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March 6, 2006
Things Fall Apart, Or, A Crazy Motherfucker Named Ice Cube
There are landmark moments of the apolitical and nihilistic in US history. My favourite is President Richard Nixon—his damning White House tapes and eventual resignation.
Another favourite is a recording released 14 years after Nixon’s resignation, and it too deeply burnt the American psyche. The recording? NWA’s Straight Outta Compton.
The group, composed of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, Eazy-E and DJ Yella, scared the bejeesus out of America with an album that bled apocalyptic forecasts for the LA ghettos—streets filled with the blood of women and punks and cops; where drugs and cum are currency; and where the only politics that matter is who’s shooting who.
There’s no doubt that the recurring themes of violent misogyny, rape, and murder are unsettling still, and when Cube rapped:
young nigga on the warpath/ and when I’m finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath/ of cops, dying in LA/ yo Dre, I’ve got something to say… Fuck tha police!
white-America suffered apoplectic seizures, and the rich-white mobilized to demonize the album and restrict its dissemination. It was too late, and LA rioted four years later: 51 dead and 1 billion dollars in damages. Things fall apart.
Straight Outta Compton read like a queer interpretation of Churchill’s “We shall not flag or fail” speech, except that the orators were gun-slingin’ gangstas who wished to defend nothing except their right to smoke cops and shoot bitches. Young children played in the smoke of a burning LA, rapping word for word “Gangsta, Gangsta”—the record was, very certainly, the poor and black’s nihilistic version of Churchill’s call to arms. But rather than the defeat of an unequivocal enemy, it seemed NWA’s victory was that their apocalyptic rants were coming true.
What made NWA’s record so frightening was that the brutal violence was a-contextualised. Public Enemy were causing their storm with smoother beats and an eye to history—they were still angry, but smarter and cooler. NWA were unremittingly bleak, placing their stories of the ghetto out of history’s reach. Their lyrics of drug dealing and murder enjoyed no arc of redemption. Everything, just simply, was.
I was given my first ever album by a kid down the road. I was twelve.
I had provided him with a blank tape, swiped from my parents’ stash, and he had responded by pirating NWA’s Straight Outta Compton on his dual-cassette deck. I loved it.
For a white, middle-class kid, the album provided its owner with a righteous sense of rebellion. But with further listens, the album yielded things of greater interest.
Of course, the politics (or apolitics) of the ghetto were lost on me. I was simply thrilled by the profanity, and amazed at the stories: murder without remorse; the rise and fall of drug empires and the cruel and unusual treatment of women. None of it made any real sense, but I remained curious and entertained, just like I was when I read the Hardy Boys or the Three Investigators.
I was piqued by News From Another World, a world where the rules were strange and adult and black. A world whose one underlying rule was that there weren’t any rules, and the vicarious pleasure this afforded its young, white listener is obvious. I was the young voyeur of race and class, and my now barren ant-farm I received for Christmas was forgotten for this greater, more interesting microcosm.
Of course the music itself left its mark, and my favourite track on the album was (it still is) “Express Yourself,” a song preaching the virtue (and dangers) of free speech. It sampled the inexplicably funky Wright brothers’ riff from their song of the same name, and it floored me.
My ownership of this record was kept secret from my parents, and so when they left to do whatever boring things white middle-class folks do on Saturday mornings, I commandeered their stereo system and blasted “Express Yourself” as loud as I could. Right now, 13 years later, I’m doing the same thing on my stereo, and whilst my love for the song hasn’t diminished in that time, the excitement of playing it cannot rate with those days.
“Express Yourself” was the one moment on the album where the claustrophobic greys of nihilism were lifted and replaced with colour—“Express Yourself” presented things that they believed in, urged along by one of the great funk riffs. For me, it was an intermission. A coffee break which was better than anything that went before or after.
MC Ren eventually slipped into obscurity, Dre and Cube discovered the main-stream, and Eazy-E, high on Marquis de Sade perversities, succumbed to AIDS in 1995. LA’s smoke cleared, only for long-standing prejudices to be resumed quietly. Programs of gentrification cleaned up the streets of LA, breaking the bloc of black insurgency, and of gangs and blood, but poverty is never abolished, just swept around, and the rich and outraged began to successfully use the riots as evidence for the dangerous influence of gangsta rap.
The mainstream eventually tapped into the commercial viability of black street battles, and when Tupac and Biggie were gunned down, as many whites mourned the loss of their pop-leaders as blacks. I am reminded again of my ant-farm.
LA’s race hostilities quieted down, lessening the appeal of gangsta rap, and as NWA, Ice-T (another hardcore rap instigator who would discover the mainstream) and other gangsta rappers were forgotten, Dre introduced the world to G-funk and Snoop Dogg and a whole universe of celebratory hip-hop emerged, commensurate with newly discovered commercial success.
Rappers were richer, white America was less scared, and this young listener had been introduced to a (so-far) life-long love for hip-hop. So it goes.
Posted by Marty at March 6, 2006 11:43 AM
Comments
i dug that record, too, after swiping it from my brother and passing it on to my dad to check out. love your adoption of the vonnegut sign-off. might get to check out broken social scene and a silver mt.zion in europe. now THAT's beautiful.
Posted by: rick at March 6, 2006 12:45 PM
saw BSS last thursday. top five gigs. fuck knows how they manage to get four guitars all sounding great together. some new songs, too, which were rad.
& whaddaya mean you passed NWA on to your Dad? your dad's hip. or strange. which one is it?
peace,
m
Posted by: marty at March 6, 2006 12:55 PM
we're, like, online at the same time and i can picture you typing and probably sitting on your porch and the sun's fucking belting you and the day's a holiday and i WANNA BE THERE.
Posted by: rick at March 6, 2006 1:19 PM
oh yeah!
he's just tolerant.
Posted by: rick at March 6, 2006 1:20 PM
you're right, rick. the sun's belting down, dj shadow drones from the speakers, and the hyde park community fair revels in its own banality right across the street. & you? you're where? in your office, wondering how the christ kids got to be so fucking... cunty? well, don't worry, my man, you have a Good Lady o'er there, and there's always music. more and more music.
m
Posted by: marty at March 6, 2006 1:23 PM
a tribe called quest!
snap.
thanks for the thought.
Posted by: rick at March 8, 2006 7:22 AM
Hello Mr M-M, found an interesting tidbit which may interest or irritate you, or both, but thought it may be worth mentioning anyway. Bizarrely, the day after reading this entry, I arrived at work to be greeted by the stereo doing its best to 'blare' out "Straight Outta Compton", though in barely recognisable form. It seems that one Nina Gordon has
done a Frank Bennett-esque genre bend on said track & given it a new lease of life in the guise of acoustic folk. It's your standard girl-with-guitar fare but your love of this record being what it is, I thought it might be a laugh nonetheless. Should all this not already be known to you, follow the blinky link road & have an aural squiz. Enjoy,
Liz
Posted by: Liz at March 17, 2006 5:07 AM
might need the link....
http://www.ninagordon.com/audio/straightouttacompton.mp3
Posted by: Liz at March 17, 2006 5:09 AM
no, i hadn't heard of it, so bless your cotton sox for the link--i'll check it out.
and a merry st. pat's to you & you,
m
Posted by: marty at March 17, 2006 10:11 AM
jesus, that's cool--there's something so fucking satisfying in hearing nina gordon sing so sweetly, so softly: "Here's a murder rap to keep yo dancin'/
with a crime record like Charles Manson/
AK-47 is the tool/ Don't make me act the motherfuckin' fool"
cheers,
m
Posted by: marty at March 17, 2006 10:22 AM
Good good, just happy to have helped provide a non-comestible side dish to other St Pat's Day enjoyments.
Happy 18th March
Liz
Posted by: Liz at March 18, 2006 3:05 PM
You don't mention the Arabian Prince, aka Professor X, who was very important to the success of "Straight Outta Compton." N.W.A. dropped off when he and the D.O.C. left.
Posted by: Alexis at June 10, 2006 4:07 AM
i'm embarrassed to say that i haven't heard of professor x before, but am now hunting down all i need to know.
cheers,
m
Posted by: marty at June 10, 2006 10:17 AM
