Describing corrupt officers as “redneck, white bread, chickenshit motherfucker” feels sadly appropriate all of thirty years later. While at the time, the track ‘Fuck Tha Police’ was potent enough to get them an actual letter from the F.B.I., today it looks prescient as one of the first kickbacks at the racial profiling and unsanctioned killings of young black men. The problem with taking a flamethrower-like approach to aggression is that the wrong people often get burned.īut the one target that the group directly set their sights on, the one that got them the most notoriety and the most condemnation, was the police. Homophobia was there as well: “But she keep cryin’ ‘I got a boyfriend’/Bitch, stop lyin’, Dumb-ass hooker ain’t nothin’ but a dyke,” on ‘Gangsta Gangsta’. Lines like: “There’s a slight chance if I fuck she might burn me, and then I might have to shoot the ho,” on ‘Just Don’t Bite It’ and “So what about the bitch who got shot, fuck her/You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain’t a sucker,” on the title track serve as microcosms of just how fast and loose hip-hop as a whole plays with misogyny. That didn’t matter: Straight Outta Comptonwas huge, at least in part due to its vicious swipe against traditional morals and conservative beliefs. Due to the profanity-laden tendencies of the songs, these singles and videos wouldn’t get played on mainstream stations, and clean versions of songs were either impossible or indecipherable. The video for the title track, for example, takes place on the actual streets of Compton. The album spawned videos that took care in bringing the visuals that the band’s lyricists – mainly Ice Cube, MC Ren, and future Death Row Records founder The D.O.C. Within a year, the album went gold in America, and by July of 1989, it was certified platinum. Straight Outta Compton was released on August 8, 1988, and made an immediate impact on popular culture. The point wasn’t whether every little detail or lyric of Straight Outta Compton actually happened because, to a kid, everything feels real. White kids who had no basis with which to contextualise Straight Outta Compton took it at face value, as did their terrified parents, whose vehement disapproval only made the album more desirable and enthralling to the hordes of kids whose imaginations were now filled with the exploits of these “gangstas”. Sitting in cosy suburban homes far away from Compton, California, kids all across the United States, and indeed all over the world, began to gravitate towards the hyper-threatening and highly specific atmosphere conjured by MC Ren, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, Arabian Prince, DJ Yella, and Dr.
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