The law student in me immediately connected with the raw eloquence of the word work, the fittingly profane outcry against police brutality. They have the authority to kill a minority Blasting from the flung-open window of a dorm room, a fresh, profane, defiant new sound stopped me in my tracks: When I first heard N.W.A, it was a nippy, bomber-jacket kind of day in the Bay Area in 1988 I was walking down Bancroft Way in Berkeley after my constitutional law class at Boalt Hall.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete Proving nature’s laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feetįunny it seems, but by keeping its dreams
NWA STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON LYRICS MOVIE
Fellow artist Chuck D of Public Enemy, who appeared on Cube’s first solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, once described rap as “the black CNN.” Straight Outta Compton tells the story of how N.W.A’s talent penetrated pop culture with bold new rhymes and beats that described the social reality of young black men stuck in an over-policed neighborhood and trapped in over-policed bodies - all in the heyday, and at the geographical epicenter, of the crack plague.īut on a grander scale, Straight Outta Compton is about how great art can grow out of great social oppression - or, to put it in the words of another iconic “gangsta” rapper who appears in the movie, Tupac Shakur, this movie is about roses that grew from a crack in the concrete:ĭid you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? The notion of rap as a political lens through which to view the otherwise invisible world of the hood - invisible, at least, to white America - is at the heart of what this film is all about. “I’m a journalist reporting what’s going on in the hood,” Ice Cube says at one point in the film. Straight Outta Compton celebrates one of the most dynamic creative periods of these: a movie about how a group of young black men crafted a bold new language to describe the death, danger, poverty, and brutality into which they were born, and from which few escape. THERE ARE FOUR OCCUPATIONS in America whose bread and butter is word work: writers, poets, lawyers, and rappers. Public Enemy, “Nighttrain,” Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black
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