In the late eighties, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, D.J. Yella, and M.C. Ren, owned the West Coast rap scene. N.W.A went from an idea in manager Jerry Heller’s head to national sensation over the course of about a year after the sixties rock svengali combined Cube’s C.I.A. and Dre’s World Class Wreckin’ Cru into the angriest outfit in an increasingly angry city. What happened next now seems rote, but was unprecedented at the time: N.W.A. got a reputation, learned to trade on it, and reached an audience ready to hear Cube testify in a hip-hop court of law. When Cube’s testimony touched on his neighborhood’s uneasy relationship with law enforcement, crowds and officers went wild.
“Straight Outta Compton,” the bio-bio-bio-bio-biopic due out this August tells the story of how an attitude went national and how five young man handled their sudden stardom. If the trailer is any indication, there will be a lot of girls and a lot of guns. There will also be a message – one that LA’s boys in blue might not want to hear.
