Straight Outta Compton: Компатондық гангста рэп революциясы

1988 studio album by N. W. A

Straight Outta Compton is the debut studio album by American gangsta rap group N. W. A, which, led by Eazy E, formed in Los Angeles County's City of Compton in early 1987. along with Ruthless rapper The D. O. C. Not merely depicting Compton's street violence, the lyrics repeatedly threaten to lead it by attacking peers and even police. The track "Fuck tha Police" drew an FBI agent's warning letter, which aided N. W. A's notoriety, with N. W. A calling itself "the world's most dangerous group." In July 1989, despite its scarce radio play beyond the Los Angeles area, Straight Outta Compton received gangsta rap's first platinum certification, one million copies sold by then. Receiving media spotlight, N. W. A's example triggered the rap genre's movement toward hardcore, gangsta rap. Remastered, the album's September 2000 reissue gained four bonus tracks. Nearing the album's 20th anniversary, another extended version of it arrived in December 2007. In 2015, after an album reissue on red cassettes, theater release of the biographical film Straight Outta Compton reinvigorated sales of the album, which by year's end was certified 3x Multi Platinum.

For most of the 1980s, New York City, the birthplace of hip hop, remained the rap genre's dominant scene. Los Angeles County was secondary. Until 1988, the Los Angeles hip hop scene, retaining more of hip hop's dance and party origin, prioritized DJs and DJ crews as the central players in hip hop; the prevailing style at the time was electro rap and "funk hop", similar to the New York based 1982 hit "Planet Rock". Ice T released the track "6 in the Mornin'" in 1986. This song began to pull the Los Angeles scene's attention away from electro rap; it reached gold sales and inaugurated a new rap subgenre, later called "gangsta rap". Wright recruited the South Central Los Angeles based rapper Ice Cube, then a member of rap group C. I. A., as a ghostwriter, and instructed him to collaborate with Dr. Dre and write a song for the label. The resulting track was "Boyz n the Hood". This song was originally intended to be performed by a New York based group who were signed to Ruthless Records; however, after that group rejected the song, Wright adopted the stage name Eazy E and performed the rapping himself. N. W. A further strove to secure radio play by supplying radio edits of their music to local stations such as KDAY. As rap fans, even from afar, sought more from Compton and South Central, The Los Angeles rap scene rapidly moved from party rap to hardcore rap. The controversy served to further bolster N. W. A's anti establishment image, and so the rappers would highlight it themselves in later tracks. Slant Magazine describes Straight Outta Compton as laying the foundation for the East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry, referring to the album as "the West Coast firing on New York's Fort Sumter in what would become '90s culture's biggest Uncivil War." Initially, still spending weekends in jail over traffic violations, Dre was reluctant to do "Fuck tha Police", a reluctance that dissolved once that sentence concluded.

N. W. A's Ice Cube and MC Ren along with Ruthless Records rapper The D. O. C. wrote the lyrics, including those rapped by Eazy E and by Dr. Dre. Newsweek wrote, "Hinting at gang roots, and selling themselves on those hints, they project a gangster mystique that pays no attention to where criminality begins and marketing lets off." Even when depicting severe and unprovoked violence, the rappers cite their own stage names as its very perpetrators. By their sheer force, the album's opening three tracks—"Straight Outta Compton", "Fuck tha Police", and "Gangsta Gangsta"—signature songs setting N. W. A's platform, says AllMusic album reviewer Steve Huey, "threaten to dwarf everything that follows". "Express Yourself", written by Cube and rapped by Dre, incidentally scorns weed smoking—already proclaimed by Cube in "Gangsta Gangsta" as his own, chronic practice—which allegedly causes brain damage, a threat to the song's optimistic agenda, liberal individuality. "I Ain't tha 1" scorns spending money on women. "Dopeman" depicts the crack epidemic's aftermath. Closing the album, "Something 2 Dance 2" is upbeat. Still, the year before, Bud Norman, reviewing in the Wichita Eagle Beacon, assesses that on Straight Outta Compton, "they don't make it sound like much fun". In Norman's view, "They describe it with the same nonjudgmental resignation that a Kansan might use about a tornado."

N. W. A's best selling album, Straight Outta Compton, released in August 1988, attained gold certification, half a million copies sold, on April 13, 1989. Meanwhile, the album peaked at number 9 on Billboards Top R&B/Hip Hop Albums chart, and on April 15, 1989, at number 37 on the Billboard 200, which ranks the week's most popular albums. On July 18, 1989, the album was certified platinum, one million copies sold. The group's 100 Miles and Runnin' EP, which took two years to produce and was released in August 1990, went platinum in September 1992. That year, on March 27, Straight Outta Compton was certified double platinum, two million copies sold. N. W. A's next and final full length album, Efil4zaggin or Niggaz4Life, released in late May 1991, went platinum just over two months later, in August 1991, yet in 2020 remains platinum, whereas on November 11, 2015, Straight Outta Compton was certified triple platinum, three million copies sold. The next week, it rose to number 97, another week later reached number 30 Meanwhile, the album's title track, entering the popular songs chart, the Billboard Hot 100, becoming N. W. A's first song in the Top 40, spent two weeks at number 38.

In 2004, the DigitaArts list 25 Best Albums Covers included Straight Outta Compton. By the album's release, Arabian Prince, on the cover, had left N. W. A. Lacking him, an iconic group photo taken by Ithaka Darin Pappas on November 11, 1988, at Pappa's studio apartment in Los Angeles' Miracle Mile district, has been repeatedly republished in media, including The Source May 1989 cover, captioning, "California Rap Hits Nationwide!" Pappas calls it the "Miracle Mile Shot", the DVD cover of the 2015 documentary Kings Of Compton, in France's Musée d'art contemporain de Marseille from 2017 to 2018, and a backdrop at N. W. A's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2016 in Brooklyn, New York. Sinéad O'Connor, then herself controversial, appraised in 1990 that "It's definitely the best rap record I've ever heard". But, feeling that he had rushed its production, N. W. A's own Dr. Dre, in a 1993 interview, remarked, "To this day, I can't stand that album. I threw that thing together in six weeks so we could have something to sell out of the trunk.” Additionally, he said, “Back then, I thought the choruses were supposed to just be me scratching.” In 2015, the biopic Straight Outta Compton was a hit film.