CHAPTER 3 The Boys in the Hood Are Always Hard
. In the early years of Los Angeles rap music, all roads led to Hollywood. There, on Santa Monica Boulevard just south of the historic Hollywood Palladium, a small record-pressing facility minted local stars. Through the mid-1980s, the hydraulic vinyl stampers at the Macola Record Company hummed and hissed daily, producing boxes of records for anyone with a master tape and a stack of cash. Amid the acetates, vinyl pellets, and cardboard, independent labels were born, too, most of them founded by the young entrepreneurs that ruled LA’s mobile DJ party scene and were the plant’s best customers. By providing support for record-publishing rookies and, more importantly, the capital equipment for manufacturing a product quickly and economically, Macola became, as Billboard christened it in 1986, a “major force on the independent music scene.” For young black talents in Los Angeles, in particular, the Macola Record Company offered a vital back channel into an otherwise impervious music industry.1
Macola opened in 1983, the brainchild of industry veteran Don Macmillan, a Canadian immigrant who had spent over twenty years manufacturing blues, jazz, and pop music at LA’s Cadet Records, a large custom presser and supplier on the corner of West Slauson and Normandie Avenues, within reach of the dozens of large record companies, labels, and music distributors housed in the region. Southern California was home to, among others, Mercury, MCA, Warner Brothers, A&M Records, Arista, Atlantic, Blue Note, Capitol, Columbia, Epic, and SOLAR. In the early 1980s, the Southland was the place for pathbreakers and chart-toppers like New Edition, Teena Marie, The Kinks, Whodini, Midnight Star, Klymaxx, Diana Ross, The Police, Prince, Thompson Twins, Janet Jackson, and Michael Jackson. This, plus proximity to the most productive film and television studios in the world, made Los Angeles a globally renowned recording mecca. Tracing the long history of LA’s dominance in the music business, a long-time industry insider wrote in an 1980 issue of Billboard about the cluster of complementary elements that grew up side by side there. By the 1940s, he explained “the combination of sunshine, movies, radio, a booming nightclub business and a thriving record industry was too much to resist” and performers as well as music industry professionals flocked to the city.2 It was an ecosystem in which a company focused wholly on record pressing could thrive.
When Cadet Records became mired in a counterfeiting investigation and subject to police raids in 1981 and 1982, Macmillan took the company’s turmoil as his cue to leave.3 He headed north to Hollywood, setting up his own small pressing shop. Even if he could not compete with the large-volume manufacturers who were “operating the scoreboard”—including Rainbo Records with its thirty-thousand-square-foot plant, and his former employer, Cadet—Macmillan trusted that the region’s frenetic entertainment culture created enough work to sustain another upstart business. Like many other entrepreneurial ventures in LA, Macola was established to cater not to those at the center of the commercial industry but to players on the periphery.4
Greg Broussard, the young DJ who would gain renown as “Egyptian Lover,” helped Don Macmillan realize his company’s potential. Before connecting with Macola, he had been mixing, dubbing, and selling homemade rap tapes to kids around the way. Egyptian Lover’s association with the unrivaled Uncle Jamm’s Army mobile dances helped him market and distribute his cassettes throughout LA, earning him local celebrity status and, in 1983, a prominent role in filmmaker Topper Carew’s documentary Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin’.5 With the money he earned from performing and selling tapes, Lover bought a Roland TR-808 drum machine—a digital device preferred by his favorite electro artists and a tool he considered vital for engineering original music. By the fall, he had recorded two tracks, “Dial-A-Freak” and “Egypt, Egypt,” each inspired by Kraftwerk melodies, Cybotron bass lines, and the eroticism of artists like Prince, and each crafted for the Uncle Jamm’s Army party faithful.6 Betting on his own renown—the chorus of “Egypt, Egypt” was a looped self-reference—Lover took the tracks to KDAY radio. Music programmer Greg Mack, who respected the popularity of Uncle Jamm’s Army and its DJs among the station’s young listeners, put both songs in heavy rotation.7
To convert radio requests into revenue, Lover went to Macola. He knew he wanted his music on pressed vinyl to spin at gigs, to put into the hands of other DJs, and to hawk locally in the same way he had sold dubbed cassettes. At Don Macmillan’s shop, the only pressing facility that accepted short-run jobs, he could get five hundred copies for $1,000. At that price, Lover was able to print units as needed, selling out his stock and then returning with cash profits to order more. Once he was confident in the music’s appeal, he asked Macmillan about a distribution deal. Like other, older music industry veterans, Macmillan was skeptical about the viability of post-disco trends, including rap and electro. But he agreed to bolster Lover’s exposure by sending extra copies of the records to the retail stores and radio programmers he knew outside of Los Angeles, including Jem Records in Grand Prairie, Texas, Stan “The Record Man” Lewis in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Select-O-Hits in Memphis, Tennessee.8 Egyptian Lover presented Macmillan—a veteran manufacturer but a novice distributor—with a promising opportunity to leverage his professional connections, expand the business, and grow Macola from a manufacturing plant into a pressing and distribution service. By 1985, “Egypt, Egypt” had sold nearly half a million units nationally, and Macola had earned its place as the foremost pressing and distribution vendor to LA rap artists.9
Key to Macola’s success was Don Macmillan’s decision to focus on the artists’ need to get their work on vinyl and into retail outlets. As his partnership with Egyptian Lover showed, he did not have to build and then staff up his own marketing department. Many of the young performers who sought his pressing services understood quite well the art of promotion and could find their own ways to drum up demand. Nevertheless, to support his young, unsigned clients’ efforts, Macmillan provided onsite space for them to form their own labels, design their own promotional materials, book gigs, and recruit and manage other talent. Artists covered label costs themselves and operated with full autonomy under Macola’s roof.
Most of Macola’s early customers had already, like Lover, built local followings with dubbed cassettes sold from shoeboxes and car trunks. They were plugged into LA’s flourishing mobile dance circuit, where partygoers often became repeat customers and even partners in promotion. Artists who patronized Macola in its first years, including the Uncle Jamm’s Army DJs, the LA Dream Team, Lonzo’s World Class Wreckin’ Cru, and the Arabian Prince, were thus already well positioned for small-market success. Macmillan recognized that, for some of his customers, manufacturing was enough: “These kids from Compton were having records pressed and selling five thousand to ten thousand units just among themselves and by word of mouth.”10
For much of the 1980s, affordable access to vinyl pressing machinery, a vital part of the music business infrastructure, kept South Los Angeles artists streaming through the doors of the Macola Record Company. Unlike the industry’s producers and distributors, the company did not choose projects based on artistic considerations or sales forecasts; it simply sold manufacturing services in simple buyer-seller transactions. Artists paid money for stacks of saleable product. For aspiring rap acts who had no entree to LA’s record producers—which was the norm, given that when it came to hip-hop the industry tended to dismiss anything produced outside New York—Macola offered a route to wholesalers, retailers, and radio airtime, and at least some pathway to achieving broad, national exposure. As Egyptian Lover later reflected, Macola gave him the means to develop Egyptian Empire Records, to be his own boss, and to become a celebrity, all by the age of twenty.11
In a town that had become the global epicenter for the music industry, the Macola Record Company was a beacon of hope for artists from the ’hood. Until 1987, it was the only record-making business with an open-door policy, welcoming all comers, connecting aspiring artists, regardless of their experience or polish or the content of their art, to the means of music production. Don Macmillan was a short-run presser willing to partner with local DJs and rappers on national distribution deals, providing them with a platform for attracting major label attention and, thus, more lucrative opportunities. At the same time, crucially, young black artists doing business with Macola retained ownership of their master recordings and full creative control over their music and their images.12
Macmillan’s operation was well suited to young Eric Wright, a Los Angeles drug dealer seeking a more lawful, sustainable line of work. Wright was raised in a blue-collar household in a once segregated, lily-white eastern corner of Compton, an unincorporated city in LA County that was, according to a reporter from the era, awash in “polite bungalows fronted by porches and lawns” and comfortably removed from the “boarded-up businesses, disheveled lots, soiled fast-food joints and two-bit stores” further to the north.13 Wright’s parents, one a Montessori schoolteacher and the other a postal worker, labored to insulate their son from trouble. But it found him. He dropped out of Manuel Dominquez High, a school that was, at the time, fighting a losing battle to keep drugs and violence off its campus.14 Free of school, Wright sold marijuana then partnered with a cousin to move rock cocaine, a business that netted him a small fortune. But by 1984, Wright had lost his cousin to gun violence. Heir to tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine at a moment of spiking demand for the drug, Eric was unnerved by the shooting, and increasingly anxious about the threat of incarceration and retribution. He had had enough of ducking police and dreading enemies. About the stress he said, “I figured I could do something else or I end up dead myself or in jail.”15
After ruling out a career with the post office, Eric Wright plotted a path into music sales. His muse was a Japanese-American record vendor who held court at the Roadium Open Air Market, a popular swap meet inside a North Torrance drive-in theater. Tucked inside the maze of 430 wooden booths filled with antiques, used books, oil paintings, clothing, televisions and stereos, mattresses, and Ayatollah dartboards, Steve Yano’s stall was a Shangri-la for young music fans.16 Each weekend, Yano and his wife Susan blanketed the twenty-foot-wide wall of their rented space with album covers. They filled shelves with rows of cassette tapes—some homemade and hand-labeled—and loaded folding tables with dozens of milk crates stuffed with more vinyl LPs, singles, and EPs (Fig. 3.1).17 Over a couple of loudspeakers, Yano played samples from his highly eclectic inventory, collected from garage sales, thrift stores, pawnshops, local DJs, and small record distributors like Macola. He attracted customers from Hawthorne, Gardena, Carson, Compton, Crenshaw, and South Central Los Angeles, many of them local DJs who spent hours hunched over the crates, fingering through records, listening to Yano’s selections, and purchasing the tracks that elicited the most enthusiastic responses from the swap-meet crowds. “If it was good,” Yano recalled, “kids would start to break dance right there in the stall.” By 1984, LA’s major labels were jockeying for his attention, hoping “the uncrowned king of a swap meet music underground” would stock their latest releases. Yano became, as he remembered, “for a while a very important guy” who regularly convened with promoters and distributers after hours, often arranging late-night meetings in parking lots to exchange cash for wholesale product. “It was like we were dealing drugs.”18
Fig 3.1 Customers sift through records in Steve Yano’s booth at the Roadium Open Air Market. Courtesy of Susan Yano.
Eric Wright viewed Steve Yano as a model of free enterprise—a self-made businessman who enjoyed flexible work hours, financial independence, workplace autonomy, and local notoriety. In a Reagan-era economy sharply divided between lucrative, white-collar careers for those with college degrees and connections, and low-wage service jobs that provided little in the way of dignity and opportunity for advancement, Eric Wright had first taken a dangerous, alternative path: the dope game. But Yano revealed to him yet another aboveboard option for making ends meet—and one built around music, no less. Even allowing for some parking-lot meetings and off-the-books transactions, record vending was a legitimate trade, and Eric Wright wanted in. “Don’t do it. It’s a bad business,” Steve Yano told him, thinking of the slim profit margins as well as all the crate-hauling. Yano, who had dropped out of a psychology program at CSU Los Angeles to build his mobile sales business, warned Wright against making the leap. “I can show you how, but don’t do it.”19
The hard truth about Yano’s business, in fact, echoed the disappointment Wright had experienced during his short stint as a party promoter. Spurred by the successes of South LA’s mobile DJ luminaries, like Rodger Clayton and Alonzo Williams, Wright had attempted to form his own mobile dance business in Compton. He rented small event spaces around the city and hired his friend Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, a local DJ with a record collection and a Numark DM-1550 mixer.20 Backyard barbecues and house parties kept the duo busy, but Wright ultimately concluded about event management, as he did about record retailing, that it did not offer any sure route to riches. Still, both experiences gave Wright precious insight into the workings of South LA’s enterprising black youth music culture. With greater knowledge of the various institutions involved, he homed in on the independent record labels on display at the Roadium, and the Macola Record Company favored by the region’s most influential DJs.21
“He wanted to run his own label,” O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson remembered.22 Lacking recording experience and naive to the ways of the industry, Wright tapped the knowledge of others in his circle. Repeat visits to Steve Yano’s record stall exposed him to a slew of Los Angeles-based record labels owned and run by black entrepreneurs, including Egyptian Empire Records, Fresh Beat, Dream Team, Party Crew, and Kru-Cut Records, all of them using the Macola Record Company for manufacturing and distribution. His old friend Dr. Dre had experience and connections to share, mainly from working with Alonzo “Grand Master Lonzo” Williams. Dre had earned a recurring DJ gig at Lonzo’s nightclub, Eve After Dark, and then an invitation to join World Class Wreckin’ Cru, the electro-rap ensemble Lonzo had pulled together to make music for Kru-Cut, his own label. Wright asked Dre to set up an introduction. As Lonzo remembered, the five-foot-five Compton kid who made a habit of keeping rolls of cash stuffed in his white tube socks came to him with “a pile of money as big as [a] bowl” and a request to “put him into the game of how to make it happen.”23 The young man known around town as “Little Rat” was a quick study, and within months he had launched a record label called Ruthless.
Taking cues from Lonzo’s experience with Kru-Cut, Wright scouted Don Macmillan’s Macola offices in Hollywood as a potential home for Ruthless, and eagerly drafted a stable of artists he trusted to know “what the kids in Compton are feeling.” Wright went to familiar haunts to find talent, including the Southside Crips neighborhood he covered as a dope dealer.24 There he found Clarence Lars, a high schooler who spun records under the moniker “DJ Train,” and Lorenzo Patterson, a friend of Lars who flirted with the idea of gangbanging but instead made “little street tapes” under the name “Master Ren.”25
True to his label’s “ruthless” branding, Wright also poached Kru-Cut’s most gifted artist, Dr. Dre, the star of the label’s World Class Wreckin’ Cru. As a drive-time DJ on KDAY’s airwaves, Dre had become a celebrated tastemaker, outranking even the mobile DJ titans who had reigned in the early 1980s. With the Wreckin’ Cru, he had even managed to secure a major label deal at Epic, the home of Grammy Award–winning artist Michael Jackson. Nevertheless, Dre had been dissatisfied. A skilled audio engineer and an experienced disc jockey with an ear for “what people will like,” he wanted more creative control at Kru-Cut, and often fumed through recording sessions with his Wreckin’ Cru bandmates. Dr. Dre was an aspiring rap-music producer tired of crafting electro ballads and performing dance moves in medical scrubs. “I wanted to get up outta that shit,” he recalled. When Wright approached him about joining Ruthless, Dre accepted the offer.26
Asserting his own vision for Ruthless Records, Dr. Dre invited a fellow Kru-Cut artist to be the label’s songwriter. Ice Cube had a knack for crafting verses that were “totally street, totally dirty”—a standout skill that landed him gigs at Skateland USA, performing for Compton’s toughest audiences. With Dre playing instrumental versions of popular rap records, Cube rapped obscene parodies, including “Diane, Diane,” a pornographic take on UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne,” and “My Penis,” based on Run-DMC’s “My Adidas.” The duo also performed “Dopeman,” an explicit composition that Ice Cube wrote as a “kind of funny” tribute to the neighborhood rock dealer.27 His performances delighted Skateland’s discerning young partygoers, most of them clad in red, claiming gang sets, and “prepared to toss a bad act out.” Together, he and Dre discovered a formula that made them Skateland favorites.28
Kru-Cut, however, censored Ice Cube. By 1986, his group Stereo Crew had secured their own treasured deal with Epic Records. But Epic promptly dropped the trio after its bawdy single “She’s a Skag” flopped.29 Emancipated from big-label restraints, the group sought to reset, and Stereo Crew became Criminals In Action (CIA). But in renewed contract negotiations with Kru-Cut, Lonzo insisted that the trio embrace a softer image, do less of “the hardcore stuff,” and drop “Criminals” from its name. Cube agreed to clean up his rhymes and rename his group “Cru In Action,” but he did so grudgingly. At the label’s direction, he found himself whitewashing his music and his persona—most literally when Dre asked him to copy the “loud and screaming” style of the Beastie Boys, the all-white group that was New York’s latest rap sensation.30 Feeling “out of character” at Kru-Cut, he found he was unable to do what he did best: write authentic street tales for and about the homeboys from around the way.31 Dr. Dre knew Cube was unfulfilled at Kru-Cut and convinced the songwriter to join him at Ruthless.32
With the help of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, and the financial resources from his shadowy past, Eric Wright built a Los Angeles music business that encouraged its artists to be “as hardcore as you want to be.”33 By the end of 1986, the year Run-DMC waged its publicity war against LA’s “ghetto toughs” and “gangsters,” he founded Ruthless Records, a business rooted in the reality that those same toughs and gangsters were LA’s most loyal rap fans and the counterintuitive belief that their stories were marketable. As Ice Cube would say years later, Wright “made it okay for all artists to be themselves; you don’t have to put up all the front. You can be as hardcore as you want to be and still make money like the bubblegum pop stars—and be just as famous as the bubblegum pop artists, who have to put on a facade to be that.”34 Because Ruthless Records urged its artists to “be what you want to be, say what you want to say,” the label became a platform for artistic experimentation, honest storytelling, and youth rebellion. For the region’s so-called gangsters—kids in places like Compton, Long Beach, and South Central who collected mix tapes, filled dance clubs, and bought records—it set the standard for LA rap.
Fig 3.2 An early pressing of “The Boyz-N-The Hood,” manufactured at Macola Record Co. in Hollywood. The label of the twelve-inch single features the LA-inspired Ruthless logo created by Los Angeles artist Darryl “Lyrrad” Davis under Eric Wright’s direction. It also refers to “High Powered Productions,” the short-lived mobile DJ partnership between Wright and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young. After creating Ruthless, the two repurposed the name for production credits. From the author’s collection.
In the fall of 1987, KDAY’s music director Greg Mack got hold of a record by a new artist named “Eazy E”: “The Boyz-N-The Hood.” The twelve-inch single’s sleeve was imprinted with the Macola Record Company logo, like most locally pressed vinyl in the KDAY stacks. But the label visible through its circular cut-out was something altogether new. The red-and-black sticker featured a banner illustration by local flyer artist Darryl Davis signaling a hard-edged spirit. Flanked by a sketch of the Downtown LA skyline on the left and the iconic hilltop Hollywood sign on the right were the big, bold letters of “RUTHLESS,” drawn as if made of chrome, steel, and brick (Fig. 3.2).35
Eazy-E was Eric Wright himself and “The Boyz-N-The Hood” was the first track released by Ruthless Records. It deviated from many of the records popular with KDAY listeners at the time. Compared to the up-tempo electro rap that Macola continued to stamp out by the pallet-load through the mid-1980s, “Boyz” was minimalist, bass-heavy, and sluggish. Its lyrics, written by Ice Cube, were plot-driven narratives, in contrast to the loosely constructed rap braggadocio that characterized most hip-hop records at the time. “Boyz” chronicled a day in the life of a young LA street hustler; its verses, each more cinematic than the last, included a run-in with an ill-fated drug addict and a violent encounter with a girlfriend’s father. Eazy-E’s character watches as LA cops arrest two friends, and, later, inside a courtroom, witnesses a wild scene involving a judge, a defendant, and an Uzi-toting woman named “Suzy.” Ice Cube’s story unfolds, in Eazy-E’s squeaky timbre, as a lurid black comedy in which every reference to crime, vice, and violence further impresses on the listener that, as the chorus declares, “the boys in the hood are always hard.”36
From a production standpoint, “Boyz” was not entirely groundbreaking. In the context of the stylistic and even philosophical shifts going on in mid-1980s hip-hop, it was more a tribute to that metamorphosis. The record’s producer and engineer, Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, borrowed heavily from two sources: Russell Simmons’s Def Jam Recordings catalog, and the rhythms of Queens musician Larry Smith. The latter, as mentioned in Chapter 2, had pioneered the stripped-down, big-beat sound associated with early risk-takers Run-DMC and Whodini. Dre arranged the music for “Boyz” by peppering Smith’s thumping drum pattern in Whodini’s “I’m a Ho” with samples from Def Jam artists Original Concept, LL Cool J, and the Beastie Boys. The result was a composite of edgy records, each one its own rebellion against hip-hop’s Sugar Hill Records days and the genre’s old guard.
“Boyz” leaned on the work of a generation of artists and promoters—especially Russell Simmons—who, by cleaving hip-hop from its disco roots, saved the music from becoming obsolete. The goal was to grow the audience, particularly among young, black listeners, and that is what happened on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, music fans had favored, to varying degrees, funk, new wave, and electro over New York’s first recorded rap hits. Mobile DJs and their black audiences preferred, for instance, Prince, Zapp, Funkadelic, Yaz, and Kraftwerk to the repackaged disco that Sugar Hill Records marketed as hip-hop. The stripped-down, big-beat arrangements that Russell Simmons’s producer, Larry Smith, created for Run-DMC’s debut were a welcome departure from the sing-song rhymes and lavish melodies of the Sugarhill Gang—and they had another prized feature. With digital booms and claps that, just like the electric bass in early-1980s funk and electro, thumped aggressively, they were valued by a lowrider car culture in which car stereos were judged by how effectively they rattled trunks and turned heads.
Music critics classified this fresher iteration of hip-hop, exemplified by the production of Larry Smith and Rick Rubin, as “hardcore,” echoing the language used to describe contemporaneous developments in punk rock. But pinned to hip-hop, the label was also, often, a reference to hardcore lyrics. With a 1982 hit record called “The Message,” there was a dramatic shift in rap content. This bleak, cinematic tale from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, produced by Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill label, depicted the city as “a jungle sometimes,” filled with temptation and danger around every corner. The record was, compositionally, a standard, disco-inspired hip-hop track, but Melvin “Melle Mel” Glover’s verses were atypical in their explicit references to grim subjects: urban decay, poverty, and crime, “thugs, pimps, and pushers,” hostile “bill collectors” and vulnerable children. It was bold songwriting characterized by a kind of literary realism, which confounded the critics as much as it seduced hip-hop audiences, especially those who saw reflections of their own communities in the lyrics.
Rap artists after “The Message” did more than pick up the thread. They wove this new “street” aesthetic into the whole fabric of 1980s hip-hop. Los Angeles rapper Ice-T explained that he had his eyes opened to how LA style would depart from “the blueprint” laid out by New York rappers.37 Seeing how audiences responded to LA artists “making records totally street” was a revelation: “It blew my mind.” After that, he used “the whole West Coast player life” as both trope and tenor—a storytelling device and an attitude. Indeed, in the wake of Melle Mel’s chart-topping rhymes about black dreams deferred, a whole crop of hip-hop artists started creating what Ice-T called “reality rap,” telling stories of hard times and hardened characters. By 1983, hip-hop records leaned toward the noir, full of narration of the dangers lurking in cities. Over hardcore beats, they described crooks and suckers, gangsters and cops, and, a favorite topic after 1983, dope dealers slinging rock cocaine.
Harlem’s “Kurtis Blow” Walker took part in this shift. Following early successes with his 1979 “Christmas Rappin’” and 1980 “The Breaks,” he recorded “8 Million Stories” in 1984, a Billboard-charting single about “the mean streets and the ghetto culture.” With suspenseful piano riffs, a grinding electric guitar solo, and a guest appearance by Run-DMC, the track described dysfunction inside New York—“a crazy city, man.” Kurtis Blow recited his verses “without pity,” detailing the lives of losers, including a “fresh kid” turned “freebase jerk” who, in the end, “lost his car, his house, his kids, his wife” and “his life.”38 Run-DMC’s debut single, “It’s Like That,” the 1983 record that spurred the group’s commercial ascent, similarly employed the era’s message-rap rubric. Emcees Run and DMC traded verses about the strivings of working people whose “bills rise higher every day,” the spread of poverty and disillusion, wars abroad, and “street soldiers killing the elderly” back home. Nearly replicating “It’s Like That” in style and substance, Brooklyn-based Divine Sounds had a 1984 hit with “What People Do For Money,” an electro-inspired street parable about straying from the straight and narrow.39 By 1985, music journalist Nelson George was identifying this street realism as the genre’s main theme: “You can call it rap, hip hop or street, but it really is a way of hearing music—and partying hard—that expresses the experiences and attitudes of a great many inner city kids.”40
But street rap quickly advanced beyond biographical, cautionary tales; within just a few years of “The Message,” it was presenting unbridled outlaw anthems. It now celebrated inner-city heroes of every ilk, some of them based on actual people but most of them archetypes reflecting fantasies and aspirations. These were caricatures of Casanovas, Robin Hoods, braggarts, fly millionaires, and presidents. And there were gangsters, too. In 1985, Def Jam artist LL Cool J claimed the “hip-hop gangster” mantle. On the monster hit “I Can’t Live Without My Radio,” he flaunted street credentials—“My story is rough, my neighborhood is tough”—and claimed to be devastating both in bed and on the microphone—“Pullin’ all the girls, takin’ out MCs.” Like any outlaw worth his salt, the Queens rapper also fashioned himself as a menace to society—“Terrorizing my neighbors with the heavy bass / I keep the suckas in fear by the look on my face.”41 Bronx rapper KRS-One played the sinsemilla-puffing vigilante, shooting down a crack dealer and a pack of thieves in the Boogie Down Productions single “My 9mm Goes Bang.” Chuck D issued more warnings to “suckers,” hinted at homicide, and compared his artistry to an Uzi submachine gun in Public Enemy’s debut single “Miuzi Weighs a Ton.” In “I’m Fly,” Kool G. Rap rode around New York in a “Caddy Seville,” defying traffic laws, skirting cops, and giving “some money to the poor,” all while basking in his outrageous wealth—“my pockets resemble Manhattan Bank.” A teenage William “Rakim” Griffin emerged in 1986 on “Eric B. Is President,” paying tribute to DJ Eric B. while proclaiming himself as the best rapper alive.42
Thanks to this hip-hop reboot, the genre was at last gaining traction in commercial markets and growing its fan base. Reflecting on it later, however, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter said there was something “missing” from the street canon. The Brooklyn rapper wondered how it was that these characters in the music “were stepping through the broken glass and into the Caddy.” He was one of those real inner-city kids Nelson George alluded to, but there was little in hip-hop music that resonated with his own experiences and attitudes, growing up in a housing project where “crack was everywhere.” In Jay-Z’s world, selling dope just made sense if a family needed to pay bills or a kid wanted the privilege of wearing clean sneakers to school—but references to the illicit that were not cartoonishly allegorical were hard to find in early 1980s rap. The New York hip-hop vanguard offered up “hustler” characters as heroes and antiheroes, but, as Jay-Z noted, the music failed to humanize them.43
Outside the New York sphere, more authentically street-hardened voices were emerging, many of them aiming for something one music critic described as a “no-holds-barred” approach to revealing the “the grimier side” of life. In Northern California, East Oakland rapper Todd “Too $hort” Shaw amassed a local rap empire by recasting message raps and battle rhymes into “playboy” narratives crafted to resonate with the local pimps, players, and dope dealers who were his best customers. On his earliest independent records, including Don’t Stop Rappin’ and Players, $hort offered tributes to Oakland, the “City of Dope,” celebrating rather than decrying its reputation as the “Wild, Wild West”—a place where “the strong control the fake” and where one’s “game … controls the lane.” Too $hort offered autobiographical sketches about befriending “dealers and crooks,” and he bragged about the “gangsta waves” in his hair, his “gangsta ride” outside, and the “gangsta rap” he performed.44
Philadelphia rapper Jesse “Schoolly D” Weaver raised eyebrows in 1985 with a trio of similar hustler-inspired tracks, “Gangster Boogie,” “Gucci Time,” and “P.S.K.—What Does It Mean?” In “Gangster Boogie,” Schoolly D boasted of his “gangster lean” and battled “a sucker emcee” while working “on the corner, selling some weed.” Laced with expletives, “Gucci Time” had Schoolly D addressing the rhetorical question, “How the fuck didja get so cool, man.” But it was “P.S.K.” that truly tested the limits of what could be defined as hardcore. The explicit verses narrated a day in the life of a “homeboy” who takes pleasure in the art of “makin’ that cash money,” gets high with his girl on “some brew, some J, some coke,” and then, in the rap battle, pulls a gun on the “sucker-ass nigga tryin’ to sound like me.” Most provocative, however, was Schoolly D’s reference—in the very title of the song—to P.S.K., an acronym for the Park Side Killers, one of Philadelphia’s most feared black street gangs, and a group in which the rapper himself claimed to be active.45
According to Schoolly D, the commercial hip-hop music of the early 1980s featured too much theater and too little reality. “Those [New York] rappers like Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, they’re just playing a role that their producers … put together for them,” he complained to the Los Angeles Times in early 1987. “None of them are for real. They’re just spoiled little rich kids that know how to act, basically.” His indictment of so-called street rappers as fake—he even called them “corny”—added to Schoolly D’s own credibility. He was an independent artist working outside the boundaries of New York, still the sacrosanct dominion of hip hop, but unlike all its stars, he was “for real.”46
When Ice-T first heard Schoolly D’s “P.S.K.—What Does It Mean?,” he was spellbound by the thunderous bass and the emcee’s relaxed cadence. “It sounded like you were high, the way the beats were echoing,” Ice-T remembered, “and his whole delivery was so crazy.” It bore little resemblance to rap’s usual braggadocio, in part because it was so cinematic and because “nobody had dared make anything that violent yet.”47 For Ice-T, “P.S.K.” was also notable for how it represented an urban landscape governed by gangs. Schoolly D’s verses, in fact, sounded as if they had been pulled straight from rhymes Ice-T had penned about the Los Angeles Crips. Years before “P.S.K.,” Ice-T, a Crip affiliate, wrote from the perspective of an active gangbanger navigating his weekend, first from the seat of his lowrider car—“On the way to the party I was scrapin’ and hoppin’ / ’Cause I knew by the end of the night there was gonna be some poppin’”—and then in the thick of a developing street scene—“I just walked to the corner and listened to them talk / And on the first James Brown record I jumped up and did the Crip walk.”48
Steeped in the trendy, and largely white, downtown hip-hop club scene, Ice-T initially curated a rap persona to appeal to the West Coast Planet Rock crowds. “I was listenin’ to New York rap and attempting to rap about that particular type of shit,” he remembered. “It wasn’t me.”49 But in 1985, he was exposed to Schoolly D, foulmouthed and cool, and as provocative as the stars of the Blaxploitation films he consumed. In “P.S.K.” Ice-T found a rap style he liked and knew he could use as a vehicle for telling “that drama” he witnessed around his neighborhood. On his 1986 release “6 in the Mornin’” he did just that, taking inspiration from Schoolly D in the low-frequency 808 drums, the casual delivery, and the harrowing urban adventures. The result was a speaker-rattling track unlike anything Ice-T had recorded previously—a massive local hit about eluding the police and traversing through the streets of Los Angeles where “The Batterram’s rolling, rocks are a thing / Life has no meaning and money is king.”50
By 1987, the year Eazy-E’s “The Boyz-N-The Hood” debuted on KDAY in Los Angeles, rap music characterized as “street” had become commercially viable. A diverse league of young artists, to varying degrees, were channeling Melle Mel and testing the lyrical and musical boundaries of hip-hop. The platform for such experimentation was an expansive, national fan base, which included budding markets for street rap in the West. As the genre’s fandom ballooned in the mid-1980s, however, virtually all of those who reaped industry rewards—who picked up major label deals, who booked arena concert tours, and who earned entry into celebrity circles—remained moored to the Northeast.
Some, like Too $hort in Oakland, 2 Live Crew in Miami, and Ghetto Boys in Houston (later to be restyled as Geto Boys), chose to carve out space for themselves in hip-hop by focusing on local consumers. Others, like Ice-T in LA and Schoolly D in Philadelphia, took issue with New York’s monopoly and defied it by making music provocative enough to yank attention away from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island.51 Eric “Eazy-E” Wright and his partners at Ruthless Records managed to do both.
Conceptually, “The Boyz-N-The Hood” was as niche as Toddy Tee’s 1985 “Batterram” mixtape. Both were dreamt up for peers within the same predominantly black South Los Angeles youth dance scene, created by artists who performed within that circuit and were, thus, intimately familiar with its patrons and their tastes. Just as the celebrated “Batterram” tape was a product of Toddy Tee’s partnership with celebrated local DJ Mixmaster Spade, “Boyz” was an outgrowth of the famed Compton performances that made Dr. Dre and Ice Cube hometown stars. Toddy Tee borrowed the instrumentals of current New York hip-hop hits to create LA anthems. UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne” and Whodini’s 1984 hit “Freaks Come Out at Night” were remade as “Rockman, Rockman” and “The Clucks Come Out at Night,” tracks produced exclusively for West Coast ears. In that tradition, “Boyz” appropriated some of New York hip-hop’s most recognizable components, including Larry Smith’s bass-slapping production on Whodini’s “I’m a Ho” (the very song Whodini performed on the Long Beach Arena stage in 1986 when violence broke out). Like Toddy Tee, Dr. Dre pinpointed what it was that made the latest in street rap palatable in places like South Central, Inglewood, Compton, and Long Beach—and popular enough to surpass the electro-rap that had been the bedrock of LA black youth culture. New York rap served as a source of input to local music innovation and local kids’ entertainment.52
Also extending the lineage of Toddy Tee’s community-focused rhymes about rock houses and the LAPD’s battering ram, Ice Cube’s own verses for “Boyz” were written in the LA vernacular of drugs, classic cars, and police abuse, and engaged with topics relevant to the South Central songwriter, his friends, and the people he observed around him. So alien to out-of-towners were the references to, for instance, an “Alpine” (a type of car stereo system), “makin’ that GTA” (Grand Theft Auto), and “my 6–4” (1964 Chevrolet Impala) that when Dr. Dre sent the song to a New York group to record, they rejected it, under the assumption that no one would understand the lyrics.53 A mention of the “ Times front page” that referred to the Los Angeles Times and another to “the county jail,” regional shorthand for Los Angeles County’s oldest and most notorious correctional facility, were further clues to Southern California listeners that this was a track made for them.54
“Boyz” embodied the Ruthless Records project. The label was founded as a Los Angeles enterprise, staffed with LA talent, produced and marketed in LA, and meant to be representative of LA—a positioning signaled not only by its logo design but in its first release. “Boyz” was crafted to be a colloquial street-rap record, from Dr. Dre’s Alpine-rattling production, to Ice Cube’s use of local slang, to the familiar vocals of the hustler known around the way as both “Little Rat” and “Eazy-E.” The hope was that the record would generate buzz in South Los Angeles County, with a little help from KDAY, local DJs, and the region’s record distributors. Eazy-E’s methods for promoting the record reflected this expectation. The Compton kid who seemed to know everyone relied, pragmatically, on all his old community associations, from LA gangs to local record sellers. He passed out cassette tapes of “Boyz” to gang youth and other street VIPs who, in exchange for the free music, promised to drum up demand; he drove around LA County in Dr. Dre’s burgundy Suzuki Samurai hawking vinyl copies of “Boyz” stacked in the trunk; he parceled out freshly pressed twelve-inch records to music venders respected among local DJs; and he handed off a copy to LA’s most trusted trendsetter, Greg Mack.55
Although it took months, the promotional game plan worked. By the end of 1987, “The Boyz-N-The Hood” had captivated Ruthless Records’ target audiences in Southern California. For Steve Yano, the baron of the Roadium swap meet, just playing “Boyz” over the speakers in his stall turned the record into his best seller. KDAY’s music director, Greg Mack, witnessed a similar frenzy after he debuted the track on air. “Within 24 hours it was the most requested song,” he remembered. One of Mack’s DJs, Julio G, who was well-versed in both regional and national hip-hop styles, was impressed by every aspect of the record, especially how it ventured into taboo topics like drugs and gun violence: “Nobody was doing it like that.” It also seduced young black filmmaker John Singleton, an LA native who first heard “Boyz” as a student at the University of Southern California and later directed a film inspired by the track. Singleton was especially struck by the song’s references to a Los Angeles rarely depicted in popular culture, and by allusions to “stuff that we knew about on the block.” As an artist already committed to disrupting conventional, predominantly white, narratives about Los Angeles, Singleton was riveted to hear local black vernacular and the colorful language about car culture, street posturing, and LA law enforcement. “We loved it,” he remembered, “because it would give a voice to … where we’re from … what we’re about.”56
For all the energy funneled into local promotion for the “Boyz” record, few at Ruthless expected sustained success to come from it; they were not even sure, as Ice Cube said, that the group’s music would “see the light of day.”57 Cube and Dr. Dre savored the process of building the track. (Later, the group recalled laughing as Dre coached a reluctant and awkward Eazy-E through every rapped line.) Much as they enjoyed the camaraderie and a degree of creative latitude lacking in past projects, they figured any hype around their Ruthless Records work would be short-lived. Initially, Eazy-E was just as bearish in his predictions for “Boyz” and for his own rap career. He had hoped simply to parlay whatever attention the track garnered for his record company into a spotlight for the label’s other act, J.J. Fad, a female rap crew from Rialto, a small city in San Bernardino County.
By the end of the year, however, there were signs that “Boyz” had the potential to be more than a KDAY listener favorite or a springboard for another project. From Los Angeles, word about the Ruthless record began spreading via friend and family networks to other black music markets. In Houston, Cincinnati, Memphis, and other cities, small, independent shops rushed to stock the record. “As soon as we got ’em, we sold ’em,” Memphis record distributer Johnny Phillips later recalled. Eazy-E, as part of his efforts to build brand recognition for his label, arranged a meeting with one of Lonzo Williams’s Hollywood industry connections, talent manager Jerry Heller. Heller, who had worked with the Who, Marvin Gaye, and Black Sabbath, among others, listened to “Boyz” and came away convinced that it was “the most important song that I had heard in over twenty-five years.” It was an example of honest rebellion, with “no apologies, no excuses,” he said. To his middle-class, Jewish ears, it sounded like “just the straight undistilled street telling me things I had never heard before.”58 It was fresh evidence for Eazy-E that the future of Ruthless could be in gangster tales and car culture—a distinctly LA version of street rap.
Reaching audiences outside of California would, however, be a challenge. Three issues in particular threatened to stifle the success of LA hip-hop artists. First, within the New York dominated hip-hop industry, the Los Angeles rap music scene was still dismissed by most, scorned by some. In the early 1980s, a small cadre of rap’s youngest and most progressive go-getters, including New York promoter Russell Simmons, recognized the potential in LA’s sprawling mobile DJ dance scene for artist exposure. Ignored as an incubator for rap talent by even the most perceptive East Coast industry figures, Los Angeles was coveted by these rap pioneers for its cultural infrastructure. It was a place where New York hip-hop could sell, and where East Coast artists could become as celebrated as they were as local heroes in places like Queens and the Bronx. The most savvy players in the early 1980s saw the path to rap stardom leading right through Los Angeles, and that theory borne out by the success of Run-DMC.59
The brawling at Run-DMC’s 1986 Long Beach Arena concert seemed to threaten not only the trio’s career but the very existence of hip-hop as a commercially solvent music genre. Punk music had been forced to the margins of the industry, and in the wake of the Long Beach debacle some anticipated the same fate for rap—or worse. The Los Angeles Times put the question in a headline that summer: “Can Rap Survive the Gang War?” To protect record sales and appease moral crusaders, Run-DMC condemned the LA gangs they blamed—along with the police and press—for the concert violence. In doing so, the Queens-based trio inserted themselves into a gang crisis they did not understand, and ultimately ceded a region that had helped make them the reigning kings of hip-hop. Indignant that gang youths—many of them loyal rap fans—did not respect the arena as the performers’ turf, and quick to call for “sterner measures” to control them, Run-DMC and their handlers rejected Los Angeles as a barbarous town that did not reflect the hip-hop spirit. The Los Angeles rap music scene had earned a spotlight, just not yet for its talent.60
The Long Beach Arena spectacle produced sensationalized coverage of rap fan rioting. But by the end of 1986, the public fascination with black gang culture faded, and brief attempts at generating dialogue around LA’s festering problems—the county’s dispossession of poor black districts and the militarized policing of these communities being just two examples—gave way, once again, to a preference for La-La Land fantasies that emphasized the region’s idyllic weather, wealth, and whiteness. And, once again, LA rappers contended with an “authenticity problem.” The perpetual myth of Los Angeles as America’s promised land ran counter to local rap artists’ attempts to stake a claim within a genre of music predicated on hardship. Nelson George, the editor in charge of black music coverage at Billboard, noted in early 1988 that his fellow New Yorkers, even after all the hoopla around the Long Beach Arena riot, still “considered Los Angeles ‘too soft’ to be a factor in hip-hop.”61
While Los Angeles fans and industry veterans like Jerry Heller appreciated the provocative lyrics in “Boyz,” Los Angeles street rap was still a peculiar thing in the late 1980s. The concept seemed absurd to many who lived far from the area—and even to some inside LA. In the Reagan Era, hip-hop had become a national phenomenon but in the public imagination it was inextricably linked to the inner city, to hardship, and overwhelmingly to New York. By 1985, rap music had already reached the point of being venerated as the authentic poetry of the street. It was a product of housing projects, tenements, and subway systems. In the words of Black Beat editor Steve Ivory, “This kind of music, hard-edged and urban, breeds in close quarters.” An A&R executive at MCA cited “environment” as key; hip-hop artists, he noted, earned currency in the market for their lived experiences, and the more harrowing the better. In that regard, Ivory thought life in LA was too comfortable. “We’ve got ghettos and people starving,” he allowed, “but it’s still easier when you’ve got palm trees and good weather.” Many of LA’s rappers lived in neighborhoods canopied by both. Rudy Pardee of the LA Dream Team mused that his group’s roots in “sunny Southern California” might be why its output was “more musical, more up-tempo” than New York crowds preferred. Some people thought what LA produced was “hard-edged,” Ivory said, but it was “just limp compared to a guy in the Bronx with no water and it’s 30 below.62
The third disadvantage for budding LA rap enterprises like Ruthless Records was that most emerged just at the moment when radio had begun snubbing independent artists. As pop music journalist Patrick Goldstein reported in 1986, competition for advertising dollars and concerns about a federal probe into illegal pay-to-play programming decisions put radio on the defensive. The once-radical industry, Goldstein explained, had morphed into a model of “new conservatism.” Program directors nationwide tightened playlists and shied away from unknown, small-label artists. Like punk rock and heavy metal artists, hip-hop acts tended to record with independent labels, which meant fewer promotional resources and no built-in clout to influence the radio programmers who broke hits. “The bottom line,” one radio industry veteran explained, “is that the young groups are getting frozen out—no one wants to touch them.”63 In Los Angeles, young local artists had KDAY, a haven for independent black music in the Reagan Era. But outside of that market, radio exposure was elusive for most hip-hop artists.
The Ruthless team therefore had valid reasons to expect that “The Boyz-N-The Hood” would be little more than an exercise in conceptualizing and producing a song. Eazy-E had funded an experiment with few predictable outcomes beyond getting a professionally recorded track that he could stamp with the Ruthless Records brand, reproduce, and sell. But the Ruthless experiment generated something else: a provocation. Eazy-E’s original goal for Ruthless was not the incitement of broad public outrage or curiosity, but both proved critical to the label’s ability to surmount industry obstacles. And that ascendency was contingent upon the events framing the release of its debut rap record.
When 1987 came to a close, Los Angeles County officials tallied nearly four hundred gang-related deaths for the year. The news of this record number of homicides reminded Angelenos living in the region’s poorest districts that Southern California, along with its “palm trees and good weather,” played host to the most dangerous street gangs in the country. The statistic also helped municipal leaders in the city of Los Angeles and Compton secure funding for gang suppression and anti-drug campaigns, and fueled support for increases in spending on state corrections, including the expansion of California’s prisons, at a time when the state had less to spend.64
Outside of LA’s south side, however, the number did little to arouse public concern. The crisis, as observed by those immersed in it, was contained within the county’s predominantly black and Latino districts. White locals and most municipal leaders—particularly those representing more affluent communities west of the Harbor Freeway—could regard LA street gangs as deplorable yet tucked away, out of sight, buffered from the rest of the region by socioeconomic and racial boundaries. As a young man coming of age in South Central, Ice Cube was keenly aware of the public indifference. “Our friends get killed,” he once told Spin, but through much of the 1980s, “nothing was said about that.”65
Karen Toshima’s death altered the narrative about LA’s gangs. The Japanese-American woman was shot on January 30, 1988, while strolling after dinner in the Westwood Village. Time magazine has described this posh business district near UCLA as a “glittering enclave of restaurants, shops and theaters.”66 It is a predominantly white and affluent neighborhood bordered by the whiter and richer neighborhoods of Bel Air and Beverly Hills—but that night, two black youths, members of warring sets of the LA Crips, fired at one another across the busting Village sidewalks. That there would be a bystander shooting death in Los Angeles was not unusual, but the particular setting of this one was. It became a bombshell story overnight, with cable news reporters recounting the story of a brilliant and admirable young woman out celebrating her achievements, and the lurid details of Toshima’s final moments. Among the national print headlines were “Gang Violence Shocks Los Angeles” and “The Price of Life in Los Angeles.” Even the London paper The Times proclaimed “Gangs Invade Yuppie Haven.” Feature stories like “Violence in Los Angeles” revealed a sudden sense of vulnerability among those Angelenos who, until that January night, had been comfortably insulated from the region’s brewing troubles. A racially-charged narrative emerged about a city under siege, where, thanks to weak law enforcement and the failures of local leaders to address the root causes of juvenile crime, the invisible boundaries that separated havens of white, middle-class life from poorer neighborhoods had been breached by black teens armed with pistols.67 Within weeks of Toshima’s death, 1988 had been branded “The Year of the Gang,” and Los Angeles was deemed the fountainhead of the crisis.68 As Ice Cube remembered, a “girl got killed in Westwood, a white neighborhood” and white Los Angeles, along with the rest of the country, began to pay attention.69
As had been the case in the early 1980s, some of LA’s African-American citizens and their leaders responded to the spike in violent crime by making appeals for greater police protection in their communities. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, a white public official beloved by his mostly black constituents in South Central, called for stronger law enforcement, emphasizing that people of Los Angeles “can’t go to church or stand on a corner without fear of some gang taking an Uzi and spraying them all.”70 The editors of the Los Angeles Sentinel supported Supervisor Hahn’s demand, reminding readers of the dozens of black innocents killed by stray bullets in black neighborhoods. The paper expressed hope, darkly, that the death of a privileged Asian woman inside an affluent white enclave of West LA would draw more attention to a crisis long neglected by city, county, and federal officials.71 In concert with the black press, local citizen groups such as the South Central Organizing Committee and the United Neighborhoods Organization worked to use the spotlight cast on the Toshima tragedy to expose the civic divestment crippling black communities like theirs.72
Karen Toshima’s death and the public outcry it engendered provided a powerful mandate for Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates in his years-long campaign to expand the scope of his anti-gang programs. Even among black Angelenos and community leaders who had in the past castigated law enforcement officials for racial bigotry and overreach, voices arose in support of tougher policing. People wanted to see “hard-nosed measures,” “no mercy,” and “no half-stepping.”73 Gates also had the explicit support of municipal leaders, who scrambled to respond forcefully to the high-profile January shooting. Within days of it, the Los Angeles City Council voted to triple the number of patrolmen assigned to Westwood; it approved the hiring of one hundred and fifty new officers; and it approved a boost in annual funding for the LAPD.74 Meanwhile, LA’s city attorney sought a court order to prevent anyone suspected of associating with the Playboy Gangsta Crips, the gang set implicated in the Westwood shooting, from congregating in public spaces in groups of two or more, and from leaving home after 7:00 PM for a reason other than work. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ultimately ruled the attorney’s “vagrancy order” unconstitutional, but the message about the threat of black youth had already registered on the public.75 In Sacramento, the state legislature also acted swiftly, crafting a bill to increase penalties—including new mandatory sentencing rules—for any felony committed by someone found connected to a gang organization, however loosely. The Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988 was cosponsored by two Los Angeles Democrats (one of them being South Central Assemblywoman Gwen Moore) and it passed with bipartisan support. Governor George Deukmejian signed the STEP Act into law in September.76
With renewed support among city, county, and state leaders, Police Chief Gates gambled on shock and awe. He announced “Operation Hammer,” an aggressive anti-gang program which the LAPD had been quietly implementing already in the months prior to the Westwood shooting. Now in the open, it expanded more loudly. As Gates told reporters, thirty Operation Hammer officers would be deployed to hunt Karen Toshima’s killer. But the unit’s primary objective would be to round up as many suspected juvenile delinquents as possible, in what the chief referred to as “gang sweeps.” The mission was, as he emphasized, to “make war” on all the “rotten little cowards” terrorizing the city.77
To this end, Gates resurrected his department’s battering ram, the six-ton military-surplus armored vehicle customized with a fourteen-foot steel beam. The provocative LAPD vehicle had been retired in the summer of 1985 after only a few forays in SWAT operations. For two years, the only signs of the “Batterram” were in Compton rapper Toddy Tee’s popular anthem on the topic and in the hard-to-suppress memories of those it was used against. But the infamous blue vehicle rolled out of storage in the spring of 1988, this time deployed for more than rock house raids.78 Emboldened by widespread support for Operation Hammer and its gang sweeps, Gates broadcast a stern warning to the youths in South LA’s ganglands, the hotbeds of the region’s rap music: “The hammer is coming down, and it’s going to come down harder and harder and harder.”79
From February to March, the Chief deployed more than two hundred officers with instructions to “make life miserable” for anyone and everyone associated with gang life. Weekend after weekend, night after night, helicopter searchlights tracked patrol car clusters through “high crime” neighborhoods. Police arrested suspects en masse, issued stacks of citations, seized guns, and impounded cars. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Any young man who flaunted red or blue rags around his head or waist or wrist, or who flashed certain hand signs to passing traffic, or who stood in a distinct slouching posture was fair game.” In just four weeks, the Operation Hammer squads had scooped up 563 suspects and the county’s Central Jail was filled to near capacity. Police officials boasted that law-abiding citizens of Los Angeles could celebrate the beginning of the end of gang-related violence.80 The Los Angeles Police Department pointed to progress, at last, in its war on street gangs, but, as Chief Gates announced in early March to a gaggle of news crews, the gang sweeps had only just begun. “We are going to continue to do it over and over and over,” Gates declared, promising to “hit them when they least expect it.”81
In 1988, growing outrage over the “spate of slaughter” in Los Angeles provided the LAPD with the justification it needed to pursue a program of round-the-clock raids in the mostly black communities of South Los Angeles. This was a presidential election year fraught with racially charged rhetoric and featuring the candidacy of Democrat Jesse Jackson, a champion of the black freedom struggle. It might have been expected in such a time that the LAPD sweeps would trigger debates about profiling and civil rights abuses. Instead, Gates’s department earned praise from both the right and the left. In support of Operation Hammer, the Wall Street Journal reported that, by the end of the spring of 1988, Los Angeles County had already tallied 387 gang-related murders, more than the number counted for the full calendar year of 1987. “To put that level of carnage in perspective,” the Journal noted, “Chicago police counted 47 gang-related murders last year.” In other words, Los Angeles was burdened by a murder rate nine times higher than that of “the nation’s former gang capital.”82 Campaigning for president, Republican George H. W. Bush praised the by-all-means-necessary policing in Los Angeles that spring, and made his own pledge to treat the nation’s gang members and drug dealers as “domestic terrorists.”83 Gerald Ivory, a probation officer from South Central, expressed frustration that even local leaders who were “supposed to be serving my community” ultimately condoned Operation Hammer, which he saw as blatant abuse of power.84 Michael Zinzun, founder of the community organization the Coalition Against Police Abuse, was similarly disappointed by liberal compliance. He warned that the unprecedented aggression of the LAPD’s policing—which saw young people being tracked, searched, booked, detained, and in many cases abused merely for being young, black, and in close proximity to a targeted gang sweep—would leave “a stamp on the lives” of a generation of African Americans already burdened by the economic and social challenges of the era. Zinzun told LA Weekly, “When those kids are picked up during the sweeps, scars are left.”85
Hollywood actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper wanted his feature-length film Colors to reveal these scars and more. In the summer of 1987, as LAPD officials began comparing South Los Angeles to war-torn Beirut, Hopper embarked on his ambitious project. Known for his commitment to cinematic realism, the Easy Rider star envisioned an unconventional kind of buddy-cop drama, a poignant one examining the people in Los Angeles law enforcement and the young people they pursued. Colors would be no Beverly Hills Cop. Hopper insisted that his film would be “about real stuff,” an honest exposition of race, masculinity, and power in Los Angeles.86 Colors would “wake up some people” to an “all-too-real drama” too long ignored by the general public. Hopper admitted to the Globe and Mail that the setup was incongruous: “ I mean, you got palm trees and the sun’s out and you got violence.”87
In his quest for cinematic realism, Hopper insisted on filming on location in Watts, where, he said, “these things are really happening.” With guidance from his cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who earned critical acclaim for his work on a documentary about the My Lai massacre and for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and with the support of the film’s producer Robert Solo, who described black Los Angeles as “the wild west,” the Colors film crew scouted gritty, sunlit, urban locations miles away from Orion Pictures’ gated Hollywood sound stages. They opted for neighborhoods on the south side that, Hopper claimed, “even the police won’t go into unless there’s a body lying there.”88
Hopper’s crew also managed to solicit assistance from city and county police officials, who wanted to insure that the film accurately portrayed the work of their men and women in blue. The county sheriff’s Operation Safe Streets gang investigation bureau and the LAPD’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) crime prevention unit provided resources and statistics.89 Robert Duvall and Sean Penn, playing the leading roles of LAPD officers, rode along with CRASH deputies during their patrols through Watts and South Central. CRASH also granted Hopper permission to use the task force’s acronym to lend authenticity to the police teams in the script. In addition, county officials provided statistics on gang membership and gang-related crimes—numbers featured in the film’s title sequence.90
In defiance of the law enforcement agents assisting him, however, Hopper also recruited help from the very criminal networks police targeted. He scouted acting extras who were, according to both police and casting agents, gangbangers. “If I was shooting in a Crip area,” Hopper boasted, “I’d use Crips as extras. Shooting in a Blood area, I’d use Bloods.”91 The director also drafted Ice-T, who touted his connections to the Crips and vowed to tap them to deliver a “first-person gangbanging story” for the film’s soundtrack.92
But by early 1988, before Colors was scheduled to debut in April, police officials were crying foul, protesting the film’s use of genuine LA gang handles and colors, and referring to it derisively as “the gang movie.” For Dennis Hopper, the Westwood shooting and the gang sweeps it spurred only raised the stakes of a project he viewed as “educational.”93 For Los Angeles authorities, Colors was an incitement. Wes McBride, the Los Angeles leader of the California Gang Investigator’s Association, warned that Hopper’s movie would surely “leave dead bodies from one end of this town to the other.” Community leaders working directly with black youth in gang-occupied districts also prepared for the worst. One South Central activist warned black readers of the Sentinel that Colors “could have a hell of an impact on something that’s already out of control.”94 In the days before the film’s nationwide release, South Central’s Community Youth Gang Service spoke out against Hopper’s careless exploitation of real gang rivalries. A representative of the agency told the New York Times, “This movie is going to cause a war.”95
Colors was a smash hit. The Orion Pictures production, which debuted in mid-April, grossed nearly $7 million in its opening week, aided by the sustained coverage of the shocking Westwood murder and the related controversy swirling around the film’s untimely release. By its third week, Colors reached number one in national box office tallies, easily defeating Warner Brothers’ blockbuster film Beetlejuice, which had opened on four times as many screens. At the end of its ten-week run in theaters, Colors had raked in over $46 million in domestic ticket sales, making it a top-grossing film for Orion Pictures.96
While Karen Toshima’s death in January 1988 introduced the nation to the scope of gang violence in LA, Colors created a narrative about it. As Ice-T argued, that narrative did far more to compel the public to consider—and avoid snap judgments about—LA’s gang crisis.97 Film critics and moviegoers, many of them far removed from the urban drama portrayed on screen, celebrated the film’s “authentic” glimpse of life on the mean streets of Los Angeles. One reviewer called Colors “genuinely three-dimensional and utterly enveloping.”98 Although Hopper had insisted time and again that he had not produced a documentary, and although gang experts disputed many of the film’s details, audiences concluded that the movie provided them with rich insight into conflicts playing out inside one of America’s most exalted cities. “All I can say is that I’m much more aware of what the residents of South Central LA go through on an everyday basis,” said a West Hollywood lawyer. “I feel for them, I really do.”99 A New York moviegoer lamented the “painful, unavoidable implication [that] nothing can stop the gang mentality from perpetuating itself,” while a writer for an Australian paper summed up his own response as “a profound sense of relief” that he lived on the other side of the world.100
Dennis Hopper’s blockbuster, told from the perspective of two white cops, aroused in its audiences some sympathy for a police force locked in what appeared on screen to be a losing battle (an affront to the LAPD according to Chief Daryl Gates, who in the months prior to the film’s debut was touting definitive progress in his war on gangs). But Colors treated most of its subjects—cop, citizen, and criminal alike—as flawed, driven by complex impulses and ills. For instance, the tension between the two protagonists, LAPD CRASH officers Bob Hodges and Danny “Pac Man” McGavin, was the byproduct of their dangerous and demoralizing work; community leaders railed against young gangsters and vied for protection from local law enforcement while simultaneously protesting police abuse; and individual gang members, like eighteen-year-old Clarence “High Top” Brown, came across as otherwise typical kids navigating atypical social and economic obstacles. Meanwhile, promotional materials for the Hollywood film juxtaposed the necessarily imposing rule of law and the degraded boys forced to prostrate themselves before it.101 Even where it indulged in overt caricatures, the film effectively tangled portrayals of good and evil, allowing some to argue that Colors humanized its young black subjects, others to charge that the movie glorified street crime, and still others to see Hopper’s cops as do-gooders, albeit with some brutish tendencies (Figure 3.3). Ice Cube assessed the film as too sympathetic to the LAPD, thinking it did little more than “show the gangbanging from the police point of view.”102
Fig 3.3 An Orion Pictures press-kit photo for the 1988 film Colors shows director Dennis Hopper and cast members. With many “throwing up gang signs,” both real and fabricated, the film’s “authenticity” is on bold display. Orion Pictures / Album / Alamy Stock Photo.
LAPD Chief Gates was not amused; he was adamant that sympathetic portrayals of gang culture turned thugs into celebrities. Even as he relied on press coverage of LA’s gang crisis to justify his aggressive crime-fighting operations, he blamed it for popularizing gangsters. Gang experts, community activists, and former gang members themselves might tie the problem to youth unemployment, defunded social programs, and the influx of cocaine into poor black neighborhoods, but Gates was convinced there was a certain kind of young person who joined a violent gang because he wanted to be in the news, to “be a star.” Gates’s 1988 anti-gang initiative, “Operation Hammer,” was therefore as psychological as it was material, with the LAPD employing terror in the hopes of combatting the growing allure of “gangster chic.”103
Gates’s aggressive tack ultimately helped to certify, however, that Los Angeles gangs were as pervasive as the Westwood shooting indicated and as the drama of Colors suggested. Along with news conferences, legislative sessions, and the chief’s inflammatory comments about African-American men, the controversial Operation Hammer program generated national attention, drawing politicians, cable news networks, pop journalists, and filmmakers to Los Angeles, all of them riveted by what Newsweek called “a nightmare landscape inhabited by marauding thugs and hard-nosed cops.” They came to witness an American “apocalypse.”104
Dennis Hopper began his own hunt for reality in LA’s notorious ganglands in 1987, at a time when the young people of those communities were making “The Boyz-N-The Hood” a smash local hit. These kids, who would later be portrayed in Colors as socially doomed, embraced “Boyz” as a song that, by honoring the local vernacular and nodding to hip-hop trends, saluted those ganglands. The Ruthless Records artists who came together to produce the record found a receptive audience for their West Coast twist on street rap. The response convinced them—and especially their front man and financier Eazy-E—that the bold provocation at the heart of the track, “the boys in the hood are always hard,” could define them as a group. The enthusiasm for “Boyz,” as Ice Cube remembered, “told us we’d found our niche.”105
The group became NWA. It was a simple label, and a purposefully opaque one that teased a defiantly provocative phrase, “Niggaz Wit Attitudes.” The acronym (which the members deliberately avoided clarifying for music writers and other reporters, making for awkwardly-constructed, if not wildly racist, headlines) fit with the “Boyz” lyrics about living hard, acting hard, and fighting hard against those who “come talkin’ that trash.”106 The members—including Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, DJ Yella, Arabian Price, and, although he was not a performing member, The D.O.C.—adopted a brand name fitting for a group of Los Angeles artists angling for recognition within the bullish, yet still New York–centric, street-rap market.
In the late summer of 1988, after Orion Pictures’ so-called “gang movie” had sent moral guardians into a panic, NWA released its debut album, Straight Outta Compton. The record was, as Eazy-E told a Los Angeles Times entertainment writer, rap music reflecting the “reality of [our] situation, no fairy tales.”107 The promotional run for Straight Outta Compton dovetailed with the public fixation on Hopper’s film and LA’s urban crisis depicted in it. Indeed, although NWA had completed all recording before the April release of Colors, its members promoted the project as a response to the movie and, more specifically, as an effort to reclaim the narrative about their lives and about the things—including gang sweeps—that they, and not white Hollywood elites, experienced firsthand. Ice Cube told Melody Maker, “We’re trying to show how it is on the other side, what it’s like to have to deal with that kind of asshole cop in the movie on a day to day basis.”108
Colors’ impressive box-office performance and the chart-ranking success of the film’s soundtrack—which featured LA rapper Ice-T on the title track rapping “The gangs of LA will never die / Just multiply”— affirmed that gangster antihero tales, once a fixture of Depression era cinema, were again in vogue. Moreover, black gangster narratives in particular, framed by real-time revelations in the news about urban crime and urban police, were a rising stock in American popular culture. NWA responded to this cultural shift. And they tapped into a market ripe for self-styled gangster storytellers who, unlike director Dennis Hopper, could paint from a palate of their own exclusive observations and experiences.
But the members of NWA also, more pointedly, represented themselves as “underground street reporters” with an intimate understanding of the problems that undermined long-standing myths of Los Angeles as a promised land. As Ice Cube told the Washington Times in defense of the violence in his lyrics on Straight Outta Compton, “It’s a hard life out there, I’m sorry to say. I ain’t the one who made it hard, but I’m the one that lived it.”109 Dr. Dre described the songs he produced for Straight Outta Compton as reflections of “real” life growing up in ways that subverted typical LA lore. He might be a Los Angeles native, but as he explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1989, “I know what street rap sounds like. I’ve lived it. I stay in touch with it.”110
More than anyone else in the group, Eazy-E claimed for NWA a reputation for authenticity. He did this, in no small part, by attacking “that phony stuff out there,” including Colors and New York street rap. At the same time, he nodded to NWA’s original fans, including the local kids who heard in his label’s music familiar—even mundane—echoes of their own lives. “The stuff they were talking about was just shit about guys that I grew up with,” remembered Lawrence “DJ Muggs” Muggerud, an LA producer who, inspired by NWA, formed the rap group Cypress Hill in 1988. Straight Outta Compton moved Muggs because the album’s characters summoned up memories of “guys in my neighborhood like Big Hub, Madman, Baldie. That was their lifestyle.” To his ears, NWA was simply “gangbangers rappin’.”111 But Straight Outta Compton also mattered to locals because it sounded like black journalism about a place heavily cloaked in white myths of opportunity and tolerance. As the Ruthless Records founder told the Los Angeles Times in early 1989, “we’re telling the real story of what it’s like living in a place like Compton. We’re giving them reality. We’re like reporters. We give them the truth.”112 Recognizing the connection between the sensationalized coverage of the problems they navigated each day and the fast-growing interest in their music, the members of NWA seized on a mantra: “We just tell it how we see it.”113
Independent production, through Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records label and the distribution services provided by LA’s small shop pressers like the Macola Record Company, allowed NWA to create freely. At Ruthless Records, Eazy-E encouraged his artists to experiment, without restraint. He built his label based on the belief that unfiltered expression would be marketable—even and probably especially if it was filthy. It was a faith nurtured by the Compton music scene, which embraced artistic irreverence, and by the enduring popularity of the raunchy routines of black comedians like Rudy Ray “Dolemite” Moore, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy.114 “We knew the value of language, especially profanity,” Ice Cube explained of his original Ruthless Records partners. “We weren’t that sophisticated, but we knew the power it had.”115
Independence also allowed NWA to freely promote its music, outside the bounds of conventional marketing. With Eazy-E at the helm, and public dialogue about Karen Toshima, Operation Hammer, and Colors in the sails, NWA could embark on a new course. It would go on to blend fictional “street stories” with semibiographical “street reality” in ways that stirred controversy and seized the attention of the nation. It was a fortuitous time for NWA to emerge fully as ghetto truth-tellers—the most authentic reality rappers from LA’s ganglands. The year 1988 marked the moment when, as the New York Times noted, “the gang member has become one of the prevailing images of the young black male on television and in the movies.”116 As KDAY’s Greg Mack told the Los Angeles Times, things had reached “a turning point.”117