![]() ![]() "Then you had calls and threats from Jerry Heller to Suge Knight, so it just was a mountain." "It was hard to get the financing that we needed, to license all the music we needed, to also get a studio behind the movie that wouldn't treat it like a typical hip-hop biopic," he says. Ice Cube, who is also one of the movie's producers, says getting Straight Outta Compton made was rough. The film also includes the group's musical beefs, their business dealings with manager Jerry Heller and menacing incidents involving former bodyguard Suge Knight, who co-founded Death Row Records with Dr. The movie includes vulnerable moments of brotherhood and friendship, and a moment during the 1992 LA riots depicting the truce between the Bloods and the Crips gangs. "We just wasn't five guys crying wolf or complaining about our little incidents with the officers, but that it was an epidemic and it was everywhere." "This song was bigger than N.W.A at that point - it was an anthem," Ice Cube says. ![]() "We always saw ourselves as street reporters," he told NPR, noting that "F** tha Police" continues to be used during protests against the police, from Los Angeles to Ferguson, Mo. Ice Cube, born O'Shea Jackson, was just 16 when he joined N.W.A to write what he called reality raps. And Charnas says their songs are still relevant today. The former writer for The Source magazine says N.W.A's diatribes against police brutality put West Coast rap on the map. "This kind of counter-cop resistance music existed before N.W.A, but N.W.A gave it its name," says Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. The song had earlier prompted the FBI to write an angry letter to N.W.A's label, Ruthless Records, which in turn used it to generate publicity. But what stands is an amazement, an electrifying piece of hip-hop history that speaks urgently to right now.One scene re-enacts a 1989 concert in Detroit as the band performs their song "F*** tha Police." The scene shows the cops descending onto the stage, inciting the audience to protest. Would the movie be better if it didn’t sidestep the band’s misogyny, gay-bashing and malicious infighting? No shit. Straight Outta Compton plays better when it’s outside the box, showing us N.W.A power and the consequences of abusing it. The band’s white manager, Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), instigates a rift that sends Cube on his own and Dre into an unholy alliance with Death Row Records founder Marion “Suge” Knight (a very scary R. But credit Gray for tracing the group’s rise and fall with dramatic vigor. The movie is never as potent as it is in that groundbreaking moment, when artists and audiences connect. But it’s Cube who puts N.W.A on the map with his incendiary “Fuck Tha Police.” The film’s righteous highlight is a Detroit concert where the cops threaten to jail the bandmates and shut the place down if they sing the rap that has demonized N.W.A to Middle America. and Aldis Hodge in lesser roles as DJ Yella and MC Ren, pack the vital spark of live performance. The recording sessions, featuring Neil Brown Jr. Oliver Anthony, Papa Roach, Shinedown Cover Lynyrd Skynyrd at Makeshift Acoustic Gig Assign any soft-pedaling to the fact that Dre and Cube, now media moguls, are among the film’s producers and that Gray directed Cube videos and his 1995 stoner comedy, Friday. Sex, drugs and the thug life figure prominently. Gary Gray, working from a script by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, doesn’t supply halos for his protagonists. The band didn’t invent gangsta rap, but N.W.A were sure as shit there in the delivery room, sparked by near-constant rousting from the LAPD. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DJ Yella and MC Ren - channeled their fury into the beats of N.W.A, short for Niggaz With Attitude. That’s where five black teens - known as Dr. Straight Outta Compton is epic, baby, an explosively entertaining hip-hop biopic that raps home truths about race and police brutality as timely now (think Ferguson) as they were during the 1980s in Compton, California. But not so much that you ever want to leave its danger zone. This movie burns so hot that it’s bound to run out of steam. ![]()
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