This is an excerpt from The Pitchfork Review Issue Five, which is available now through the magazine's website and select retailers. Get your subscription here. Illustration by Meaghan Garvey
"Express Yourself" was N.W.A’s obvious shot at radio airplay. There was no cursing in the verses to censor, and rhythmic cacophony was replaced by a loop of the indelibly funky 1971 hit of the same name by Charles Wright and the 103rd St. Watts Band, a pinnacle of the era’s socially conscious soul music. Using the communicative capital inherited from the fiery rhetoric of the Black Power movement, N.W.A sought to use the relative optimism of "Express Yourself" to rend a hole in the firewall around mainstream media, allowing their otherwise dark vision of Compton life to seep through. "There’s a lotta brothers out there flakin’ and perpetratin’, but scared to kick reality," Dr. Dre plainly tells Ice Cube, framing the song’s message before the beat kicks in.
Reality. In 1988, that word—that concept of what is—was just beginning a seismic semantic split, blazing a new definitional pathway that signified not merely ontology but a new form of televisuality. A decade or so before "Survivor" and "Big Brother", and a few years before even "The Real World", reality congealed as a programming format to describe the proliferation of "true crime" telecasts after the runaway success of "COPS" and "America’s Most Wanted". In their representations of American law and order, these shows sided with state authority, working closely with and for American law enforcement to create inexpensive, incredibly popular entertainment programming for the fledgling Fox network, which had launched only two years earlier. They were cheap to produce for the same reasons that audiences flocked to them: "COPS"’ video-verite squad-car ridealongs captured rubberneckers and voyeurs, and "AMW"’s stylized crime recreations and audience-participation structure drew the amateur sleuths and do-gooders.
"Reality is often ironically difficult to capture because it is unstructured, unpredictable, and unscripted," "COPS" co-creator John Langley once said about his program. In his own way, he was implying why other producers and networks were, in a way, "scared to kick reality." Clearly, Dr. Dre wasn’t specifically talking about reality television on "Express Yourself", nor was Ice Cube when he sampled the KRS-One lyric "It’s not about a salary/ It’s all about reality" for Compton track "Gangsta Gangsta". But they were drawing from the same semantic well as Langley and the rest of Fox’s true-crime programming gurus. From opposite ends of the American-entertainment power spectrum, both "COPS" and N.W.A were depicting a vision of American law and order at the end of a decade marked by Ronald Reagan’s Draconian policies on poverty, drugs, and violent crime. To Reagan, such issues were not products of deep infrastructural problems, but social blights to eliminate, thereby improving conditions for the privileged. The metaphor was war, and it shaped television-programming decisions and rap productions alike.
With Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A instigated for rap’s ascent to pop-culture ubiquity a still-active thread of controversy about the connection between rap lyrics and the lived realities of urban black citizens. Before N.W.A, threats of violence on the mic were metaphors for skills on the mic. After N.W.A, the controversies surrounding rap started falling in two camps, as rappers struggled to negotiate the pressures and expectations of a rapidly maturing form of pop music. There were concerns of origin (the authenticity debate—are they "real"?) and of the music’s perceived effects (the morality debate about rappers as terrible role models). But what if rap lyrics, musical production, and promotional imagery weren’t bifurcated along these lines? What if the gangsta rap that N.W.A pioneered wasn’t filtered through authenticity or morality, but through an entertainment format known as reality?
They had a lot of raw material to work with. The bounds of televisual objectivity were being stretched beyond recognition in the late 1980s—lines between public-interest reportage and simple tabloid shock were being blurred. N.W.A came up during the "Donahue" and "Geraldo" moment, which—in the wake of "The Morton Downey Jr. Show"’s 1987 to '89 run—reimagined public-affairs talk-show programming as an incendiary cocktail of racial and class tensions. (On 1992’s The Predator, Ice Cube would chop up Louis Farrakhan’s notorious "Donohue" appearance into an interstitial bit of media commentary.) At the same time, VHS and Hi-8 Handycam camcorders proliferated like Polaroid cameras had a generation before, transforming private activities into network-television entertainment. ("America’s Funniest Home Videos" debuted in November 1989.) More importantly for black citizens’ interactions with police, camcorders promised to democratize surveillance, and could transform awareness of unseen abuses of power. Ideally, cheap video cameras might objectively prove the reality "Fuck tha Police" poetically raged against.
Through Straight Outta Compton, gangsta rap was nurtured in a city with a notorious history of de jure segregation, patches of peaceful suburban living, and a lengthy, dismal post-industrial employment drought that, for some, made crack and crime lucrative employment options. In his 1990 book City of Quartz, Mike Davis dubbed LA "the carcereal city," in which surveillance of the ethnic underclasses was built into the architecture and city-planning and patrolled by a militaristic police force seeking to maintain peace for the middle and upper-classes. Gangsta rap also came of age in the shadow of Hollywood, the world’s largest and most powerful creator of myths. This combination of factors underlines the difference between N.W.A’s hard-rap predecessors and Straight Outta Compton. Reality, that emergent mixture of objective reportage and tabloid shock, perfectly complemented N.W.A.’s dark, violent impression of their part of the world—one that was ignored by the mass media, but constantly surveilled by the police.
No matter their middle-class upbringings and celebrity aspirations—only Eazy had banged to any meaningful degree, via a loose affiliation with the Kelly Park Crips—the fact remained that N.W.A. grew up amidst a war between people who looked like them and police who didn’t, provided the creative fuel for their gangsta performance—observation plus confrontation. As Dan Charnas recounts in his book The Big Payback, "they had all grown up around gangs and guns—in South Central, that was reality." So when the group’s early mentor Lonzo Williams ran into Dre and Eazy buying guns at L.A.’s Carson Mall, he was shocked, and asked them what was going on. Their response was plain: they were going on their first tour. "Dre, Eazy, and Cube were turning that reality into theater, and now that theater was becoming real, too," Charnas explains. "Of course they were buying guns. Everywhere they went now, real gangsters were trying to test them." Their manager Jerry Heller wrote the purchases off as a business expense—to the IRS, they were "stage props."
For many observers, this ontological cocktail—part documentary, part Alice Cooper—made no sense. In a 1990 feature for the Source, rap journalist David Mills claimed that N.W.A’s shock tactics eradicated their claims to represent "the strength of street knowledge." That’s true, though only if rap is viewed through the journalistic convention of objectivity. By freely mixing hard-’hood realities with creative, cocksure fictions traceable back to the blues, N.W.A took rap through the same reality looking-glass that "COPS" and "America’s Most Wanted" were doing for TV’s primarily white audiences seeking a fresh view of American law and order. For N.W.A and the early solo careers of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, reality gave them a chance to symbolically stand behind the lens of the camera and rifle scope, instead of serving as their targets.