![]() Playing upon stereotypes dating back to blackface minstrelsy, they tapped into a centuries-old American appetite for racialized entertainment. Over Dr Dre’s booming beats and sampled sounds of automatic gunfire, Ice Cube, MC Ren and Eazy-E rapped about their sexual prowess and penchant for violence. Taking a life or two, that’s what the hell I do / You don’t like how I’m living? Well, fuck you! Under the guidance of Eazy-E, NWA commodified a more sinister version of the Los Angeles story, crafting a new brand of hardcore rap that moved from third-person descriptions of street life to first-person portrayals of the gangstas themselves.Ĭompare earlier recordings like Eazy-E’s Boyz-n-the-Hood – which describes the arrest, trial and failed escape of a fictional drug dealer named Kilo-G – to NWA’s Gangsta Gangsta, in which Ice Cube actually assumes the role of an unrepentant criminal, proclaiming: ![]() Selling the hoodįor decades, real estate boosters have packaged the Southern California good life, using images of sunshine and palm trees to entice millions of Americans to relocate to the West Coast. The genius of the group’s approach – masterminded by member Eric “Eazy-E” Wright – was the way it manufactured a narrative of Compton as a rough, unpredictable place, while placing it at the center of NWA’s identity. And in a deeper sense, NWA’s brand of rap music was always a cinematic blend of reality and fiction: a blaxploitation film with beats.
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