NWA story is not so great when you look at it without the Hollywood glitter:
A bunch of black dudes create a band that barely existed for 5 years –Ice Cube, the biggest star, left 3 years in-, promoted by a Jewish music executive who had $250,000 personal money to play with and start Ruthless Records.
They wrote lyrics of stories from the hood they were listening to. Stories. They get better each time. Crazier. In the end, those lyrics are as much fantasy than reality. NWA members didn’t fuck with real Gs, only Eazy was. NWA really wanted to not have to gangbang and it’s a part that everyone forgets. When I hear them boasting about the hood on wax I feel more desperation than pride.
They played with that. They were sitting on a huge pile of C4 with millions of $ in it. “Y’all motherfuckers, media, FBI, young white dudes want more crazy stories? We’ll tell them to you and we’ll get bigger. We don’t give a fuck. We hustlin dawg.”
And they did, all moved really fast from NWA –barely five years!- to their personal brands, relocated in nicer suburbs.
The end.
We knew about police brutality. We knew about poor black neighborhoods. In retrospect I don’t think those extreme lyrics helped in any way.
I’ve never understood how they could get away with how misogynists those lyrics are, really showing how society is sexist as a whole. In the last Dr Dre Compton album that just came out, they fake-kill a woman and it made me so fucking uncomfortable like just stop this shit, stop this shit black people are dying in the streets too often stop this shit. Fuck.
Once again it’s about a narrative –keeping it real??- but the world doesn’t work this way, you’re supposed to grow up. You can’t be doing a fake murder of a black woman on a 2015 record when black women are getting killed by police or boyfriends. You’re fucking 50 Dre and you have a terrible past on that subject. You need to act on this. Be Real, Get Responsible.
Even this album cover is kind of a disgrace. For people outside the LA county, if you live in Compton you don’t go to fucking Hollywood, ever. You don’t see that sign, you don’t see those downtown skyscrapers. You just drive around unlimited suburbs with palm trees around, under a close sun that doesn’t give a damn about you and your broke ass.
The beats are good though.
