Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  As young populations browned, youths were increasingly uninterested in whitewashed hand-me-downs. The surprising success of Ted Demme and Fab 5 Freddy’s Yo! MTV Raps in 1988 made African-American, Chicano and Latino urban style instantly accessible to millions of youths. With its claims to street authenticity, its teen rebellion, its extension of urban stereotype, and its individualist “get mine” credo, gangsta rap fit hand-in-glove with a multiculti youth demographic weaned on racism and Reaganism, the first generation in a half century to face downward mobility.

  “That’s how we sold two million,” Turner says. “The white kids in the Valley picked it up and they decided they wanted to live vicariously through this music. Kids were just waiting for it.” Although MTV banned the video for the title track two months after the record’s release, the album became a cultural phenomenon. Fab 5 Freddy bucked upper management and brought his Yo! MTV Raps crew to tour with the crew through the streets of Compton.

  Like a hurricane that had gathered energy over hot open waters before heading inland, Straight Outta Compton hit American popular culture with the same force as the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks had in the U.K. eleven years earlier. Hip-hop critic Billy Jam says, “Like the Sex Pistols, NWA made it look easy, inspiring a Do-It-Yourself movement for anyone from the streets to crank out gangsta rap tapes.” All one had to have was a pen and a pad of paper, a mic, a mixer, and a sampler. Thousands of kids labored over their raps in their dark bedrooms, then stepped onto the streets to learn first-hand the vagaries of hustling and distribution—all just so that people could hear their stories.

  NWA’s Straight Outta Compton democratized rap and allowed the world to rush in. It was as if NWA overturned transnational pop culture like a police car, gleefully set the offending thing on fire, then popped open some forties, and danced to their own murder rap.

  As capital fled deindustrialized inner cities and inner-ring suburbs for Third World countries and tax-sheltered exurban “edge cities,” the idea of the Local returned with a vengeance. Big thinkers like Chuck D and Rakim had broadened hip-hop’s appeal with revolutionary programs and universalist messages. But two years after Rakim’s open invitation to join the hip-hop nation—”It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”—gangsta rap revoked it.

  “We’re born and raised in Compton!” NWA bellowed, decentering hip-hop from New York forever. NWA dropped hip-hop like a ‘64 Chevy right down to street-corner level, lowered it from the mountaintop view of Public Enemy’s recombinant nationalism and Rakim’s streetwise spiritualism, and made hip-hop narratives specific, more coded in local symbol and slang than ever before.

  After Straight Outta Compton, it really was all about where you were from. NWA conflated myth and place, made the narratives root themselves on the corner of every ‘hood. And now every ‘hood could be Compton, everyone had a story to tell. Even Bill Clinton’s sepia-toned videobio, aired at the 1992 Democratic Convention, could have been titled Straight Outta Hope.

  That a hood-centric aesthetic might rise with the Reagan right’s attack on big government seemed appropriate. To combat their defense-bloated deficits, Republicans had introduced a strategy of devolution, shifting much of the burden of health, education and social services from federal government back to the states and cities. By the 1990s, under President Clinton, Democrats moved to the so-called center, joining Republicans in the slashing and burning of their own legacy.

  Federal government would no longer be a place to seek remedies, as it had been during the civil rights and Black power era. Politics in the Beltway was becoming increasingly symbolic, just sound and fury. Nor could the courts, stuffed with Reagan appointees, be a source of relief. Many major political struggles had already shifted to the level of state and city governments, and were being waged amidst declining resources. States with older, less urban, more homogenous populations and low social service needs—usually the “red-column” Republican-dominated states—made it through this transition just fine. States with younger, browning, urban populations and expanding social service needs—usually “blue-column” Democratic-dominated states—fell into a brutal cycle of crisis and cleanup, each more severe than the last.

  The gangsta rappers were more right than they ever knew. Where you were from was exactly the story.

  The War on Gangs

  If the new national consensus around federal government was less-is-more, the new urban consensus around local government was more-is-more, particularly when it came to attacking crime and those old social pariahs, gang members. But the War on Gangs soon soured into something else entirely. And once again, Los Angeles was the bellwether.

  The shot that launched the War on Gangs was not fired in Compton, East Los Angeles, or the central city neighborhoods of the Bottoms, but in Westwood Village, amidst hip clothing boutiques, theaters and eateries a short distance from UCLA’s Fraternity Row.

  There on January 30, 1988, in the teeming Saturday night crowd of students, wealthy westsiders, and youths who had come from throughout the city to cruise the Village, a Rolling 60s Crip named Durrell DeWitt “Baby Rock” Collins spotted an enemy from the Mansfield Hustler Crips walking up Broxton Avenue. Two young Asian Americans, Karen Toshima and her boyfriend, Eddie Poon, were out celebrating Toshima’s promotion to senior art director at a local ad agency. They unwittingly walked into the crossfire. Even as Poon tried to pull Toshima to the ground, one of two bullets intended for Collins’s rival struck her in the head.50 She died at UCLA Medical Center the next day.

  City Hall leaders reacted with outrage. To many Asian Americans’ dismay, Toshima became a symbol of the city’s racial divide. For whites, Toshima’s death was a sign that gang violence was drawing uncomfortably close. To Blacks and Latinos, one death in Westwood was apparently more important to City Hall than hundreds in East and South Central Los Angeles.

  Police Chief Darryl Gates had been itching for a war. Now he would get it. In weeks, City Hall leaders voted to add 650 officers to LAPD, bringing the department to its largest size in history. LAPD held an emergency summit on gang violence and pushed for millions in emergency funds for a new military-style operation on the gangs. City Hall gave its blessing to Gates’s Operation Hammer, a program of heavy-handed sweeps in Black and brown communities touted as a national model in the War on Gangs.

  On August 1, in what was supposed to be Operation Hammer’s crowning moment, Gates brought the War on Gangs to South Central. That evening, eighty-eight LAPD officers, supported by thundering helicopters overhead, trained their firepower on two apartment buildings at the corner of 39th Street and Dalton Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. Cops stormed through the two buildings, taking axes to furniture and walls, overturning washing machines and stoves, smashing mirrors, toilets and stereos, rounding up residents and beating dozens of them. They spray-painted LAPD RULES and ROLLIN 30S DIE on apartment walls. One resident was forced wet and naked out of the shower and forced to watch her two toddlers taken away while cops destroyed her apartment with sledgehammers.51 “We weren’t just searching for drugs. We were delivering a message that there was a price to pay for selling drugs and being a gang member,” said one policeman who participated in the raid. “I looked at it as something of a Normandy Beach, a D-Day.”52

  Residents in the area had indeed complained to police of the drug dealing by Crips on the block. But none of those dealers lived in these two buildings. The raid yielded only trace amounts of crack and less than six ounces of marijuana. The Red Cross was forced to house nearly two dozen of the buildings’ tenants, who had been effectively rendered homeless. One relief official termed it “a total disaster, a shocking disaster.”53

  In fact, Operation Hammer had been a massive failure from the start. In the year following Toshima’s death, Gates’s operation netted 25,000 arrests, mainly of youths that appeared to fit the department’s gang profile. 1,500 youths could be swept up into jail in a day; 90 percent of them might be released without charg
e, after their information was entered into the gang database, now teeming with the names of thousands of innocents.54 Meanwhile, hardcore bangers often tipped each other off in advance of the sweeps and escaped the LAPD dragnet.55 The math of the Hammer did not add up. By 1992, the city was paying out $11 million annually in brutality settlements while allocating less than $2 million to gang intervention programs, and almost half of all young Black males living in South Central were in the gang database.56

  Twilight Bey, a former Cirkle City Piru, described to hip-hop journalist and DJ David “Davey D” Cook a typically harrowing day in the life of a young male in South Central.

  One of the things that would always happen is [the police] would stop you and ask you “What gang are you from?” . . . In some cases, if you had a snappy answer and by that I mean, if you were quick and to the point and had one word answers they would get up in your face and grab your collar, push you up against the police car and choke you. Or they would call us over and tell us to put our hands up and place them on the hood of the police car. Now usually the car had been running all day, which meant that the engine was hot. So the car is burning our hands which meant that we would have to remove our hands from the car. When that happened, the police would accuse of us of not cooperating. Next thing you know you would get pushed in the back or knocked over . . .

  You have to remember most of us at that time were between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Just a year ago we were ten and eleven and playing in the sheriff’s basketball league where they would treat us like little kids. A year later when we are close to being teenagers we are suddenly being treated with all this abuse.

  In a lot of cases you had kids who had chosen never to be a gang member. . . . If you told them you weren’t in a gang, they would look at whatever graffiti was written on the wall and put you on record as being part of that gang.

  DAVEY D: . . . It seems like it was some sort of sick rites of passage so that by the time you became a grown man you knew to never cross that line with the police.

  TWILIGHT: Yes, that’s exactly what it was. It was some sort of social conditioning. Instilling fear is the strongest motivation that this world has to use. It’s also the most negative. . . . What I mean by that is, if you are constantly being pushed into a corner where you are afraid, you’re going to get to a point where you one day won’t be. Eventually one day you will fight back. Eventually one day you will push back. When you push back what is going to be the end result? How far will this go?

  The Backlash

  By June 1989, a right-wing backlash against NWA was in full effect. That month, the newsletter Focus On the Family Citizen bore the headline RAP GROUP NWA SAYS “KILL POLICE.” Police departments across the South and Midwest faxed each other the song’s lyrics. Tour dates were abruptly cancelled. Cops refused to provide security for NWA shows in Toledo and Milwaukee. In Cincinnati, federal agents subjected the crew to drug searches, asking if they were L.A. gang members using their tour as a front to expand their crack-selling operations. Nothing was ever found.57

  In August, FBI assistant director Milt Ahlerich fired off a letter bluntly warning Priority Records on “Fuck Tha Police.” It read:

  A song recorded by the rap group N.W.A. on their album entitled Straight Outta Compton encourages violence against and disrespect for the law enforcement officer and has been brought to my attention. I understand your company recorded and distributed this album and I am writing to share my thoughts and concerns with you.

  Advocating violence and assault is wrong, and we in the law enforcement community take exception to such action. Violent crime, a major problem in our country, reached an unprecedented high in 1988. Seventy-eight law enforcement officers were feloniously slain in the line of duty during 1988, four more than in 1987. Law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to the protection of our citizens, and recordings such as the one from N.W.A. are both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.

  Music plays a significant role in society, and I wanted you to be aware of the FBI’s position relative to this song and its message. I believe my views reflect the opinion of the entire law enforcement community.58

  The letter came as NWA was touring, and had the effect of further mobilizing police along the tour route. NWA’s tour promoters tried to secure an agreement from the band not to perform the song. The national 200,000-member Fraternal Order of Police voted to boycott groups that advocated assaults on officers of the law. But in Detroit, where local police showed in intimidatingly large numbers, the crowd chanted “Fuck the police” all night, and the crew decided to try anyway. As Cube began the song, the cops rushed the stage. The group fled.

  Music critic David Marsh and publicist Phyllis Pollack broke the Ahlerich story in a cover article in The Village Voice, and through their organization Music In Action, mobilized the ACLU and industry leaders to formally protest. Turner forwarded the letter to sympathetic congresspersons and the FBI backed off.

  Choosing Sides

  But NWA’s scattershot test of the limits of free speech provoked outrage even in sympathetic quarters.

  “I thought NWA was Satan’s spawn. I was like, fuck these Negroes for real,” says hip-hop journalist Sheena Lester, then the youth and culture editor for the Black-owned, South Central–based Los Angeles Sentinel, later an editor at Rap Pages and Vibe. “I was reading about them—who are these motherfuckers? What do you mean, ‘bitch’ this and ‘ho’ that? Fuck them. If I’m a bitch, kiss my ass. I just felt like dealing with NWA was counterproductive.”

  She was not alone. The political and cultural rads had become hip-hop progressives, deeply influenced by their elders’ Third World liberation politics but drawn to the rapidly transforming landscape of pop culture’s present. The media dam holding back representations of youths of color was near to bursting, and hip-hop gave them confidence the flood would soon come. They took over college and community radio stations, started up magazines, cafes and clubs, and created art, design and poetry with the same kind of energy they took to storming administration buildings.

  NWA presented them with a thorny dilemma. There was the I-am-somebody rap rewrite of Charles Wright’s Watts 103rd Street Band’s “Express Yourself “ and the lumpenprole rebellion of “Fuck Tha Police.” But they certainly couldn’t ignore the allure of lines like, “To a kid looking up to me, life ain’t nothing but bitches and money,” not least when the rhyme was being delivered boldly over thrilling beats that made a heart race.

  The first boycotts against NWA came from community radio DJs and hip-hop writers, who were publicly outraged at the crew’s belligerent ignorance, and privately ambivalent about the music’s visceral heart-pounding power. Bay Area hip-hop DJs Davey D and Kevin “Kevvy Kev” Montague led a boycott of NWA and Eazy E on their nationally influential college radio shows, believing it would be contradictory to play such music while they were trying to create an Afrocentric space on the air. Both devoted hours of call-in radio to the debate, and their listeners finally supported the ban. The boycott spread to other hip-hop shows across the nation.

  To the hip-hop progressives, the true believers who embraced rap as the voice of their generation, NWA sounded militantly incoherent. Their music drew new lines over issues of misogyny, homophobia, and violence. NWA had stepped up rap’s dialogics; reaction was the point. They anticipated the criticisms, but silenced them by shouting them down. Defiant and confident, Yella even disclosed the in-joke, scratching in a female voice, “Hoping all you sophisticated motherfuckers hear what I have to say.”

  The hip-hop progressives were hearing it and were conflicted. Three decades after Baraka’s call for “poems that kill,” radical chic had become gangsta chic. Just as the blues had for a generation of white baby boomers, these tall tales populated with drunken, high, rowdy, irresponsible, criminal, murderous niggas with attitude seemed to be just what the masses of their generation wanted. Even more disconcerting, they lined up all the right enemies: the
Christian right, the FBI, baby boomer demagogues. NWA was going to force every hip-hop progressive to confront her or his relationship to the music and choose sides.

  When Straight Outta Compton crossed over to white audiences, things became very unpleasant. Gangsta rap was proving more than just “the new punk rock”; it became a more formidable lightning rod for the suppression of youth culture than white rock music ever had been. Yet the music was undoubtedly difficult to defend. To the hip-hop progressives, it sometimes seemed less than a cultural effect of material realities, a catalyst for progressive discussion, or objective street reportage of social despair, than the start of further reversal. Yet the music was undoubtedly difficult to defend. It sometimes seemed less than a cultural effect of material realities, a catalyst for progressive discussion, or objective street reportage of social despair, than the start of further reversal.

  In the photo for a 1990 Source cover story, Eazy E aimed his 9mm at the reader, over the cover line, THE GANGSTA RAPPER: VIOLENT HERO OR NEGATIVE ROLE

  MODEL? Inside, a fierce debate raged over gangsta rap. David Mills asked, “[Y]ou wonder whether things have gotten out of control, and whether, like radiation exposure, it’ll be years before we can really know the consequences of our nasty little entertainments.”59

  Worse yet, the culture wars seemed to stoke the political wars—the War on Gangs, the War on Drugs, the War on Youth. As Rob Marriott, James Bernard and Allen Gordon would write in The Source, “The saddest thing is that these attacks on rap have helped set the stage for the most oppressive and wrong-headed crime legislation. Three strikes out? Mandatory sentences? More cops? More prisons? Utter bullshit.”60