Old School Hip Hop: Old School, 80's, 90's,

TheFrogFather · 10-03-2006, 12:23 PM

"Boyz N Tha Hood" is the story of a young man's misadventures with friends, cars, girls and guns on a single afternoon. It opens with him "cruisin' down tha street in my '64." He sees a friend driving a stolen car. He catches another friend trying to steal his car stereo and shoots him. He has a couple of drinks, gets in a fight with his girlfriend, then with her father. He wrecks the car and, finally, walking home, sees the guy with the stolen car from the first verse fight with police. A busy day. "I can sell that," Yano said.

Eazy took it to Macola, had a pressing done, and Yano started selling the 12-inch singles at the swap meet.

"Kids are just loving it," Yano says. "We had the best promotion you could ever get, promotion at the grass-roots street level."

Eazy would drive up to Hollywood, ostensibly to talk to Don MacMillan. "He'd go to Macola, go into the back room and steal his own records," says Lorenzo Patterson, a young rapper whom Eazy recruited to join his label. "We'd take 'em out through the back door and throw them into his Jeep."

Eazy hired "snipers"--friends, gangbangers, ordinary guys who wanted to make a couple bucks--to take the records around to neighborhood stores. They gave away cassette copies to kids in the projects who were leaders of their own little cliques.

Against all odds, "Boyz N Tha Hood" became a hit.

"The response told us we'd found our niche, to be ourselves," says Cube. Eazy persuaded Dre, Cube, Yella and another local rapper named Mik Lezan, known as the Arabian Prince, to form an all-star group. Dre and Yella would make the beats; Cube would write the lyrics; Arabian Prince, Cube and Eazy would rap them. They could all continue to do their own things and get together on the side to make wild records for Ruthless.

It was an informal collective. People came and went in the studio. Cube, just out of high school, surprised everybody by leaving town to take a course in architectural drafting in Arizona. "If this record thing didn't work out, I didn't want to be out there digging ditches," Cube says. The Arabian Prince left too--for a solo career. As replacements Eazy brought in Patterson, who went by the name M.C. Ren, and Tray Curry, a Texas rapper who performed as The D.O.C. Eazy auditioned Ren in his mother's Compton garage, where he had recording gear set up. Ren had been writing rhymes since junior high. He rhymed equations in algebra class

. "He told me to start rapping about anything," Ren says. "So I started rapping about [stuff] in the garage. He liked it, took the tape to Dre. Dre signed me on the spot. Took me to a notary public he knew in Lakewood, signed me to a contract. There was no money or nothing. I didn't care. I was like, 'Fine.' "

Ren says Eazy's pitch was straightforward: at Ruthless, you could make records you couldn't make at other labels; it would be a place where nobody would tell you what you couldn't do. The records would all be like "Boyz N Tha Hood"--full of sex and guns, drinking and drugging. It would be stuff their friends would buy. At 24, Yella was the oldest of the crew. Eazy was 23; Dre, 21; Ren, 20; Cube, 18.

One day, hanging out at the Arabian Prince's house in Inglewood, they arrived at a name for the new group. They wanted something everybody would identify with the West Coast. Somebody suggested From Compton With Love.

"Hell, no!" everyone shouted.

"Then," Ren recalls, "Eazy says, 'How 'bout N.W.A, Niggaz With Attitude?' Everybody's like, 'Hell, yeah. N.W.A it is.' "

TheFrogFather · 10-03-2006, 12:24 PM

"Boyz N Tha Hood" is the story of a young man's misadventures with friends, cars, girls and guns on a single afternoon. It opens with him "cruisin' down tha street in my '64." He sees a friend driving a stolen car. He catches another friend trying to steal his car stereo and shoots him. He has a couple of drinks, gets in a fight with his girlfriend, then with her father. He wrecks the car and, finally, walking home, sees the guy with the stolen car from the first verse fight with police. A busy day. "I can sell that," Yano said.

Eazy took it to Macola, had a pressing done, and Yano started selling the 12-inch singles at the swap meet.

"Kids are just loving it," Yano says. "We had the best promotion you could ever get, promotion at the grass-roots street level."

Eazy would drive up to Hollywood, ostensibly to talk to Don MacMillan. "He'd go to Macola, go into the back room and steal his own records," says Lorenzo Patterson, a young rapper whom Eazy recruited to join his label. "We'd take 'em out through the back door and throw them into his Jeep."

Eazy hired "snipers"--friends, gangbangers, ordinary guys who wanted to make a couple bucks--to take the records around to neighborhood stores. They gave away cassette copies to kids in the projects who were leaders of their own little cliques.

Against all odds, "Boyz N Tha Hood" became a hit.

"The response told us we'd found our niche, to be ourselves," says Cube. Eazy persuaded Dre, Cube, Yella and another local rapper named Mik Lezan, known as the Arabian Prince, to form an all-star group. Dre and Yella would make the beats; Cube would write the lyrics; Arabian Prince, Cube and Eazy would rap them. They could all continue to do their own things and get together on the side to make wild records for Ruthless.

It was an informal collective. People came and went in the studio. Cube, just out of high school, surprised everybody by leaving town to take a course in architectural drafting in Arizona. "If this record thing didn't work out, I didn't want to be out there digging ditches," Cube says. The Arabian Prince left too--for a solo career. As replacements Eazy brought in Patterson, who went by the name M.C. Ren, and Tray Curry, a Texas rapper who performed as The D.O.C. Eazy auditioned Ren in his mother's Compton garage, where he had recording gear set up. Ren had been writing rhymes since junior high. He rhymed equations in algebra class

. "He told me to start rapping about anything," Ren says. "So I started rapping about [stuff] in the garage. He liked it, took the tape to Dre. Dre signed me on the spot. Took me to a notary public he knew in Lakewood, signed me to a contract. There was no money or nothing. I didn't care. I was like, 'Fine.' "

Ren says Eazy's pitch was straightforward: at Ruthless, you could make records you couldn't make at other labels; it would be a place where nobody would tell you what you couldn't do. The records would all be like "Boyz N Tha Hood"--full of sex and guns, drinking and drugging. It would be stuff their friends would buy. At 24, Yella was the oldest of the crew. Eazy was 23; Dre, 21; Ren, 20; Cube, 18.

One day, hanging out at the Arabian Prince's house in Inglewood, they arrived at a name for the new group. They wanted something everybody would identify with the West Coast. Somebody suggested From Compton With Love.

"Hell, no!" everyone shouted.

"Then," Ren recalls, "Eazy says, 'How 'bout N.W.A, Niggaz With Attitude?' Everybody's like, 'Hell, yeah. N.W.A it is.' "

The Permanent Business

As the label took shape, Eazy bugged Lonzo for an introduction to Jerry Heller, a veteran talent manager. Lonzo had met Heller at Macola, which was a kind of social club for the emerging local hip-hop scene.

"We all heard of Jerry. He was always there at Don's," Lonzo says. "At one time he had almost everybody on the West Coast signed up. Throw it against the wall and see what sticks. That's what he was doing."

Lonzo and Heller had become friendly. Lonzo was older than many of the other guys, and he and Heller had an easy rapport. Lonzo didn't much like Eazy. For one thing, he thought Eazy was prying Dre away from him.

"The original plan was for Dre to produce Eazy and stay in the Cru," Lonzo says. "Dre was enticed by Eazy's lifestyle. He got tired of the flashy costumes, got tired of practicing the choreography. He wanted to be a rapper.

"I'm fighting for the Wreckin' Cru and I can't compete. There's a musical divide. I thought their music was good, but I wasn't into it. I loved ballads."

In the end, Lonzo agreed to introduce Eazy to Heller, but he made it clear he wasn't doing it as a friend. He charged Eazy $750. The introduction took place in March 1987 in the Macola lobby. "Eazy took the money out of his sock right there and paid Lonzo," Heller says.

Heller was an old pro, a part of what music people call "the permanent business." Denizens of the permanent business have a genius mainly for endurance. They hang around, surfing the erratic waves of popularity that define pop culture. Heller had made and lost at least one fortune already. A middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road white guy with no musical ability, he had been managing musicians dating back to Creedence Clearwater Revival in the 1960s. By the 1980s, Heller's fortunes had declined. He was, he says, "burned out on the industry."

"Then I heard about this scene at Macola, this pressing plant on Santa Monica Boulevard," Heller says. "For a thousand dollars, he'd press 500 records."

Eazy told Heller about the kind of record company he wanted. Then he played "Boyz N Tha Hood" and a new N.W.A song, "Straight Outta Compton."

"It blew me away," Heller says. "I thought it was the most important music I had ever heard."

They agreed to form a partnership and sealed the deal with a drink at Martini's, a Hollywood hangout. Heller decided that what N.W.A needed most was better promotion and distribution. That fall, Heller sent the band on tour and went shopping for a partner. The tour was far from glamorous. For much of it, N.W.A shared the bill with Salt-N-Pepa, a group of three women with national hits. Salt-N-Pepa flew between dates while N.W.A drove in a van.

Salt-N-Pepa found it greatly amusing that the hard-core Compton "gangsters" had to drive themselves. "Used to laugh at us: 'When y'all's plane leaving?' " Ren says.

Heller wasn't having a great deal more fun trying to sell the group. He says Columbia Records executive Joe Smith's reaction, upon hearing a demo tape, was typical. Smith offered to purchase the name Ruthless, which he thought had possibilities, but wanted nothing to do with the records.

"Are you crazy?" Heller remembers Smith asking. "What the hell would make you believe somebody is going to buy this crap?"

Some evidence was beginning to accumulate that Smith was wrong. Heller took Eazy to New York to introduce him at an industry gathering. They were in an elevator at the Park Lane Hotel. The elevator stopped and let on Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels, the front men for Run-DMC. Heller and Eazy immediately recognized Simmons and McDaniels, who in turn gave Heller and, especially, Eazy the once over. Then, recognition having dawned, Simmons and McDaniels started softly rapping the lyrics to "Boyz N Tha Hood."

TheFrogFather · 10-03-2006, 12:24 PM

"They knew every word," Heller says. "The record had never been played on radio anywhere. It's a 12-inch single distributed locally. And they knew the whole thing." Seizing on the underground success of "Boyz," Macola's Don MacMillan compiled that song, a bunch of demos and rough recordings various people had done under the Ruthless banner and issued it as an album under the name "N.W.A and the Posse." Only three of the songs on the album were performed by what would become N.W.A. The record didn't sell in huge numbers, but it started building N.W.A's reputation.

Johnny Phillips, a record distributor in Memphis, remembers a call around this time from one of his accounts, an independent record store in Cincinnati, asking about a record by a group called N.W.A that was being played in local clubs.

"I called Macola, bought a couple hundred of them. By the next month we were reordering five, six, seven thousand a week. As soon as we got 'em, we sold 'em."

Phillips, the nephew of Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis Presley, was a key distributor for Priority Records, a fledgling company in Los Angeles. He sent Priority a copy of the Macola album. Priority was the creation of Bryan Turner and Mark Cerami, former K-Tel Records executives. They had started the label just two years before and made some money issuing a line of rap compilation albums. Then they hit it big with an unlikely novelty hit, the California raisins.

Television commercials for the California raisin industry had featured a musical quartet of animated raisins singing the soul classic "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." Priority licensed the rights to the singing raisins and put out an album of soul oldies. They sold 2 million copies. As a result, Priority was flush with cash and looking for new talent.

Coincidentally, Priority's offices were on the same floor of a Hollywood building as Jerry Heller's office. Turner, Cerami and Heller knew one another casually, and Heller had just been in to pitch N.W.A.

Cerami went to see the group perform. It was like the Beatles, he said. That sealed it. N.W.A was set to follow in the footsteps of the California raisins.

Paint Ball Politics

In the record business, money is spent on two things: recording music and promoting it. By the time N.W.A went into the studio to make its first real album, "Straight Outta Compton," a typical studio album cost well more than $100,000 to produce. Some cost 10 times that much.

The more money that was spent and made, the greater the size of the record company that would manage it.

One of the great gifts hip-hop gave to the music community was liberation from these corporate bureaucracies. Most hip-hop records were being made by small companies on low budgets--"on machines you could buy for $200 at Toys R Us," Heller says.

The other half of up-front costs--promotion and marketing--is spent mainly trying to get radio stations to play records. With N.W.A, there was no chance radio stations were going to touch the stuff, so there was no sense throwing money at them.

"You couldn't spend money on radio, so basically you couldn't spend money," Turner says. This, coupled with low production costs, made the economics of an N.W.A record utterly different.

TheFrogFather · 10-03-2006, 12:25 PM

"I could sell fifty, sixty, seventy thousand of these records and make money," Turner says.

With those numbers and with almost no investment, Priority could afford to both sign N.W.A and leave the group alone. After its brief tour, N.W.A, with Cube back home from Arizona, went into the studio with complete freedom to make whatever record they wanted to make. And they did.

"Straight Outta Compton" has been described variously as a work of revolutionary genius, a painful scream from the bleak streets of black America and, more commonly, as reprehensible trash with no redeeming value. It is all of that, and remains startling because of it.

"It's just an image," says Ren. "We got to do something that would distinguish ourselves. We was just trying to be different."

The fifth word on the first song on "Straight Outta Compton" is unprintable in The Times. The same word and many variations of it recur with regularity thereafter.

The record is laced with language you don't hear on the radio or in polite society. That was the beauty of it and, from the group's point of view, the joy of it. "We were going to write about the street. Cussing and hollering," Ren says. They didn't give a damn about polite society, or anything beyond the narrow world of the low-level street hooligans they wrote about.

What is most shocking about the album is not the language but the gleeful, celebratory hedonism of it, the misogyny and violence and dark-as-midnight nihilism. As a listener, you get the sense you're learning more about something than you really want to know, something you might at some point be called to testify about.

When people talk about the album's political and social power, they're referring mainly to the first three of 13 songs: "Straight Outta Compton," "F--- Tha Police" and "Gangsta, Gangsta."

The other 10 tracks are party songs, some of them great dance tracks but lyrically silly and forgettable. Several songs had been recorded previously and were redone for the album. It is a measure of the power of the first three songs that they have been able to drown out memory of the other 10. Dre has at times seemed embarrassed at the rawness of the whole affair, saying the record was crudely made. Others see this as a virtue, part of the album's immediacy. The record was made in just six weeks. It cost about $8,000 and has the loose sense of a bunch of guys having one hell of a good time--except Ice Cube, who is ferociously angry throughout.

"Think about how you felt at that age," Cube says. "I was mad at everything. When I went to the schools in the Valley, going through those neighborhoods, seeing how different they were from mine, that angered me. The injustice of it, that's what always got me--the injustice."

The group was not political in any way other than the most elementary sense. Cube's lyrics were more socially aware than he was. "F--- Tha Police" was at least as dismissive of the police as it was an attack on them. The group wasn't even going to record it initially. When Cube first showed the lyrics to Dre, he passed. "What else you got?" Dre asked.

It was only after Dre and Eazy were caught shooting paint balls at people at Torrance bus stops that Dre changed his mind about the song.

Cube was the main lyricist for the album. Dre and Yella shared the producer's credit. They were almost always the first ones in the Torrance studio and the last to leave. Others came and went as need or whim dictated. It was clear who was in charge.

"Dre was like the main ear," Ren says. "He'd tell you, 'Try to make it like this.' You'd do it. He'd be like, 'Cool.' Or, 'That's terrible.' Dre'd look at you like, you dumb mother . . . ."

The results do not match Dre's later musical sophistication; few things do. It was, as Priority's Bryan Turner points out, his first real album. Even so, the sound of the album is as powerful as the lyrics--and more varied. The fast-beat Wreckin' Cru techno is absent, replaced by slower, deeper, funkier rhythm tracks set in a scrap heap soundscape of sirens, gunshots, shouts, curses and cars. The overall effect can be ominous.

Hip-hop from its beginnings has been intensely place-based. Rappers have told us about their neighborhoods and towns, praising them and criticizing others. Regional chauvinism became a defining characteristic; geographic feuds a part of the drama. N.W.A made a virtue of necessity in celebrating Compton, a place few people had ever heard of outside Southern California. To this day, all that many people know of it is what N.W.A told them. In a way, people read both too much and too little into "Straight Outta Compton." Too much was made of supposed political motivations and probably not enough of the fact that these were kids making records for other kids.

Few people placed the record inside a broader regional tradition to which it clearly belongs. California pop music in the last 40 years has had four periods of peak popularity: mid-'60s surf and hot-rod music; late-'60s psychedelia; '70s laid-back country rock; and gangsta rap of the late '80s through the '90s.

As distinct as these genres are, they share a notably self-indulgent worldview. No matter who's singing--Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, the Eagles or Niggaz With Attitudes--or about what, California hedonism prevails. As Cube put it in "Gangsta, Gangsta," life is just girls and money, or words to that effect.

In almost any other medium, the same content would have been received more calmly. It would have been analyzed as an artistic stance, not a lifestyle. (These weren't, after all, real gangsters.) Dre would have been exalted as a postmodern master, Frank Gehry at the mixing board, cobbling scraps of James Brown funk to cool Euro techno in a way that made both seem more alive. Cube would have been doing political commentary on CNN and Eazy's autobiography would have been a business school staple.

People forgot that these were songs, fictions. Almost inevitably, establishment forces denounced "Straight Outta Compton." It set off a long-running, unresolved debate about the content of pop culture.

The ubiquity of pop music encourages overreaction; it's the only art form that blasts out of a 200-watt amp in the Toyota next to you at the stoplight on Slauson, the artillery thump of the bass vibrating shop windows a block away. Or, more to the point, the stoplight might be on Magic Mountain Parkway in Valencia; or any intersection in Bethesda, Md., Waukegan, Ill., or Redmond, Ore. Or, for that matter, in Tokyo, Paris or Rio.

From nearly the beginning, as soon as N.W.A broke out of the swap meet scene, the group sold most of its records far beyond the boundaries of black neighborhoods. Eventually, Priority calculated, 80% of the sales of "Straight Outta Compton" were in the suburbs, mainly to teenage boys who wouldn't know real niggaz if one woofed in their ears.

The FBI Helps Out

The record came out in late 1988. Radio wanted nothing to do with it. When the group taped a music video, MTV refused to play it. Still, sales climbed into the hundreds of thousands.

TheFrogFather · 10-03-2006, 12:26 PM

Turner says the knowledge of distributors such as Phillips was crucial in getting the record introduced nationally. "Those were the really critical relationships, with the mom-and-pop stores, because there was a whole list of them that could actually get your record promoted, get your record sold because kids would come buy it. There was such a demand for rap and such a lack of supply."

At first the album received little national attention; sales built region by region. When it broke within an area, it crossed over to white markets almost immediately, King says. The hardest part was getting stores to stock it. "Once you got it in, that's all it took," King says. "It sold fast with junior high kids. It was illicit, forbidden fruit."

By the middle of 1989, six months after its release, "Straight Outta Compton" was a stealth phenomenon. Then N.W.A got lucky--perversely so. Milt Ahlerich, an assistant director of the FBI, sent a letter to Priority, accusing the label of selling a record ("F---Tha Police") that encouraged "violence against and disrespect for the law-enforcement officer." Ahlerich didn't propose to do anything. There was nothing he could do. He said merely that "we in the law enforcement community take exception to such action."

The bureau's interpretation of the song was so literal it's a wonder it didn't form a task force to dig up the bodies that Eazy, Ren and Cube bragged about dispatching. Bryan Turner didn't know how to react.

"I was scared. You kidding? It was the FBI. I'm just a kid from Canada, what do I know?" Turner says. "I showed it to some lawyers. They said they [the FBI] couldn't do anything. That made me feel better. Then we circulated the letter. The thing was like a nuclear explosion. Once we circulated that, everybody wanted to hear the record the FBI wanted to suppress."

N.W.A went back on tour. Sure enough, they were banned from performing in some cities, touching off small riots. Every time it happened, there was a spate of publicity followed by a spurt in sales. "It was free publicity as far as I was concerned," Yella says. Bill Adler, a former rap label executive, says it's simple to identify elements of a hit record. "Pop music is teen music. The stuff that's going to explode are the things that appeal to teens. Girls want somebody cute. Boys want somebody tough."

What could possibly be tougher than to have the FBI after you?

"The FBI helped out," Heller says. "MTV banned the 'Straight Outta Compton' video and we sold 100,000 copies. A whole cultural phenomenon. Several months into it, Elle did a 10-page spread on gangster chic in the foreign edition. We did a Newsweek cover." N.W.A woke the music industry to the huge commercial possibilities of hard-core hip-hop.

Eventually people quit asking if hip-hop was a fad. Rap music worked its way on to the radio, dominated it to some extent, ending what had been a decade of de facto radio racial segregation. Hip-hop, now dominated by gangsta rap descendants, is the best-selling music in the world.

"The economics of it were staggering. Just staggering," Heller says. If you were with Warner Bros., for example, and you sold 500,000 records, they might drop you from the label. The way we were doing it, if you sold 200,000 records you made a quarter million dollars. And you made it right there. We'd take the check to the bank, cash it and split it up on the corner."

Whether all of the checks were for the right amount would later become a subject of much debate and litigation, but for the time being N.W.A was riding down Main Street in the biggest parade any of them had ever imagined.

Consider the things that had to happen for "Straight Outta Compton" to become a hit record.

It required an economic catastrophe to overwhelm metropolitan Los Angeles, leaving African American neighborhoods in shambles, their residents in despair. It required a crack epidemic to then sweep through those same streets, offering more misery but also complicated opportunities that enriched people such as Eric Wright.

It required the invention of the VCR and the sudden, unforeseen decline of drive-in movie theaters, creating the space where new American bazaars--the swap meets--would rise. It required the existence of Macola Records, an old-school oddity hanging on in a new-school world, and the persistence of inner-city, word-of-mouth recommendations in an age of mass-media dominance. It apparently even required the existence of animated raisins lip-synching Marvin Gaye records.

TheFrogFather · 10-03-2006, 12:27 PM

This history is a crooked street, crowded with more happy accidents than are comfortable to contemplate. It begins to seem like fate. It begins to seem as if Puffy Combs might have underestimated Dr. Dre when he said, "Dre is to rap what God is to the church."

I Shot a Man in Reno

Here are sample lyrics from yet another song without redeeming social value:

"Early one morning while makin' the rounds,

I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my baby down

I shot her down then I went to bed,

I stuck that lovin' forty-four beneath my head."

The song continues with the protagonist chased and caught by police, then sent to prison. In the last verse, unrepentant to the end, he laments that he "can't forget the day I shot that bad bitch down." He regrets only getting caught.

Rap critics would be right in finding very little social uplift in this song, "Cocaine Blues," recorded by Roy Hogshead. Hogshead, however, was not a rap star. He didn't even have a nickname.

He recorded this song in 1947, and at least five versions of it have been made since. Johnny Cash sang it on his best-selling "Live at Folsom Prison" album in 1968. Nobody protested or even noticed.

Alan Light, founding editor of Vibe magazine, an influential hip-hop publication, says he asked Cash about the potential harmful effects of rap lyrics. Cash referred back to the Folsom Prison record, specifically to the title song, which includes the line, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." You know, Cash said, I don't recall ever hearing about anyone listening to that song, then going to Reno and shooting somebody.

Neither, as far as anyone knows, has anybody killed a police officer after hearing N.W.A's "F--- Tha Police." So why did the FBI send a letter to N.W.A? Alan Light contrasts the reception of rap music with that of other popular arts that sometimes celebrate violence. Some of the best movies ever made--the "Godfather" series, for example--are exceptionally violent, and no one attempts to ban them. Dre points this out when he compares "Straight Outta Compton" to "Pulp Fiction." His songs are dark comedies, he says; he wonders why people don't see that.

"The difference is the level of respect accorded not to the artists but to the audience," Light says. The audience for movies is presumed to know better, to distinguish fact from fiction. The hip-hop audience, presumably, cannot.

Maybe that's the key to understanding the feelings "Straight Outta Compton" aroused, the success it enjoyed and the effects it continues to have. Maybe it disguises its fictional base too well. It's too real. When N.W.A shouted at you, you were compelled to shout back. N.W.A was together in its most potent lineup for less than two years.

Cube, financially frustrated, left before the end of 1989 for a highly successful solo career. He has since become a screenwriter, actor and movie producer, a virtual corporation unto himself. The other four members put out two more N.W.A records, but to considerably less effect.

Dre split acrimoniously from Ruthless in 1992 to help form Death Row Records, where he recorded the second most influential hip-hop album ever, "The Chronic," which defined the sound of rap for a decade. He has discovered and produced two of the biggest individual stars in hip-hop history--Snoop Dogg and Eminem.

Ren and Yella have had more limited solo careers. Ren is still recording, while Yella has a pornographic movie production business. Eazy continued to run Ruthless and to record until his death from AIDS in 1995. There continues to be talk of a reunion, with Snoop taking Eazy's spot.

Whatever comes of that, N.W.A had more of an effect in less time than probably any figures in pop music history. It's as if Sinatra had become Sinatra by cutting a single record, as if Dylan quit before going electric. N.W.A incited a revolution that redefined hip-hop just as hip-hop was poised to overrun popular culture. As pop has increasingly become the culture that matters, hip-hop has reached deep into mainstream America.

It really was the beginning of the end of life as we knew it. The beginning of the end, it turned out, was accompanied not by heavenly choirs but a rhythm section.

This is not an idle point. Rhythm is a drug. Maybe, like medicine, it should never be consumed in combination with other dangerous substances.

Maybe that's what happened with "Straight Outta Compton." Maybe by combining deadly rhythm with taboo subjects--violence and sex and drugs--it gathered unprecedented strength. Maybe it was unstoppable; just too powerful, too forceful.

Maybe, in other words, it was just too damn good.

KevinGarnett · 11-22-2006, 06:01 PM

Tha Frogfather thanks for posting all this information on old school rappers. I didn't know all this stuff but you were wrong on a couple of things about Kurtis Blow and Whodini. Kurtis Blow wasn't in The Show movie. He was in Rhyme And Reason movie. Whodini's Six album wasn't a ep and it was their last album. That album sucked by the way LOL. I think Whodini's best album is Back In Black. I love that album. Funky Beat, One Love, Growing Up, I'm A Ho(this is the jam), Fugitive, Last Night I Had A Long Talk With Myself, The Good Part are my favorite songs on the album. Escape is their 2nd best album. The song they did with Terminator X called It All Comes Down To Money is tight. Only albums i've heard by Kurtis Blow is Ego Trip and America. Both of those albums suck. Ego Trip album has my favorite songs by him, AJ Scratch and Basketball. I'm glad Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five's The Message song got made. I didn't know that song almost didn't get made. That's a classic song. Which one was Cowboy in the group? I didn't know he died and i didn't know he used drugs.

Janitor · 12-07-2006, 07:12 PM

hmmmmmm

D_Y_O_Z · 12-28-2006, 04:04 PM

Flash would go into the Hevalo to check out Herc, but Herc would always embarrass him. He would call Flash out on the mike and then cut out all the highs and lows on the system and just play the midrange. Herc would say, "Flash in order to be a qualified disc jockey...you must have highs." Then he would crank up the highs and they would sizzle through the crowd. Then he would say, "And most of all, Flash, you must have...bass." And when Herc's bass came in the whole place would be shaking. Flash would get so embarrassed he would leave.

hahahahahahahahaha