthlessness of the streets. Much of the album’s laurels rest upon its opening salvo of tracks—the album’s title track, “Gangsta Gangsta” and “Fuck tha Police”—which are still among the most disruptive entries in rap history. Much of the album played out in that vein. There were harsh rhymes and biting polemics against women, police, and whoever else they damn-well pleased. “One day Ren said they’d finished the album and asked if I wanted to hear it,” said CPO Boss Hogg, remembering the days Ren would hang and rap on the corner with his brother and their friend. “I sat on the corner with them and listened to this cassette tape that was Straight Outta Compton. It was bomb. The thing is, at that time the East Coast was still the big thing, so I didn’t see this coming into anything. Next thing I knew they were one of the biggest things out because of ‘Fuck tha Police.’ ”

  Each member except Yella and Arabian Prince recorded a solo track: MC Ren on “If It Ain’t Ruff” and “Quiet on tha Set,” Ice Cube on “I Ain’t tha 1,” Eazy on a remixed version of “8 Ball” from the N.W.A and the Posse bootleg, and Dr. Dre on “Express Yourself,” the beat of which was a carbon copy of South Central soul group Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s 1970 hit of the same name. Oddly enough the album is capped off with “Something 2 Dance 2,” a bouncy electro record that owes a great debt to Sly & the Family Stone.

  “Something 2 Dance 2” features the lone appearance of Arabian Prince, a member whose contributions have all but been erased from the legacy of the group. There have been conflicting stories about what drove Arabian Prince to exit N.W.A during the recording of Straight Outta Compton. It’s often speculated his style that leaned toward electro and disco was too much for the group, with members feeling the sound was lighter than what they were trying to do and thus an ill fit for the group. “It was like . . . we wasn’t doing that type of shit,” Ren said. Jerry Heller wrote in his memoir that the “Supersonic” producer simply dropped out of sight without any bad blood and speculated Arabian didn’t need the money since his father, Joseph Nazel, was in the publishing business. But Arabian Prince has pointed to finances as the motivator for his exit, taking issue with the way Jerry and Eazy conducted their business. “I was a solo artist first, so I knew what royalty statements were. I knew that when you sell this many records, every quarter you get a statement, you look at that statement, you see how much money came in, and you share the money,” he said. “That wasn’t happening.”

  And so after posing with the group for the album cover—all six of them staring toward the ground of an LA alley as Eazy points a handgun directly at the camera o
r, better yet, the mark who was about to get smoked—Arabian Prince bounced, leaving Dre, Eazy, Cube, Ren, and Yella as N.W.A’s most famous lineup, even though that roster never actually created an album together.

  Jerry Heller’s luck changed when he made a last-ditch pitch to Bryan Turner and Mark Cerami of Priority Records.

  Turner and Cerami were former executives at K-Tel International, a Winnipeg-based company known as the original “As Seen On TV” peddler of goods. At K-Tel, Turner licensed old hits for compilation albums advertised in the late hours of the night to insomniac impulse buyers. Roots of Soul, Motown Love Collection, Funky Super Hits, Hooked on Swing—the list goes on. After K-Tel went bankrupt in 1984, Turner relocated to Los Angeles and founded Priority Records with Cerami, who was the son of K-Tel’s head of sales, and Steve Drath. They didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel at first, opting to keep the compilation formula. Turner had great relationships with executives Cory Robbins, Fred Munao, and Barry Weiss, who cut him licensing deals without asking him to pay in advance, as well as a distribution deal with Capitol-EMI’s distribution arm, CEMA.

  Priority’s first compilation, Kings of Rap, was released in 1985, sold 300,000 copies, and subsequent releases like 1986’s Rap’s Greatest Hits did well. After a commercial featuring claymation anthropomorphized raisins performing a groovy rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” became wildly popular, Turner approached the California Raisin Advisory Board about licensing the name and likeness of the “California Raisins.” He then tracked down Buddy Miles, the former Jimi Hendrix bandmate who sang the vocal in the commercial, and booked studio time with him. More commercials were produced, and the fictional R & B group of dried grapes released the first of four albums, The California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs, in 1987. It sold a staggering two million copies. Emmy-nominated prime-time specials, a Saturday morning cartoon, and copious amounts of branded merchandise followed.

  Priority had zero cache in the rap world, and almost no familiarity with the genre outside of the cash-grab compilations they put out, but Jerry was desperate as 1988 was winding down. He’d been rejected everywhere, including Capitol, whose independent distribution company CEMA disseminated Priority releases. Jerry knew Turner and Cerami back during the K-Tel days, as their offices in the fifteen-story Cahuenga Sunset Building were close to each other and he was able to secure a meeting with Turner, Cerami, and the Priority staff. Prior to the meeting Turner received a call from a distributor who raved about how “Boyz-n-the-Hood” was still moving thousands of units on the regular.

  A hell of a first impression was delivered in that conference room. Eazy propped his Air Jordans up on a desk and was distracted by the pager on his belt. Ren scowled. And then there was the music. Dre inserted a cassette containing the first three tracks of Straight Outta Compton—records that are astonishingly obscene and vivid in its depictions of street life.

  Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube

  From the gang called Niggaz Wit Attitudes

  The music was startling. Turner admits he didn’t get it at first. He was sold when Jerry brought him to an N.W.A gig at Sherman Square Roller Rink in Reseda (Jerry taking him through the stage door so he wouldn’t get a glimpse of the weapons folks tossed before going through metal detectors). The label head was dumbstruck seeing the crowd chant “Fuck tha Police”—the most controversial of the three recordings he had previewed. The song could be found on a free mixtape Eazy had his “snipers” spread across LA. A week after the concert, Turner and Cerami agreed to finance and distribute Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It through Priority via Eazy’s Ruthless Records. The members of N.W.A were also given “airtight” artist contracts, with each signing inducement letters agreeing that regardless of what happened with Ruthless or between one another, they had to honor their obligations to Priority.

  “It was the best of both worlds: major-label clout with effective indie distribution,” Heller said.

  PARENTAL DISCRETION IZ ADVISED

  In the liner notes for Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A thanked “all the gangsters, dope dealers, criminals, thieves, vandals, villains, thugs, hoodlums, killers, hunters, base heads, hypes, winos, bums, arsonists, police, maniacs and badass kids” that listened to their shit. In the years since its August 1988 release, Straight Outta Compton has been heralded as a landmark debut, one of the most important hip-hop works of all time and an album that helped launch West Coast rap, ushered a new movement for the genre, and shifted pop culture. All those things are true, yes, but when it was originally released the album was met with little fanfare outside of their neighborhood.

  There was hardly any radio play. Critics ignored it. The media wrung their hands over the album’s explosive lyrics and the group’s provocative name, with N.W.A members even coercing reporters into saying “nigga” when mentioning the group by name. “If you rose to the bait, you were a racist . . . There was no middle ground,” journalist Jonathan Gold once wrote. Despite this, sales of the album soared, with the record performing extremely well in mom-and-pop record shops unafraid to carry rap.

  N.W.A’s appeal broadened into white suburban communities as the media coverage of the group ramped up. The music was “illicit, forbidden fruit” as one Los Angeles Times report would say. Junior high students across the country couldn’t get enough of this foreign land called Compton where drugs, gangs, and the police wreaked havoc on its denizens. Some of that appeal quickly turned into obsessive imitation as white boys widely appropriated Gangsta-rap aesthetics—adopting the language, dressing the way they saw rappers on BET and MTV, and quoting the lyrics as gospel. Fascination with black culture wasn’t a new idea, it went back decades from “the white negro” during the jazz and swing eras of the 1920s and ’30s, the hipster and beatnik movements, and the blue-eyed soul that started popping up in the 1970s. The adoption of hip-hop by whites almost rarely felt authentic given the genre’s percolation through black and Latino communities. Whites who pulled from hip-hop culture—the music, the dancing, the art, and, especially, the fashion—were often dismissed as “wiggers” (a portmanteau of “white” and “nigger”) or “wankstas.” Today, those attitudes have barely changed. There are few white artists who have sustained long, successful careers in hip-hop outside of Eminem—and he had Dre as a cosigner. Much of it boiled down to posturing versus authenticity. Paul Mooney said it best on Chappelle’s Show: “Everybody wants to be a nigga, but nobody wants to be a nigga.”

  The term “Gangsta rappers” was lobbed upon N.W.A after their missive “Gangsta Gangsta.” At first it annoyed the group. They considered their music “Reality Rap” because the lyrics were pulled from what they observed and something only black folks could truly understand.

  In six weeks, Straight Outta Compton sold half a million copies—and that was without a hit single or a video on MTV. Not that they didn’t try. A visual for “Straight Outta Compton” was filmed. In it they strutted down Compton streets with their hardest scowls on their faces and re-created an LAPD gang sweep. The video’s director, Rupert Wainwright, originally wanted the story to play like a revolution on the streets of Compton—until he listened to how ferocious the record was. “I realized this could actually cause a riot. So I flipped the idea on its head, and we shot a police sweep, where N.W.A look like the victims of police brutality.” MTV refused to play the clip, claiming its policy was to “prohibit videos that glorify violence and/or show gratuitous violence.”

  During its first years on air, MTV had received much criticism for its reluctance to embrace black artists, and was even more hesitant to feature rap artists on air before Run-D.M.C. exploded in 1986 with “Walk This Way.” It never mattered that N.W.A were rapping fictional tales, nor did it matter that the video for “Straight Outta Compton” didn’t actually depict the group engaging in violence. Ultimately, news of the MTV ban added to the group’s illicitness and translated to more sales. N.W.A was being talked about as if they w
ere nefarious thugs hell-bent on destroying the moral fiber of America, and the ban solidified that reputation. Controversy is good for business, and they learned to embrace it, but the group was incensed by MTV’s stance. The network had a huge audience and now that it was showcasing rap videos it was that type of visibility that could propel them.

  “On MTV they play heavy-metal music, they show people worshipping the devil and all this, but when we bring our video telling the truth of how it is on the streets to show everybody so that they could be aware of this, they don’t want to play it saying we are promoting violence, promoting drugs—I disagree with that,” said Ren, who felt like there was more violence shown on kiddie cartoons such as G.I. Joe than their video.

  The release of Straight Outta Compton came at a time when rap had gotten far too loud to ignore by MTV. In August 1988, the network aired the pilot for its first hip-hop show, Yo! MTV Raps, a mix of rap videos, interviews, and in-studio performances. The first episodes appeared on Saturday nights and were hosted by Fab 5 Freddy, a visual artist and rapper who’d emerged in New York’s graffiti scene during the dawn of hip-hop. Within a few months the channel cleared its schedule for a weeknight edition hosted by Ed Lover and Doctor Dré (not to be confused with N.W.A’s Dre). Yo! MTV Raps, became wildly popular and successful in its attempt to market what Freddy called “the cutting edge of black culture.”