Straight Outta Compton opens in theaters nationwide on Friday (Aug. 14). Pregame for the biggest bio-flick of the year by browsing this playlist of ten crucial NWA artifacts, all easily accessible through YouTube. I didn’t want to teeter one way or the other. In the mid-80s, “The Doctor” spent a couple of years DJing in a hip-hop-friendly L.A. club, eventually demoing tracks with aspiring rapper and future NWAer Yella.
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“He picked her up by her hair and “began slamming her head and the right side of her body repeatedly against a brick wall near the stairway” as his bodyguard held off the crowd with a gun”, wrote Rolling Stone. Last month, Public Enemy released their 13th studio album, Man Plans, GOD Laughs.
When asked how N.W.A. would respond to the social commentary of today, Gary said, “Probably the same way they did back then”.
What’s your favorite N.W.A. song?
“In this Sunday, August 2, 2015 photo, Ice Cube poses for a portrait in promotion of the new film?Straight Outta Compton“, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. The young people who grew up loving “Straight Outta Compton” are now the ones who green-light movies. I talked to MC Ren. The first single from the titular album couldn’t have been an apter statement of objective. Following a weekend where Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation managed to top the box office with a haul of $28.5 million, Variety is reporting that Straight Outta Compton will win the three day race with a $40 million opening. Lyrically, though, it’s largely a condemnation of censorship and hypocrisy. Dre extensively in the past, like Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, Xzibit, The Game, and Ice Cube, there are a lot of other featured artists on Compton. The fast-paced video mostly highlights a block party, but also features Dre, wide-brimmed-hatted, on a horse in plantation fields, and concludes, incongruously, with him getting sent to the electric chair.
The surviving rappers have smudged everything that might make them look like creeps or chumps, beveling so many rough edges that their screen selves become blank slates. The effort certainly paid off, because Jackson delivers a completely convincing and riveting performance as Cube in Compton. “Nah. But 90% of ’em are”, Ren fires back defiantly. We understand what that feels like..
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Part of the pleasure of the film is not only reliving the memorable pop-culture moments but also seeing the humanity of the characters, who are often regarded as one-dimensional thugs who made it big by glamorizing violence and spouting misogynistic lyrics. And Dre kind of recalled one thing and Cube recalled another. Perhaps the filmmakers assume we know all this. Did you discover anything like that in portraying your dad as a teenager? It’s clear what producers Cube and Dre are most interested in: the money.
