CHAPTER 4    Somebody’s Gonna Pay Attention

  .  In August 1989, Ice Cube described to Melody Maker the concept for NWA’s first music video, a video MTV had very publicly banned just months earlier. It was simple, he told the British magazine: it depicted a gang sweep. The video was a dramatization of the police raids that targeted young men like him and that had been, for years, commonplace in the black districts of South Los Angeles.¹

First employed by the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1980s, gang sweeps had become the centerpiece of Chief Daryl Gates’s “Operation Hammer,” an unprecedented show of force designed to combat gang-related crime throughout the city. In 1988, the sweeps began making national headlines both for their “successes” and for their violent excesses. Anxious to contain what police officials believed Dennis Hopper’s film Colors had uncorked—one Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department commander said the movie promoted the idea that “you can be a movie star if you’re a gang member!”—Los Angeles law enforcement escalated the Hammer sweeps. LAPD Chief Daryl Gates led the charge, determined to lay to rest popular fears that his department had lost control of the city’s now famous gang crisis.²

In August 1988, one particularly perverse and widely reported LAPD raid left two South Central apartments demolished, furniture smashed with sledgehammers, clothing doused with bleach, and graffiti scrawled on walls declaring “LAPD Gang Task Force Rules.” During the police blitz, Dalton Avenue resident Jeannie Carter, in her third trimester of pregnancy, was handcuffed and forced facedown to the floor. Officers reportedly tormented another resident, young Hildebrandt Flowers, threatening to lynch the teen with the gold chain he wore and, then, with fence wire. Police also rounded up dozens of youths within a four-block radius of the Dalton apartments, and ordered the detainees to whistle the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show to avoid beatings. The so-called “Dalton Raids,” which were so destructive they left four families homeless and drew the emergency relief efforts of the American Red Cross, netted just six ounces of marijuana, less than an ounce of cocaine, and one felony charge. In spite of legal threats and the public outcry from leaders in South Central, the LAPD followed up its August operations by partnering with the LA County Sheriff’s Department and anti-gang task forces in Inglewood and Compton to ramp up the sweeps.³

Not long after the 1988 Dalton Raids, NWA filmed its video for “Straight Outta Compton.” The point, according to Ice Cube, was to provide a different perspective on the ongoing battle in Los Angeles, one that reframed the narrative about cops, criminals, heroes, and villains. The rapper explained soberly to Melody Maker that NWA chose to recreate a gang sweep to reveal how Los Angeles County police “abuse their authority.”⁴

The video opens with a group of young black men, including the frontmen of NWA, weaving through alleys and strolling down sidewalks. A series of carefully selected images—“Welcome to Compton” signage, a Bail Bonds awning, a Compton Unified School District mural, and the imposing facade of the Compton Courthouse, nicknamed “Fort Compton”—establishes the setting. Scenes of a mustached cop prepping a handgun, twirling a side-handle baton, and circling Compton on a map foreshadow the coming conflict.⁵ Ice Cube delivers his lyrics, boasting of “a crime record like Charles Manson.” MC Ren follows, pointing provocatively at the camera, pretending to cock imaginary weapons (in line with his lyrics), and grandstanding about his gangsta “rep.” Last up, Eazy-E declares himself “ruthless, never seen, like a shadow in the dark,” dodging police at every turn. From the passenger seat of a drop-top black Chrysler LeBaron, he delivers his lines, mocking the driver of a police van. Throughout the video, NWA performs a hard-core, and explicit, version of rap braggadocio, in which posture, tone, and content serve to taunt, defy, and humiliate the group’s main foil: law enforcement.⁶

The short film, however, casts the song as an expression of powerlessness. Only police wield actual deadly weapons, and they use them, zealously, to round up NWA and their friends. The video’s central drama, in fact, is the police chase, with filmmaker Rupert Wainwright imposing upon the audience the pursuing officer’s perspective of black youths gathered on a neighborhood corner. They try in vain to flee the police, running down alleys and around dilapidated homes until caught, only to be forced to the concrete with shotguns pointed at their skulls and shoved into their shoulder blades (Fig. 4.1). By the end of the video, every rapper appears in handcuffs, sitting inside a police paddy wagon, with the exception of Eazy-E and his partner, still cruising in the LeBaron. The final frame of the video features a close-up of a young black man with his cheek pressed against the hood of a patrol car.⁷

Fig 4.1  A still from NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” video, portraying the final moments of a gang sweep in an abandoned lot in a residential South Los Angeles neighborhood. Guns drawn, LAPD officers apprehend black youths, including an unarmed Ice Cube. Director Rupert Wainwright filmed much of the video from a similar vantage point, giving the viewer the police perspective. Rupert Wainwright, Priority Records.

Spin magazine reviewed the “Straight Outta Compton” video as a “four-minute action pic” that “opens a wide gray area between right and wrong, then runs wild in it.” Against the bleak urban backdrops, NWA’s rap lyrics became “too black, too strong, too rock ’n’ roll.” An entertainment writer for the Washington Post went further, suggesting the video could be considered “incendiary.” In the spring of 1989, not long after NWA made its debut on MTV, the cable video network officially refused to air “Straight Outta Compton,” citing its depictions of guns and violence (without noting that, in the video, only police display weapons and use physical violence).⁸

These critical reactions came as no surprise to Ice Cube, however. They only reaffirmed his suspicions, first, that the popular press chose to ignore the pervasiveness of police abuse in black neighborhoods like his and, second, that it preferred to spin narratives about threats posed by young black men. He told Melody Maker that NWA recreated a gang sweep to challenge audiences in precisely the way most commercial rappers did not—by exposing them to the mechanisms of oppression that disrupted the daily lives of African-American kids. Ice Cube explained that the police operated on the assumption that they “basically have the right to pick someone up just because he’s black and he happens to be walking down the street.” The gang sweep gave them carte blanche to engage in racial profiling, a toxic form of abuse that remained unchecked because America’s leaders “don’t honestly care about what’s going on.” In his world, police ignored due process and devalued black lives, while those with the power to affect change did nothing. The only “problem” with the “Straight Outta Compton” video, Ice Cube suggested, “is that we’re telling the truth” about police abuse and the public apathy that helps perpetuate it. He argued that media outlets like MTV feared the implications of NWA’s popularity. As NWA’s message pervaded the mainstream, packaged in the form of a music video, audiences would be compelled, finally, to reckon with injustice. “And that hurts,” he said.⁹

By describing the premise of NWA’s debut music video and the controversy swirling around it, Ice Cube was implicitly articulating his group’s marketing plan: NWA would “show how it is on the other side” and welcome the furor that would inevitably follow.¹⁰ It was a tactic grounded in a sophisticated sense of the public’s growing fascination with dark narratives about 1980s Los Angeles. The release of Eazy-E’s debut “The Boyz-N-The Hood” had, after all, coincided with the sensationalized coverage of Karen Toshima’s murder—a tragedy that, because it occurred in affluent Westwood Village, ignited racially coded debates about whether black street gang violence posed an immediate threat to LA’s white communities. The swelling popularity of “Boyz” in 1988 also overlapped with the theater run of Dennis Hopper’s Colors, which, after the Westwood shooting, drew audiences like rubberneckers eager to glimpse a grim scene of inner-city crisis. The neo-noir stories coming out of Los Angeles in the late 1980s—Newsweek compared South Central LA to “the set for some B-picture about the world after a nuclear apocalypse”—captivated an American public that had previously thought of Los Angeles as an exemplar of economic and racial progress in the Reagan era.¹¹

But Ice Cube’s press tour, in which the rapper blasted MTV for censorship, also showed something of how his group fit into a rapidly changing media environment—particularly as it related to music production and entertainment. MTV’s widely-reported decision to ban the “Straight Outta Compton” video from its programming came just at the time that the cable outlet was launching the first nationally broadcast program wholly devoted to hip-hop music. Like other rap acts, NWA heralded the introduction of Yo! MTV Raps as a watershed moment for their genre, which had struggled up to then to find real advocates in radio or television, and therefore remained an underexposed and underestimated counterculture. Here would be a powerful new platform for rappers and their labels, unconstrained by many established rules, and eager to engage in innovation, experimentation, and controversy. With the help of handlers and collaborators, NWA provided all three—first, by unveiling an infectiously musical album scored with obscene “reality” raps; then, by testing image-centered promotional strategies custom-made for the music television spotlight; and, finally, by deftly escalating a squabble over a rejected video to assert its cultural authority. All this made NWA a model of what Def Jam’s Bill Stephney declared in 1989, the year LA gangsta rap broke from the margins: “The revolution will be marketed.”¹²

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NWA began work on its first studio album Straight Outta Compton in the summer of 1987. Dr. Dre took the reins in each recording session, coaching his emcees and engineering each track with the assistance of former World Class Wreckin’ Cru bandmate DJ Yella. Ice Cube, along with MC Ren and Arabian Prince, penned lyrics, often with input from Dre’s Texas protégé The D.O.C. The group’s founder Eazy-E bankrolled the whole operation, providing occasional vocals while letting others mold his product.

Although it did not include Eazy-E’s seminal song “The Boyz-N-The Hood,” the album employed the single’s winning formula, pairing a California version of street rap with trunk-rattling digital percussion, snippets of the Los Angeles soundscape, and an eclectic mix of funk, soul, and hip-hop samples. James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, William DeVaughn, the Pointer Sisters, and Kool Moe Doe punctuated lyrical accounts of turf wars, dope deals, drive-by shootings, police confrontations, and sexual conquests. It was not an entirely novel design. The album’s producer and engineer, Dr. Dre, had been inspired by his contemporaries, including New York’s Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, and Run-DMC, all of them pioneers of a hip-hop street sound that married modern ghetto themes with black music of earlier generations.¹³ When Straight Outta Compton was complete, the consensus within NWA was that it would elevate the fledgling group to preeminence in Los Angeles, where each member had already earned a modicum of fame on the local black dance scene. Yet national commercial exposure still seemed a pipe dream.

Eazy-E, who footed the bill for recording, was more ambitious than the rest, and from the helm of Ruthless Records he set out to market Straight Outta Compton broadly. He solicited music manager Jerry Heller to shop the album to major labels. “This is what Eazy hired me for,” Heller recalled, “for my Rolodex.”¹⁴ Both men, one an industry novice and the other a seasoned rock ’n’ roll booster, anticipated varied, even visceral, responses inside boardrooms and executive suites. Indeed, most labels rejected Heller’s pitch outright, citing NWA’s image as unmarketable, its name behind its acronym—Niggaz Wit Attitudes—as obscene, and its lyrics as a legal liability. After a dozen rejections, only Capitol Records got back to Heller. The label’s chairman, Joe Smith, whom Heller knew well, offered to buy the Ruthless Records trademark. But he refused to add NWA to his company’s roster. Smith had sought to draft hip-hop artists to establish “a presence in rap” for Capitol so it could compete in the genre with other majors, including Columbia and MCA, who had recently begun distributing music for Def Jam and Profile, respectively. The chairman, however, did not want ownership of the “crap” his friend was peddling. Heller labored to demonstrate NWA’s broader cultural relevance, particularly in its black radicalism and rock ’n’ roll rebellion. “Joe, it’s the Black Panthers,” he stressed. “It’s the fucking Rolling Stones.” But Smith, unmoved by NWA’s music simply responded, “I hate what they are saying.” He questioned his friend’s judgment: “What makes you think anyone is going to buy this garbage? Who’s going to listen? Tell me who is going to play it? No radio station in the world.”¹⁵

The fact was that American radio programmers had long snubbed hip-hop, with urban contemporary, crossover, and top-40 stations routinely treating it like a fad that could simply be willed away. At the point when Capitol’s Joe Smith was questioning the prospects of NWA’s music getting any airtime, hip-hop artists and promoters had already spent more than three years battling for playlist additions, or “adds” as they are called in the industry. The rise of street rap in the early 1980s defied the mainstream convention of whitening black music. Rap artists and their labels resurrected early hip-hop music, updated its style, refreshed its themes, and recast it for a younger, blacker audience—with the expectation that the changes would drive sales. The music was deliberately designed to be both “hard” and “pop,” not one or the other—a tricky combination in the context of an entertainment market increasingly driven by top-40 radio, competition for ad dollars, and artistic compromises. The formula made little sense to radio program directors and label executives who viewed the popular mainstream as wholly synonymous with white consumer trends. By refusing to, as Def Jam’s Russell Simmons put it, “water it down,” street rappers like Run-DMC were proposing a new blueprint for giving music commercial appeal, one that most radio outlets and large record companies did not initially embrace.¹⁶

Through the late 1980s, radio program directors all but boycotted street rap, and, because major labels also refused to touch it, rap artists had little leverage to curry favor with stations that had hit-making power. Without radio plays, a key metric used by top trade publications like Billboard and Radio & Records to rank hits, rap songs rarely charted, which further justified the reactions of major label executives, like Smith, who characterized the music as unsalable “garbage.” Yet street rap did sell records, and it sold them well even without radio support. Through the mid-1980s, healthy sales of rap albums, singles, and tapes featuring new “hardcore” artists, including LL Cool J, Dana Dane, Ice-T, and Schoolly D, demonstrated the resilience of a genre blackballed by traditional music media and supported by only a network of small, independent labels. Hip-hop was proving itself to be the kind of sleeper phenomenon that earns big returns for investors with patience. But even after 1986—a year in which Run-DMC, on independent label Profile, managed to shatter all rap sales records, saw its albums reach gold- and platinum-level sales, played to arena crowds on a sixty-four-date national tour, and earned a Grammy Award nomination—the music industry’s traditional gatekeepers remained largely unwilling to commit.¹⁷

“We’ve never received radio play commensurate with our true popularity,” Run-DMC’s publicist Bill Adler complained in 1988, arguing that if radio truly reflected consumer demand, “there isn’t an urban station in the country that would be playing less than 30% or 40% rap.” Adler’s frustration was with an entire nexus of urban radio outlets, including those with black and urban contemporary formats, that seemed disconnected from, even deliberately defiant of, market trends. When Billboard conducted a survey of program directors in America’s urban markets that year, it found that most firmly refused to add rap titles to playlists even as they acknowledged the genre’s sales. They cited listener distaste for rap and, in one respondent’s words, the risk of “professional suicide.”¹⁸

Prospects for hip-hop airplay were further diminished when, because of widespread reporting in the mid-1980s about major music labels’ use of independent promoters to skirt laws regarding pay-for-play, two Congressional investigations were opened into “payola and possible mob ties” in the industry—and the major labels promptly dropped all use of promotional middlemen. This had the effect of cutting out what the Los Angeles Times described as “a key cog in the hit-making machinery—radio airplay for new artists.” The newspaper quoted one industry veteran’s explanation: “The loss of independent promotion … has hurt the artists who need the most help—the young, developing groups. Radio programmers have been so rattled by all the controversy over independent promotion that they’re playing it very safe. They’re only adding big name bands to their playlists.”¹⁹ Young rappers were not the only black artists affected. The Reverend Al Sharpton was quick to hold a protest against “the unilateral dismissal of all independent record promoters” because they were a critical resource for many black performers either recording on indie labels or not prioritized by their major labels’ in-house promotional departments—and, as he pointed out, “black promotion men are not implicated in the allegations.”²⁰

The black program directors at urban contemporary format stations, however, seemed particularly averse to hip-hop music and wary of its tough tone and tougher content. Some stations even ran ads promising rap-free programming. “Outlets are really closing up,” said Bill Toles, an advocate for the creative freedom of black musicians. Vernon Reid, the guitarist for Living Colour, a black rock band that was frequently—although mistakenly—categorized as a hip-hop group, said “black radio wouldn’t touch us.” Def Jam’s Bill Stephney, first hired to secure radio airplay for the label’s acts, defined the resistance in black radio, and eventually in black television programming, to rap as a missed opportunity to present audiences with a fuller, more complete picture of African-American experiences. When Robert Johnson, president of Black Entertainment Television, told him he “didn’t see the importance of doing a rap show, that it wasn’t applicable to his audience,” Stephney lamented Johnson’s blind spot and concluded that the BET brush-off was representative of a broader problem. “We understand the message on CNN is not going to be close to ours,” he told Spin. “But if BET or black radio is going to position itself as having a so-called black perspective, it better be pretty close to what the people in my community are talking about. And it isn’t.”²¹

There were exceptions within black radio programming, and most of them, by the late 1980s, were on the West Coast and in the South. Small, local R&B and urban contemporary stations, including KPOO in San Francisco, KDIA in Oakland, WFXA in Augusta, KQXL in Baton Rouge, and WEAL in Greensboro, added hip-hop tracks often enough for entertainment journals to tally a smattering of playlist adds. Through the summer of 1988, a few rap songs broke through radio firewalls—most notably, Ice-T’s “Colors,” LL Cool J’s “Goin’ Back to Cali,” and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” All three of these tracks had the major label distribution others coveted, and “Colors” had the added benefit of being the title track for Dennis Hopper’s acclaimed film.²² Another breakthrough track was J.J. Fad’s “Supersonic” (on Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records), which was generating buzz in some radio markets in the South and the West thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack for the blockbuster movie Coming to America (Fig. 4.2).

Fig 4.2  Full-page ads in Black Radio Exclusive  promoting the soundtracks for Colors  and Coming to America, both released in early 1988. Ice-T and J.J. Fad, two of the only rap artists added to black urban radio playlists that year, were linked to these high-profile, major studio films. Black Radio Exclusive.

In the case of “Supersonic,” it also helped that urban contemporary music programmers treated the song not as a rap track but as a dance record or, as Black Radio Exclusive described it, “up-tempo techno.”²³ As an electro-inspired female trio, J.J. Fad fit seamlessly into a 1980s dance music market dominated by freestyle, electro, and R&B women vocalists including Neneh Cherry, Jody Watley, and Lisa Lisa, all of whom incorporated playful, syncopated lyrics into their bass-heavy music. Despite these notable examples of hip-hop artists succeeding in penetrating urban radio markets by various means, including genre bending, the industry’s conservatism remained a well-known obstacle to most rap acts.

At a time when media markets held rap music at bay, KDAY in Los Angeles was the one truly remarkable outlier. Its hip-hop-heavy programming—described as “rap, rap, rap” by one disgusted Silver Lake resident whose house wiring picked up stray signals from the nearby station—emerged from Music Director Greg Mack’s turnaround strategy for the struggling AM station.²⁴ Offering his unwavering support was KDAY’s program director Jack Patterson, who Mack later recalled was himself an anomaly in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, when “all the radio people in LA hated rap. Program Directors hated it, the big record stores wouldn’t carry it. They thought it was just a novelty and would go away.”²⁵ Throughout the 1980s, Mack and Patterson provided a radio platform for hip-hop artists by tapping into the tastes of local DJs and relying on ad revenue provided by local businesses—including rap-friendly nightclubs and mobile DJ enterprises. During a decade in which national contemporary radio, in effect, froze out hip-hop, KDAY stood as an absolute exception.

In its liberal policy regarding playlist adds and its dependence upon grassroots support, KDAY served artists in much the same way rap-friendly independent labels did. Just as Greg Mack’s success reviving KDAY was possible because of hip-hop experimentation and not in spite of it, indie producers similarly watched their influence expand and investments pay off as they cornered the rap market. Echoing Mack’s approach to music programming, Delicious Vinyl founder Michael Ross asserted that the retail success of his small hip-hop label could be credited to his staff’s privileging of local tastes— “keeping its ear to [the] streets” rather than focusing on industry charts, urban radio playlists, and market outlooks. Monica Lynch, president of New York-based Tommy Boy Records, made a similar claim. Her company produced first-wave hip-hop artists, including Afrika Bambaataa, back when critics lampooned the newborn genre as a gimmick. By 1988, it boasted a full roster of profitable rap acts, including Stetsasonic, Queen Latifah, and De La Soul. “Rap put us on the map,” she told Billboard. Similar strategies employed liberally throughout the second half of the decade—namely, experimentation, a commitment to artist development beyond first releases, and local, grassroots promotion—made successes of Oakland rapper Too $hort’s 75 Girls Records and Tapes, Luther Campbell’s Luke Skyywalker Records in Miami (later renamed Luke Records), and Eazy-E’s own Ruthless Records. Hip-hop also made Profile Records a force in music retail; by 1988, thanks to Run-DMC’s record sales, it ranked as the most profitable indie label in the country. Against heavy odds, these indies thrived without the major labels’ promotion and distribution advantages. Moreover, in an era when the music business was thought by many to be too risk-averse and wedded to yesterday’s hit-makers, their support of artists that major labels shunned suggested that these small, marginal enterprises were curating the next wave of popular music. In 1988, Billboard referred to rap indies as “the artistic and creative backbone of the music industry.”²⁶ They were beating the big producers at their own game.

In the 1980s, few independent rap enterprises were as well positioned as Bryan Turner’s Priority Records. Turner was a Jewish kid from Winnipeg who had once worked for K-Tel International, a company best known for its as-seen-on-television consumer products, including the Veg-O-Matic, a food-processing device as popular for its utility as for its lengthy commercials that riveted viewers with “But wait! There’s more!”²⁷ In the early 1980s, Turner served in the company’s entertainment division licensing music, a position that brought him to Los Angeles. As a representative for K-Tel, he traveled between Los Angeles and New York, where he had a “light-bulb moment.” After observing young bar patrons responding enthusiastically to even the hint of a hip-hop beat, he resolved to market the music. “There’s definitely something going on, appealing to this young generation,” he thought. “Something clearly parents wouldn’t understand or really like.” Banking on the very same rebel spirit that had once fueled the explosion of rock ’n’ roll, Turner ventured to create his own music-licensing company. He, along with Mark Cerami and Steve Drath, colleagues who shared Turner’s vision, left K-Tel in 1985, taking with them intact relationships with record companies that had partnered with K-Tel over the years. With seed money provided by Turner’s uncle and father, they founded Priority Records.²⁸

Priority was not created as a rap label. Turner, Cerami, and Drath set it up as a song-licensing company that mined and then compiled hit records. Priority took its cue from K-Tel’s repackaging of music trends, with an initial focus on collections of fifties pop, rock, new wave, and metal. But Priority’s hip-hop cassettes proved its bestsellers. The fact that young rap fans, as Turner discovered, were unusually “aggressive buyers”—perhaps by necessity, since few radio outlets played rap hits—meant there was strong demand for rap compilations. Plus, for rap consumers, these curated collections mimicked the dubbed “street tapes” that hip-hop DJs sold with ease in places like Oakland, Miami, Philadelphia, Houston, and Los Angeles. Priority’s tapes, with titles like Power Rap and Rap’s Greatest Hits, fit seamlessly into an already established youth-driven economy. The company’s advantage was in its ability, as a licensed distributor, to put its products inside music retailers and some national chain stores—venues that were, of course, inaccessible to DJs vending bootlegs. As Turner noted, even Priority’s first rap release, Kings of Rap, “sold heavily in the racks [at] Kmarts and Wal-Marts.”²⁹

K-Tel also paved the way for Priority’s unorthodox approach to promoting its music products. In the 1960s, K-Tel’s founder Philip Kives, a relative of Turner, developed the “infomercial,” a long-play commercial with methodical demonstrations of product features. At K-Tel (short for Kives Television) the business model was to use television to amplify Kives’s unrelenting door-to-door sales pitch and then, having drummed up demand for a product, direct viewers to the retail stores where they could purchase it. Unlike standard televised ad campaigns, which rarely lasted more than thirty seconds and aimed mainly to boost brand awareness, K-Tel’s infomercials were often five-minute spots, produced to close the sale on an impulse purchase.

In 1987, Priority Records transformed the California Raisins, a set of Claymation characters popular in Sun-Maid Raisins commercials, into a platinum-selling Motown cover band. The concept worked without the kind of radio support that traditional labels relied upon. In fact, Turner deliberately sidestepped radio programmers and, instead, leveraged the popularity of existing California Raisin Advisory Board ads and related Claymation network programming to sell The California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs. “That was a K-Tel-oriented marketing idea,” Turner explained, a nod to the way his former employer racked up gold and platinum records for its compilations by side-stepping traditional forms of radio promotion in favor of the long-form television pitch.³⁰ Turner’s success stunned the record industry. Other labels’ executives were aghast that, within just two weeks, the Raisins had sold over six hundred thousand units and were taking up precious space on the American pop charts. Priority Records also surprised music journalists, who nevertheless were quick to pun on the achievement—Dave DiMartino at Billboard marveled at this “new wrinkle” in the charts bringing the label “its most fruitful sales to date,” while Stanley Mieses at Spin quipped that, by pushing the cartoonish group, Priority was committing “statutory grape.”³¹ The ridicule, however, seemed only to reaffirm Turner’s own posture as an industry hustler whose schemes actually worked. In 1988, with his two-year-old company’s coffers brimming with money thanks to anthropomorphic dried fruit, Turner could brag that he had a winning approach. Major labels “think about hit songs,” he said. “I think about hit concepts.”³²

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When Eazy-E began Ruthless Records, he similarly set his sights on hit concepts over hit songs. His Los Angeles-based label was initially set up as a vehicle for the promotion of an electro-rap girl group, J.J. Fad. The Rialto-based trio (Juana “MC J.B.” Burns, Dania “Baby-D” Birks, and Michelle “Sassy C” Franklin) was Eazy-E’s first big concept, developed in response to “Push It,” a surprising—and surprisingly salacious—hit record from New York’s female rap trio, Salt-N-Pepa. “Push It” was originally the B-side to Salt-N-Pepa’s 1987 single “Tramp,” a song that failed to gain radio traction. After San Francisco DJ Cameron Paul, best known for his thumping up-tempo dance mixes, transformed “Push It” from the long-play album cut that it was into a trimmed-down, drum-heavy, made-for-radio dance remix, “Push It” became a sensation. Salt-N-Pepa was not the first girl group to become a staple of 1980s dance radio; the Cover Girls, Seduction, Exposé, Company B, and Sweet Sensation (Salt-N-Pepa’s labelmate) already filled the crates of the newest generation of radio tastemakers. But the crossover success of Salt-N-Pepa suggested to Eazy-E that the dance market was ripe for female rap groups and that Ruthless needed to have its own. J.J. Fad fit that bill. The group had already released an electro-rap song called “Supersonic” on the LA indie label Dream Team Records, to which Eazy-E had close ties. He recognized the crossover potential in “Supersonic,” signed the group, and in 1988, J.J. Fad released Supersonic the album under the Ruthless Records banner. That summer, Ruthless banked its first certifiable pop smash. Boosted by its inclusion on the soundtrack for Eddie Murphy’s comedy Coming to America, J.J. Fad broke into the top 30 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. As Jerry Heller noted, “Eazy’s instincts were, as usual, right on the money.”³³

Yet, even with a winning record, Eazy-E and his new partner, Heller, could not convince the majors to bring Ruthless artists aboard. Even Atlantic Records, which helped distribute Supersonic, had no interest in hitching its wagon to Eazy-E’s roster of LA street rappers. Ruthless Records had the option to go it alone. “The Boyz-N-The Hood” had been a boon for Eazy-E’s fledgling label, driven by the Compton rapper’s own tireless street promotion and hand-to-hand distribution. Los Angeles was awash in small record pressers, like Macola Record Company, that churned out thousands of saleable units quickly and without creative limitations, which meant that entrepreneurs like Eazy-E had direct access to the tools of the trade. Plus, the demand for “Boyz” in California and in certain black-music markets in the South demonstrated the potential for his label to continue to garner the kind of grassroots support that, for instance, Oakland’s 75 Girls and LA’s Egyptian Empire cultivated through the late 1980s.

But, moving forward, Eazy-E wanted more for his own enterprise than niche popularity. He wanted J.J. Fad sales numbers, and thus he was determined to secure a formal distribution deal—if not with Atlantic, then with someone else. If the goal was mainstream exposure buttressed by corporate resources, NWA’s music would be a tough sell, as both Heller and Eazy knew. They anticipated the slew of rejections Heller ultimately fielded, and both concluded that Ruthless would need an unorthodox sort of partner—one with enough capital and a measure of recklessness—to provide help.

Although Eazy-E was uncertain about whether he and his fellow members of NWA had the same kind of hit-making potential that J.J. Fad exhibited, he was confident in his group’s design. He had Dr. Dre to create carefully layered and painstakingly engineered masterpieces, and Ice Cube, Ren, and The D.O.C. to craft rhymes. But Eazy-E believed that the greatest strength of NWA’s debut Straight Outta Compton—and his own solo material on Eazy-Duz-It—was in its full mastery of the art of storytelling. Jerry Heller pitched NWA to possible distributors as a group that, in production, lyrics, and character, dramatized the lives of the very gangsters and hustlers sensationalized in 1980s popular culture. In the months leading up to the release of Straight Outta Compton, major media outlets continued to paint young black men from South Central and Compton as “marauding thugs,” “cold killers,” and “angry harbingers of a new Watts riot.” These were the sorts of caricatures that stoked fear, particularly during an election year in which crime and punishment dominated the political debate, often with racial overtones.³⁴ But the attention, however negative, trained a spotlight on the ganglands of Los Angeles, one that Eazy-E, with the help of Heller, hoped to exploit. If the nation had become newly obsessed with South LA’s “bad guys,” then Eazy-E intended to position Ruthless Records to represent them. Ruthless would offer up a new, more cinematic version of hip-hop music that gave voice to the vilified.³⁵

While still refining his reality rap vision, Eazy-E continued to run his company’s production and distribution, reaping the benefits of his own relentless promotion on his Los Angeles home turf. His efforts had helped solidify the label’s appeal in the county, with limited reach in Northern California and the South. Early on, Ruthless found its most enthusiastic audience within the KDAY broadcast range and, by 1988, had managed to earn young fans beyond the LA bubble with the help of a smattering of event bookings in the San Francisco Bay Area and retail connections in Texas, Louisiana, and Memphis. But it was Bryan Turner’s Priority Records that proved to be a better conduit for connecting Ruthless Records’ brand of street rap to the broader—and whiter—public.

Priority Records had an extensive catalog of record releases and, now, a fresh reputation for having manufactured a pop sensation with the California Raisins, but it did not make a habit of signing recording acts. In its first years of operation, it only licensed music. Just as their forebears at K-Tel had done for over two decades, Bryan Turner and Mark Cerami purchased the privilege to reproduce, cover, and sell copyrighted tracks, which were then folded into best-of compilations. It was a modestly lucrative strategy for selling records that steered the company away from dealing directly with artists and hepled it avoid the expense of building up a library of original music. The label had few incentives to offer recording contracts, and it had even fewer resources to gamble on unsigned acts.

By early 1988, however, sales of Priority’s titles associated with the Raisins—“We sold millions of those stupid things,” Turner reflected—drew the attention of artists seeking label representation and, at the same time, filled the company’s war chest. In a position to venture into new territory, Turner and Cerami intended to follow in the path of hip-hop’s first successful indie labels, including Profile and Def Jam, who Cerami defined as run by “entrepreneurs … who felt the excitement surrounding the music and saw the potential for it.” Like them, Priority’s young executives wanted to seize on the phenomenon “going on in the clubs and on the streets” that major label executives “were slow to recognize.”³⁶ With both the financial resources and the desire to invest in rap, Turner and Cerami refashioned themselves as label A&Rs, poring over cassette tape demos and meeting with talent managers, including Jerry Heller.

“What impressed me about NWA and Eazy-E,” Turner remembered of his response to Heller’s pitch, “was that these guys lived the things they talk about.” Rather than homing in on hit songs in the Ruthless catalog, he picked up on the Compton label’s recipe: entertainment from the periphery or, more plainly, raw stories told by society’s outcasts. Turner recognized that, as tabloid-like coverage of the drama in LA’s ganglands created intrigue, the audience for NWA’s brand of music would grow. Turner saw how NWA’s reality rap could tap right into, and perhaps even inform, the feverish debate about black youth, crime, and policing being amplified by cable television news. “All I was hearing on the news was the perspective of the police,” he said, but conspicuously absent from the coverage were the voices of the black kids—the “outsiders.” Turner and Cerami struck up a production deal with Heller for Priority to partner with Eazy-E and NWA. As Turner said of his company’s new investment, “It really hit me that their side of the story is important to tell.”37 Over the objections of some of Priority’s most important retail clients, Turner and Cerami dug in, betting on Ruthless as the wellspring of the next generation of hip-hop.

Priority’s wager was based first and foremost on Eazy-E’s edgy reality rap concept, that rappers could present their version of LA’s “ghetto truths” to provoke audiences. Turner’s memory of first meeting NWA was that he said “Let’s do it. This is some scary stuff. It will scare some white people here.” After all, plenty of reporters, politicians, filmmakers, and news anchors had piqued the public’s interest by doing the same.³⁸ Second, it was grounded in one specific market observation: as Turner saw, in spite of radio blackouts “everyone is into rap now, even 12-year-old white kids in Texas.”³⁹ And third, it was a partnership custom made for the harsh reality that the traditional workings of the recording industry were stacked against hip-hop artists, and only by skirting those conventions could success be achieved. All of these considerations grew out of the new, unprecedented role for television in the marketing of music, a sea of change happening in the 1980s that altered the very anatomy of the recording industry, and in doing so, created new avenues for Los Angeles rap.

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To be sure, television had long played a role in music promotion. In the 1950s, for instance, the advent of television variety shows hosted by the likes of Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan, and of course the American Bandstand program that would make Dick Clark such a force, gave recording artists the chance to seduce a national audience larger than any they could ever assemble on the concert circuit. Radio still reached more people, but television recalibrated listeners’ relationships with musicians, magnifying the importance of the artist’s visual image. Moreover, early television music programming taught record labels to privilege rather than merely patronize teenage consumers, who made up more and more of television’s viewership with each decade. In the 1970s, popular syndicated dance shows like Solid Gold and Don Cornelius’s Soul Train proved to television broadcasters and record companies just how fruitful, and lucrative, a cross-media partnership centered on a young demographic could be.⁴⁰

The launch of MTV in the early 1980s complicated that alliance. Initially, it seemed a foolish idea for any television producer to forego road-tested variety and dance-show formats in order to screen prerecorded videos. That was especially true because virtually all videos first available were press-kit fodder—shorts created by labels at low cost to push new recording artists. Before the 1980s, music videos were cheaply made promotional videotapes, which might only play on loop during in-store appearances or be used for international publicity. Directors, artists, and talent managers considered them a “curiosity” at best and “lavatory paper” at worst.⁴¹ The architects of MTV, however, envisioned a near future in which the videos would get better—and a fortune to be made by stitching them together just as radio DJs did with records. The young staffers on the MTV payroll, many coming straight from FM and college radio programming, saw no reason not to create a parallel to the radio market using these otherwise disposable short films. As founding executive John Lack recalled, “A video radio station—that was my dream.”⁴²

Rather than replicate the one-size-fits-all approach they saw inhibiting the producers of even the most daring, late-night network shows like Saturday Night Live and The Midnight Special, MTV’s founders refused to design a channel “to please everybody.” In 1981, in the midst of a national recession and a music industry slump, John Sykes, a founding member of the MTV team serving as promotion director, told a room full of skeptical record-label executives that the old broadcast networks had failed them. “We live in a very fragmented society which just won’t support a mass appeal, network-style format anymore,” he argued, touting MTV’s “target audience” concept. MTV took its inspiration from the world of radio, in which a given station pegged its format to a particular music style and carved out a listening audience with specific demographics, whether based on age, race, region, gender, or class.⁴³ When it premiered in 1981, MTV was simply a visual iteration of FM radio in which a three- to five-minute film set to a song counted both as airplay (or, in industry lingo, a spin) and as powerful advertising for the artist. Jack Schneider, who had worked in radio and television before investing in MTV, stressed that, as novel as it might have seemed, the concept of music television was virtually identical to the radio station with its microphone, transmitter, and stack of records. “We are simply adding the video aspect to it,” he said. Even the practical experience of turning on MTV was similar to tuning into a favorite DJ’s program on a rock radio station. As Ann Wilson of Heart remembered, “You could just put it on and party around the TV.”⁴⁴

Even as they offered the reassuring parallels to radio, MTV’s creators promoted their outlet as a unique and, more pointedly, a subversive force that would disrupt the entire media landscape. And, indeed, it did pull off the neat trick of having viewers like Ann Wilson not seem to recognize, or care, that they were watching long-play television commercials. The use of chyrons on music videos to identify the track title, artist, album, and label built brand awareness (a feature that set MTV promotion apart from marketing on radio, where DJs often neglected to mention any song information at all). MTV was, in essence, a twenty-four-hour infomercial for the recording industry.

Record labels, still trying to recuperate from a global decline in record sales, responded by hiring better directors, stylists, and film editors to showcase their products. Meanwhile, artists discovered—and sometimes bemoaned—a new obligation to develop an on-screen persona. “I hated making videos,” Billy Joel recalled. “I became a musician because I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a movie star.”⁴⁵ A Capitol Records marketing executive conceded that, as MTV established itself as a media force, “the look of an act” became as important as talent, if not more.⁴⁶ Producer Rick Rubin, who worked with Run-DMC, agreed that MTV “changed what was expected of an artist. The job changed. It became a job of controlling your image.”⁴⁷ By the early 1980s, the recording industry could already see how music television was revolutionizing American pop culture: visual concepts were suddenly essential to success in music.

Music television altered the way people consumed music, broadly speaking. But for rap music, the impact was mixed. It appeared to be the ideal medium for hip-hop, which was, from its creation, a visual music culture. Hip-hop coevolved with street art and dance; it was a genre that, like disco in the 1970s, had been incubated within party scenes dripping in provocative style and colorful innuendo. Over the course of the 1980s, it came to center on the theatrical appeal of the streetwise rapper—whose “hardness” appealed to suburban kids because it made him, in the words of cultural critic Jonathan Gold “an image of what their parents feared most.”⁴⁸ While established rockers of the 1960s and 1970s initially “didn’t get the point” and “didn’t care” about shooting videos, most of the central figures of hip-hop’s pioneering generation immediately saw the value.⁴⁹ In videos for tracks like Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” hip-hop artists and their labels showed an embrace of a medium that, as a commercial force, was as improbable as they were.⁵⁰

Hip-hop artists only stood to benefit from the fact that, already by 1983, video programming had begun to undermine radio’s monopoly on music marketing. Music television was a brand new avenue of exposure—a way to break through for an entire genre that found the path to radio playlists blocked. Across the spectrum of radio outlets, from top 40 to urban contemporary, program directors ignored hip-hop throughout its first decade. The black stations that had traditionally been a refuge for African-American musicians unable to crack the white-dominated pop radio market were also loath to play rap. Even in the mid-1980s, when Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and other acts began booking stadium tours, some black radio outlets refused to include hip-hop on their playlists and even plugged this exclusion on the air. As MTV gained industry muscle, rap labels felt less need to spend energy and resources trying to win over these stations. “I’m tired of talking about black radio now,” Def Jam’s Bill Stephney commented. “Now kids are reacting to videos instead of radio.… The whole focus has switched.”⁵¹ Russell Simmons noted that MTV presented his artists with something black FM could not provide: access to large white audiences.⁵² For Run-DMC in particular, Simmons coveted the success that a handful of superstars had enjoyed by keeping their black following while winning millions of white fans, too. Billboard’s Nelson George wrote about this version of the classic “crossover,” which he defined as “a strategy for growing your music-buying audience from a black audience to a larger white one,” and credited Prince in particular with “leaping over the barriers that constrained most artists of color.”⁵³ (Later, in the 1990s, “crossover” picked up a negative connotation in some circles as it was used to label commercially popular rappers as pedestrian—or worse, “corny.” But back in the 1980s, the term could refer to black triumph over the music industry’s color line.)

The problem was, for all of the potential advantages it offered hip-hop, MTV replicated, in its early years, the very conservatism that had historically pervaded both television and radio. Since the dawn of television, network executives and variety program hosts, highly attuned to sponsors’ preferences and audience ratings had shied away from any artists perceived as polarizing. It was a position that, in practice, disproportionately impacted black musicians who did not reflect or were not familiar to overwhelmingly white, suburban network television audiences. This, of course, ran counter to the needs of established black-owned recording labels like Motown and SOLAR, but it was particularly disadvantageous to the younger companies trying to develop and market rookie black talent.

In the early 1980s, heavyweights like James Brown, Ray Charles, and Natalie Cole could secure guest spots on, for instance, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and NBC’s Saturday Night Live—both of which had already featured many black artists. Black-owned record labels also carved out space for their artists in primetime specials, like Motown 25, and syndicated programming including Don Cornelius’s Soul Train and The Jackson 5ive cartoon series. By contrast, the freshman class of hip-hop artists and their labels found virtually no support on network television. That remained true until the late 1980s, with just two notable exceptions. First, in September 1980, rapper Kurtis Blow appeared on Don Cornelius’s Saturday morning dance program Soul Train. Cornelius, a founder of SOLAR Records, crafted Soul Train as a showcase of mostly African-American talents for whom network television invitations were elusive. By the 1970s, Cornelius was a nationally recognized star who, as Nelson George described, offered a window into “this entire other world of black style and black music.”⁵⁴ But Cornelius, like his contemporaries in black radio, could not and did not hide his disdain for rap. He suffered through Blow’s performance, obviously irked by the New York kid and his unmusical music. The other exception came in February 1981, when the Bronx ensemble Funky 4 + 1 More performed on Saturday Night Live. The group’s appearance, often interpreted as a landmark moment in hip-hop history, was not due to a decision made by the show’s talent coordinators; they were brought on board by the episode’s host, Debbie Harry. The new-wave goddess, slated as both host and musical act (with her band Blondie), used her celebrity to expose the show’s national audience to a piece of the edgy New York music scene she adored.⁵⁵

When MTV premiered in 1981, it promised change—a leap toward a more enlightened future for the entire world of music entertainment. Its creators, Bob Pittman and Fred Seibert, cast MTV in the image of the NASA moon landing. As Seibert later laughed, “We were the most conceited, arrogant people.… We thought: We’re gonna change the face of television!”⁵⁶ But by the end of MTV’s freshman year, the self-proclaimed mavericks of television were being called out in many quarters for doing nothing to overturn the racial discrimination that had long plagued the medium. Frustrated record-label executives demanded that MTV’s founders account for the exclusion of black artists from its video playlists. Singer Rick James was one of the first to publicly accuse the cable channel of “blatant racism,” after it rejected the video for his hit record “Super Freak.” Black Music Association Executive Director George Ware proposed taking the matter up with the Federal Communications Commission, to charge MTV with racially discriminatory practices.⁵⁷

MTV’s Sykes had little patience for the accusations, explaining, “We don’t sit in a room and say, ‘they’re black, we won’t use them.’” He stressed that MTV’s programming was equivalent to a radio station with an album-oriented rock format—versus, say, a country, classical, or urban contemporary format—and reminded his growing chorus of critics, “We are going after a rock audience.”⁵⁸ But disco star Sylvester (Sylvester James, Jr.) rejected MTV’s format justification as disingenuous. The segmentation seemed a convenient means of exclusion: “You have to be either black or rock, with no merging between different types of music. And if you’re black, you have to be r&b.” Meanwhile, white R&B acts, like Hall & Oates, Culture Club, and The Eurythmics, all had videos accepted by the network’s acquisitions committee and each appeared in heavy rotation.⁵⁹ Even David Bowie, one of MTV’s earliest luminaries and a beneficiary of its openness to white artists who played black music, used an on-air interview at the station itself to challenge it: “Why are there practically no black artists on the network?”⁶⁰ A few years later, Les Garland, the MTV executive tasked with overseeing program content for the channel, would say the problem had been a matter of supply: “simply stated, there were few videos playing by black artists because few had been made.” Yet, for every Donna Summer and Tina Turner video MTV played, there were known to be many others—including chart-toppers Rick James, Michael Jackson, and Prince—whose videos had been turned down.⁶¹

In the early 1980s, the greatest hope black artists had to overcome MTV’s rejection was, ironically, that it would succeed well enough to inspire competition against it. The company was operating on a new business model and had yet to turn a profit, but the model seemed workable enough to lay the groundwork for other emerging cable channels looking to hook new viewers. Even established broadcast television companies seeking to revitalize stale programming followed MTV’s lead. And they all benefited from the fact that MTV had not cornered the music video market.

Indeed, through the first half of the decade, television producers piled onto the “video music bandwagon.”⁶² Inspired by MTV’s experiment, television producers rushed to carve out space in the cable landscape for their own vision of music entertainment. The USA Network offered both Radio 1990 and Night Flight, a weekend series that featured music from “outside the mainstream,” including punk, reggae, and Latin rock, along with music documentaries, concert clips, comedy, and other material that, according to the show’s creators, “has not been shown on other networks, but has a high entertainment value.”⁶³ With Chartbusters, Power Play, and Night Tracks, the Turner Broadcasting System replicated MTV’s more streamlined model, with hosts playing popular videos and little else.⁶⁴ Black Entertainment Television introduced its Video Soul series focused on “urban contemporary” music, a blend of R&B, dance, and pop that paralleled the breadth of black FM radio. The Nashville Network compiled country music videos in its Country Clips series. “Premium cable” and satellite television subscribers, still a tiny percentage of all television viewers, had a range of other options, as well, including Album Flash on Cinemax, HBO’s Video Jukebox, and The Playboy Channel’s Hot Rocks, which hyped its prerogative to play the videos MTV declared too obscene to screen.⁶⁵ Meanwhile, Miami Cablevision partnered with Southern Bell Telephone to create a remarkably lucrative twenty-four-hour video channel that was interactive; its programming was driven by viewers who called a 976 toll-call service and paid to have requests played on air.⁶⁶

Cable television had no monopoly on early music-video programming. Because the vast majority of American households for much of the decade did not subscribe to any cable provider at all, MTV’s inaccessibility to most music fans generated incentives for network television to design traditional, advertising-supported options. Clip shows, specials, and music channels proliferated on the networks, feeding consumer demand while also orienting the wider American viewing public to the phenomenon of music videos.

When NBC unveiled its Friday Night Videos series in July of 1983, the music press announced, “Viewers without cable can now get their fix.”⁶⁷ NBC promoted the weekly show, scheduled to follow Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, as a late-night companion to the network’s Saturday Night Live. Certainly, like SNL, the new show could lean on NBC’s historical ties to the recording industry to recruit A-list music talent. The ambition was greater than that, however. Promising not only top video clips from top stars but also exclusive “World Premieres,” Friday Night Videos aspired to leave a mark on music culture as deep as SNL’s influence on comedy.⁶⁸ Executive producer Dick Ebersol, noting in 1983 that “more than nine-tenths of the US has never seen MTV,” also pledged to showcase “good rhythm and blues,” committing to serve the larger market that MTV, with its overwhelmingly white programming, was ignoring. Although critics tended to see it as merely an “MTV clone” and derided it for airing fluff pieces—“It should just shut up and play the music,” Variety’s television reviewer declared—Friday Night Videos was an early ratings success.⁶⁹

It was not alone. ABC scored its own late-night syndicated hit with New York Hot Tracks. By the mid-1980s, some eighty stations carried the program, and in the nation’s biggest television markets, it competed directly with NBC’s Friday Night Videos. According to producer Brooke Bailey, Hot Tracks was successful because it did three things that set it apart from other network video programs. It spotlighted neglected videos, with an emphasis on black artists; it flaunted the show’s culturally renowned urban setting, regularly filming inside New York nightclubs and music venues, including the historically black-oriented Apollo Theatre; and it curated its playlists for a predominantly nonwhite viewership. Whereas Friday Night Videos occasionally played R&B, perhaps to avoid the bad publicity MTV had earned for “video bigotry,” Hot Tracks sought to be the broadcast networks’ leader in black music video programming.⁷⁰

Meanwhile, by the end of 1985, close to a dozen music video channels had cropped up in regional markets on UHF and low-power frequencies. While certainly lacking viewership on the scale of New York Hot Tracks, they could provide their audiences with what Variety described as “a cross between the MTV cable service and a local radio station that plays contemporary music all day and night.” In this very practical way, small-outlet producers and programmers in cities across the country, including Las Vegas, Houston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco, anchored music shows to local communities. Many aired “homegrown videos,” interviewed hometown artists, featured call-in request shows, and even reported the local weather.⁷¹ Viewers of Rick Kurkjian’s Oakland-based California Music Channel were treated to San Francisco landscapes and ads from Bay Area businesses including the Oakland Invaders (a short-lived professional football team).⁷² Lanny Ziering, the producer of KWHY-TV’s Video LA, said, “We can’t compete against services like MTV. But we can focus on local groups, focus on local events, local concerts, local acts, local hits.”⁷³ John Garbedian of Boston’s WVJV-TV explained the strategy more succinctly: “We’ve localized, localized, localized.”⁷⁴

By 1988, American television viewers had at their disposal over one hundred music video programs, most of them focused on pop, rock, and R&B. Furthermore, as New York Times music critic Jon Pareles observed, the “high-fashion, high-velocity visual style” of the music video had permeated everything from commercials to scripted dramas like Miami Vice. As music television saturated the market, top to bottom, Cynthia Friedland, creator of Night Flight, worried that overproduction of music programming was depressing consumer demand for it. “Video is no longer a novelty,” she lamented. “Every time you turn on the TV set you’ve got another video, and if you switch the channel, you’re likely to see the same one.” As individual shows’ ratings sank and advertisers began to flee, the music video industry was pressed to rethink the value of its principal product. Commenting on the rapid maturation of the market, Night Tracks producer Tom Lynch offered an analogy that must have sounded ominous to rock ’n’ rollers’ ears. Music television, he said, had become “like a middle-aged man.”⁷⁵

By the late 1980s, MTV was staring down the fate that haunted any programmer committed to an aging format: irrelevance. Thus, the original trailblazer of music video programming, and the catalyst for its proliferation, sought newer, bigger ideas. The most significant of those came from two New Yorkers in MTV’s promotions department, Pete Dougherty and Ted Demme. Both men were fans of hip-hop with ties to New York’s edgiest music scenes. Dougherty had spent his teen years going to punk and glam rock clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, and he considered producer Rick Rubin and graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy to be good friends; Demme was a dyed-in-the-wool rap fan who was, unlike his bosses at MTV, attentive to the growing popularity of hip-hop in spite of its lack of commercial exposure.⁷⁶ Both were adamant that rap music could rejuvenate the cable channel.

The idea was not a profound one. Years before Ted Demme began hounding MTV’s general manager and bugging the company’s entire music department about “the next wave of music,” others within the recording and television industries were making noise about hip-hop and its unappreciated potential.⁷⁷ With strong sales numbers to bolster their case, Def Jam’s Bill Stephney and Russell Simmons had labored mightily to convince cable networks to support rap artists and their music. Undaunted by rejection, they remained confident that rap programming, once adopted, would draw audiences across regional, racial, and class lines.⁷⁸ Hunting in the late 1980s for a bright spot in a dulled video television landscape, TBS’s Night Tracks creator Tom Lynch concluded that rap music was “the only good thing that’s happened” and that rap videos possessed “the fun rock used to have.”⁷⁹ Priority Records founder Bryan Turner, of course, was another devoted hip-hop fan who, like Demme, was eager to create avenues of national exposure for rappers (and their labels). He told the Los Angeles Times in 1986 that it did not take extraordinary insight to see that white kids were rap’s latest and most enthusiastic converts.⁸⁰

New York Hot Tracks provided the proof to these arguments. When it first debuted in 1983, the late-night show was a scrappy “vidclip” series that featured not just black videos but hip-hop videos—lots of them. It was originally carried by just one ABC-affiliated station in New York, not far from the uptown nightclubs and street scenes that served as backdrops for the mostly low-budget rap shorts. Within a year, however, New York Hot Tracks was syndicated, carried by dozens of stations throughout the country and competing directly, in its regular timeslot, with NBC’s Friday Night Videos. It was a baffling development at a time when virtually every other music and television outlet recoiled at the idea of playing hip-hop, assuming that audiences would be repelled by it. Just as astonishing was the fact that New York Hot Tracks frequently outperformed Friday Night Videos—the series that was meant to be as culturally transformative as Saturday Night Live. Unlike its bigger-budget competitor, New York Hot Tracks did not mimic the MTV model, and its content was not geared for a general white viewership. Indeed, the show billing itself as “The ‘Hottest’ Late-Night Music Video Program in America” was, as rap promoter Monica Lynch said, “the great black hope.”⁸¹

In the midst of their own company’s scramble to refresh its programming, Demme and Dougherty seized on the opportunity Hot Tracks handed them. By pointing to its surprising national popularity, and years of impressive hip-hop sales numbers, they prevailed in their campaign to bring rap—its videos, its artists, and its visual culture—to MTV. In the fall of 1988, after airing a one-off hip-hop special that broke ratings records, MTV unveiled its new weekly series: Yo! MTV Raps. The program, featured music videos, but was equally defined by the kind of home-turf, venue-based segments that had set New York Hot Tracks apart from its competitors. The show’s first host, Fab 5 Freddy, rejected the conventional in-studio “VJ” format and instead ventured out into the neighborhoods, homes, and hangouts of the rap artists he profiled to conduct interviews and tape video introductions.

Yo! MTV Raps stayed in its own lane as a television program distinctively committed to hip-hop culture and the varied perspectives of black youth, turning what Greg Mack had done for half a decade on KDAY radio in Los Angeles into a national phenomenon. For much of the 1980s, KDAY had been the only broadcast outlet defined by its hip-hop patronage; it was a kind of lone prophet on a media landscape that treated the genre as if it barely existed.⁸²

Yo! MTV Raps took up that mantle, however, within months of its premiere—a profound shift, even for those in California within reach of KDAY’s signal. “Now we had a national show dedicated to our music,” Ice Cube explained. Years later, Snoop Dogg would recall how MTV’s new series amplified hip-hop, creating opportunities for exposure he had always assumed were exclusive to white rock artists. For him, as a Long Beach teen entertaining fantasies of a music career in rap, Yo! was a revelation.⁸³ Carlton “Chuck D” Ridenhour, the politically outspoken front man for New York’s Public Enemy, said that hip-hop was “headline news,” and that made Yo! MTV Raps “the Black CNN.” It presented black life, in stereo. Just like Ted Turner’s pioneering twenty-four-hour Cable News Network, Yo! functioned as a revolutionary new platform for reflecting on the most captivating people and events of the moment.⁸⁴

Within months of its debut, remarkably high ratings prompted MTV producers to move Yo! MTV Raps to a full-hour timeslot, to produce it daily, and to rescreen episodes during early-morning programming. By early 1989, Yo! was airing twelve hours per week. As Def Jam’s Bill Adler declared, kids of all backgrounds “have gotten a whiff of rap on MTV and now they’ve begun to demand it.”⁸⁵ For their part, black kids throughout the country needed no “whiff” to draw them to a genre they had been consuming for over a decade. But what Bill Adler recognized, along with Yo! MTV Raps architect Ted Demme and MTV general manager Lee Masters, was that other young viewers—particularly white teenage boys—were tuning in, too. Ironically, in light of all the charges that had been leveled at the channel’s discriminatory programming, Yo! put MTV on track to become an outlet dependent on a genre that was predominantly black, even as its viewership remained mostly white.⁸⁶

For host Fab 5 Freddy, the fact that MTV’s audience was largely white presented radical opportunities. “We know how whites live,” he explained of American culture in the 1980s. “We don’t have to think about it. Motion picture, television, they’re all full of how white people live, act, how they kiss.” But the introduction of a nationally broadcast hip-hop show, which orbited around black music, black art, black humor, black vernacular, and black individuality, and had a mostly white viewership, meant that “now things are swinging around a little bit.”⁸⁷ Fab 5 Freddy, and the show’s eventual in-studio hosts James “Ed Lover” Roberts and Andre “Doctor Dré” Brown, aligned their work with that of activists and artists across generations, from the nineteenth-century muckraking of Ida B. Wells and the pageantry of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA to the literature of James Baldwin and the comedy of Richard Pryor. All of them took aim in their different ways at a national culture that perpetuated inequality by ignoring dimensions of black humanity. Thinking along the same lines, Doug Herzog, MTV senior vice president of programming in the late 1980s, claimed that Yo! was as instructive as it was entertaining, particularly for the channel’s young, white viewers. “If you are seventeen years old and living in Des Moines, you’re not going to pick up the New York Times,” he asserted, but by tuning into Yo! MTV Raps, “you’re going to learn a little more about race in America.”⁸⁸ MTV’s executive vice president Lee Masters, originally a hip-hop skeptic, was happy to admit that, within months of Yo!’s debut, rap had become one of his channel’s biggest attractions in its history, on par with new wave and metal.⁸⁹ But on top of this, MTV’s executives were saying that rap programming was healthy for America.

Commercial validation—that is, exposure via mainstream outlets that catered to white audiences—mattered to hip-hop artists, promoters, and rap recording labels. From its inception, hip-hop’s inability to capture white audiences large enough to gain entry into the media mainstream had excluded it from commercial outlets and threatened its long-term viability. In this context, the launch of Yo! MTV Raps was a watershed event, particularly for those hip-hop leaders, like Def Jam’s Russell Simmons, who imagined rap as broad-appeal “teenage music” rather than a race-specific dance trend whose time would quickly pass.⁹⁰

But Yo!’s hosts did not simply view themselves as cultural ambassadors to America’s heartland, and nor was their only objective to crack open pop markets for hip-hop. They were at least as interested in stitching together disparate rap cultures. By the mid-1980s, it was obvious that the genre was rapidly evolving, and no longer wholly defined by Bronx ingenuity, East Village exposure, and Queens style. Instead, hip-hop was flourishing as a set of regionally distinctive and innovative music scenes, each fostering homegrown talent and reflecting local experiences—more and more of them a long way from New York. Fab 5 Freddy was a globetrotting artist with music industry ties who had rare insight into rap’s sweeping influence, and privileged access to all its geographically unique variants. As a painter steeped in the postmodern art movements of the era, he was a principled advocate of cultural blending who helped draw together New York’s uptown street parties and downtown gallery scene. It was all part of what made him “the coolest person in New York.”⁹¹ Using his postmodernist insight, Freddy aimed to fuse together America’s various hip-hop sects. Early in his tenure at MTV, he boasted, “I’m the king of synthesis.”⁹²

From its debut, Yo! MTV Raps did more than provide a platform for artists to promote their wares and court skeptical radio programmers; it became “the most important force in hip-hop” because it connected them, by offering a window into the far-flung reaches of American hip-hop and the many contexts in which it flourished. Between videos, Yo! was replete with artist interviews and hometown profiles. These segments, which often mimicked news reporting, introduced audiences to a patchwork of the creative styles and real lives rooted in such distinct locales as Bed-Stuy, Queens, Miami Beach, West Philadelphia, Houston’s Fifth Ward, East Point Atlanta, Oakland, and Compton (Fig. 4.3).⁹³

The Yo! MTV Raps platform was tailor-made for the West Coast rappers who already understood quite well that breakout success in the expanding, fractured, and increasingly competitive field of hip-hop did not come from music alone. Neither was it a simple product of radio adds or music video airings. Those things mattered, to be sure—but market demand hinged, more than ever before, on image and intrigue.

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By the time MTV unveiled its rap programming, NWA and its handlers had already proven adept at spinning media attention into promotional gold. Inventive forms of marketing and distribution had defined the early experiences of the group, individually and collectively. These were self-reliant music makers who had paid cash for pressings and personally distributed cassettes and vinyl on the street, at swap meets, out of car trunks, and to local DJs. The key disadvantage of independence—the lack of advance financial support from a big business entity—spurred each to hone their marketing hustle. The K-Tel veterans at Priority Records who, by contrast, did have rich investors in their corner, still banked on this type of promotional strategy to limit overhead costs while growing their nascent rap label. Bryan Turner’s own “but-wait-there’s-more” lineage informed his decision to sign Eazy-E and NWA, who promised to encourage “impulse buying” by raising eyebrows with cutting-edge production, taboo topics, and a rebel image. Plugging the talent on the Ruthless roster, he boasted, “[these] are guys who don’t pull any punches.”⁹⁴

Fig 4.3  Fab 5 Freddy (bottom row, left) pictured in Elysian Park in Central Los Angeles, with Compton rapper Anthony “Tone Loc” Smith, members of Oakland’s Digital Underground, Eazy-E and MC Ren of NWA, and Michael Concepcion, a founder and former member of the Los Angeles Crips. All were featured in a 1990 Yo! MTV Raps  segment on the video shoot for “We’re All in The Same Gang.” Jeff Kavitz / FilmMagic, Inc. / Getty Images.

The Ruthless and Priority camps both operated on the premise that controversy was currency. With enough of it, artists and their labels could afford to bypass traditional promotional routes, like pitching to regulated media outlets and producing rock-crossover records, as Def Jam had done in the mid-1980s with mixed results. Priority Records manufactured and distributed Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-E’s debut studio album Eazy-Duz-It widely. But the company invested few resources in marketing the music to radio and television program directors. Like Eazy-E, Turner thought it was a waste of money and manpower when the product he was pushing drew plenty of free publicity (a lesson he had learned well with the success of the California Raisins). Eazy-E was pleased to have a profit motive to encourage his crew to express themselves without limit, to create music they liked without regard for recording industry standards, and to drive the genre forward by elevating the West Coast.⁹⁵

Straight Outta Compton stunned rap fans and critics alike. It was an album packed with expletives, which was still a rather extraordinary phenomenon in hip-hop music; its obscene content alone was fodder for music writers, particularly in the wake of the protests following the RIAA’s controversial decision to place “parental advisory” stickers on music it deemed indecent. “Explicit lyrics on parade,” Billboard alerted its readers. The Independent noted sardonically that NWA’s debut “involves heavy rotation of the word ‘motherf—er,’ without which the album would be considerably shorter.” The Guardian compared the group’s music to Andrew “Dice” Clay’s comedy, in that both dared to “say the unsayable” to test the boundaries of liberalism. Rather than “blunt or transcend the savagery of their milieu,” it continued, “they appear to revel in it.”⁹⁶ Meanwhile, a pop music writer for the Los Angeles Times noted that NWA’s “X-rated tales about gang violence” had drawn the ire of critics “who feel the records glorify gang behavior.” Still, that reviewer’s assessment of the album was that “for all its crudeness, [NWA] exhibits a sense of artistic spirit and vision.”⁹⁷

Fanning further curiosity—and outrage—was the group’s own name, which it did not spell out but left as an acronym for audiences to surmise. The group effectively baited reporters and critics into filling in the forbidden epithet and then finding themselves in a conversation about race. Only in late 1989, after months of awkward press descriptions of the group’s moniker, did Ice Cube disclose on Fox Television’s Pump It Up! that he and his bandmates chose the name “Niggaz Wit Attitudes” because “we wanted to scare a lot of people, start a little commotion.” The name alone was a deliberate choice, Eazy-E later told Spin, crafted to assert “the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude.”⁹⁸

More impactful than anything else the young talents at Ruthless / Priority did, they cast themselves as the black outlaw face of LA and, by doing so, asserted a bold corrective to the standard mythologies of the place. “Whenever the media shows California,” Ice Cube told the Guardian in 1989, “all they picture is beaches and pretty girls; they never go to our neighborhood.”⁹⁹ There had always been tales of Los Angeles, of course, that challenged La-La Land lore; in the 1980s, these included neo-noir and cop films. Crime and poverty, gang wars and drug trafficking, death and despair were all on display in big studio productions like Repo Man, To Live and Die in L.A., Lethal Weapon, and Colors. Film narratives captivated audiences with fictional interpretations of the seamy underside of America’s most fabled promised land. But they did so through a white lens. As Ice Cube argued, even the controversial Colors, which employed real Los Angeles gang-affiliated youth as extras, was filmed on gang turf, and included a range of complex and sympathetic black characters, was at its core a film about a pair of white LAPD officers. Colors exposed many Americans to LA’s gang crisis for the first time, Cube noted, but what they witnessed was mainly “the police point of view” rather than a story that evoked his personal reality. Priority’s Bryan Turner took every opportunity to echo this theme, telling the music press that his artists “lived the things they talk about,” in sharp contrast to the script and screenplay writers out there. Indeed, in the context of a growing fascination with troubled Los Angeles, and sensational national news reporting on crimes in the region, Straight Outta Compton sounded like documentary. “This is the real world of Colors,” one critic pronounced.¹⁰⁰

When NWA first appeared on Yo! MTV Raps in the spring of 1989, just a few months after both its album and MTV’s new hip-hop show had debuted, the group’s shock-oriented marketing strategy had only barely paid dividends, even with an album brimming with scandalous content. In the fall of 1988, the National Academy of Songwriters picked Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Ruthless manager Jerry Heller, as experts on LA rap, to star as keynote speakers at a “Raptalk” seminar in Santa Monica. A few significant adds on urban contemporary radio, and Eazy-E’s appearance on the Top Pop Album chart, also earned Priority Records a feature in a December 1988 issue of Billboard. The trade publication credited the label with “zeroing in on the hardcore side of California hip-hop.”¹⁰¹ It was not much compared to the hype swirling around New York-based acts like Run-DMC and LL Cool J, or around the emerging Afrocentric “New School” artists, including De La Soul, Queen Latifah, and Public Enemy. But it was enough to secure NWA a prized spot as guests on Yo!

The MTV show presented rap music videos within the context of human-interest stories, and NWA had the potential to be the most interesting story of them all. Yo! host Fab 5 Freddy took MTV’s cameras into Compton. As was his usual mode of operation, he refused to sequester his LA guests inside the network’s stuffy New York studio and instead traveled west to embed himself in their world. There, both host and subject worked to rouse the viewing audience with images that contradicted popular California clichés. Freddy introduced the NWA segment with a nod to the prevailing narratives of Los Angeles—that it produced Hollywood celebrities, beach bodies, and suburban bliss, but not street rap. Then the members of NWA appeared, draped around the “Welcome to Compton” stone marker and dressed, in spite of the sunny weather, in layers of black Los Angeles Kings and Raiders gear. Eazy-E, the crew’s ringleader and Freddy’s prime focus, was most prominently outfitted in a white, bulletproof vest. The group escorted Yo! through their Compton haunts, suggesting along the way that the bungalows and palm trees were not the signposts of paradise after all. This was a ghetto landscape where gangs roamed, police loomed, and black kids were vulnerable to both.

Part music variety show, part investigative reporting, Yo! MTV Raps provided NWA’s members with their first significant, nationally televised opportunity to assert themselves as young innovators who mattered as much for the art they produced as for the reality they personified. The video for “Straight Outta Compton” was not yet complete, so they used their time on Yo! to improvise a powerful visual narrative and demonstrate that “the hardest stuff is coming out of this beautiful place.”¹⁰² The NWA episode of Yo! offered glimpses of easygoing black youth culture in LA, including kids horsing around at a swap meet, friends meandering along Venice Beach, and young men cruising around the neighborhood in classic cars. But it also presented bracing allusions to poverty and violence. The appearance bolstered NWA’s street credibility, giving them a platform to speak as if on behalf of their LA peers, including those in gangs. The rappers could posture as “ghetto reporters” with more authority than the most embedded of CNN correspondents.¹⁰³

The scenes they and Fab 5 Freddy curated resonated with Yo!’s viewers, many of whom, in spite of their interest in hip-hop culture, did not know the group or anything about Compton.¹⁰⁴ Atlanta’s Antwan “Big Boi” Patton was barely fourteen when NWA unmasked Los Angeles for MTV’s rap fans, but remembered the show well. “It was cold blooded,” he said, “it was like, damn, this is their neighborhood! You got introduced to what Compton looks like.” In Philadelphia, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson’s reaction was more visceral: “Bulletproof vests? What the hell!?”¹⁰⁵ Fab 5 Freddy remembered the NWA episode as a potent introduction to an otherwise little-known California group and to their unusually hardcore hip-hop brand. Yo! MTV Raps gave the nation its first taste of Los Angeles reality rap, or as the press preferred to call it, “gangsta rap.”¹⁰⁶

One month after MTV introduced America to NWA, however, the network refused to air the group’s music video for “Straight Outta Compton.” Claiming that its hardcore depiction of a police gang sweep of black teens “glorified violence,” MTV executives passed on a short film that, for all intents and purposes, just reinforced the portrait of “gangsta rap” the channel had already showcased. More importantly, the cable outlet that had always seemed willing to rile censors with rock videos now proved uncomfortable with a dramatization of the sort of police harassment considered routine in black Los Angeles. After introducing its national audience to the most provocative rap group in the genre’s history, immersing viewers in NWA’s striking West Coast origins, and extolling Los Angeles rap’s “ghetto truths,” MTV was refusing to show the most fundamental truth of them all.

NWA and Priority Records deeply resented MTV’s decision for two related reasons. First, the group, especially its founder Eazy-E, craved commercial success. After years of scraping by as self-sustaining independent artists and struggling to hit six-digit sales numbers, the Ruthless crew had dared to dream that MTV would launch them into the mainstream. There were precedents for that hope in, for instance, the explosive success of Philadelphia’s DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Compton’s own Tone Loc, and even NWA’s labelmate J.J. Fad, who all made it big following MTV’s airing of their music videos.¹⁰⁷ Priority Records’ Bryan Turner, a disciple of the original infomercial empire, was incensed with MTV for depriving his most promising act of the promotional exposure the channel could supply. He sent out press releases slamming MTV for censorship and charging the company with racism, an accusation that MTV easily refuted with a statement from hip-hop heavyweights at Def Jam, who defended the network’s decision to “play what they think is right for their program.”¹⁰⁸

Second, as Ice Cube made clear in fiery interviews, the group was angered by a sense of disempowerment. In the course of developing their identities as artists, the young Los Angeles rappers had discovered that commercial success could amplify the voices of the disenfranchised. Notoriety could be leveraged to challenge enemies, including those representing the power of law enforcement. Glen “Daddy-O” Bolton of Stetsasonic noted that NWA “talked about issues,” which made the Compton rappers heroes of “the underground, because they’re saying what people want to hear.”¹⁰⁹ But NWA wanted that message to resonate aboveground, too. “Yo! Shit’s fucked up,” Ice Cube proclaimed. “Somebody’s gonna pay attention.”¹¹⁰

The American public did pay attention, and the fact that MTV did not want it to only sharpened interest. MTV’s refusal to play NWA’s riveting music video was a decision that drove untold numbers of rap fans to the channel’s competitors. Video Jukebox Network (aka The Box) took particular advantage of the situation when it launched nationwide, in March of 1989, under the leadership of a former MTV executive. Its vow was to “play things you are not going to hear on … any of those other channels,” including those rap videos “that wouldn’t fly anywhere else.”¹¹¹ That music video fans had access to “Straight Outta Compton,” even as MTV blacklisted it, gave NWA a bigger platform. Now they were icons of the era’s free speech debates, as well as symbols of LA’s urban crisis. In the spring of that year, NWA graced the cover of an LA Weekly issue featuring an in-depth article on the MTV controversy. Melody Maker, Spin, Yo!, Word Up!, The Guardian, New Musical Express, Billboard, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others, covered “Compton’s Controversial Posse” with fervor. By the summer, NWA’s debut album Straight Outta Compton was certified gold, an achievement sweetened by a sudden burst in ticket sales for the group’s summer concert tour—a venture that Eazy-E arranged hastily that May after plans for the group to perform on Ice-T’s tour fell through. In the space of a month, NWA rose from being an opening act to headlining its own sixty-city concert tour.¹¹²

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When, back in 1987, Capitol Records Chairman Joe Smith thumbed his nose at Jerry Heller’s proposal to sign Eazy-E and NWA, he had asked the wrong question. Smith had challenged Heller’s logic in sponsoring a bunch of California kids who rapped about guns, gangsters, and police: “Who’s going to listen?” The more astute question would have been, “Who’s going to watch?”¹¹³

In a twist, NWA was able to capitalize on music television promotion, generating sales and a torrent of publicity, by highlighting the fact that MTV would not play its music. NWA recognized the opportunities embedded within the rapidly changing media environment of the Reagan era, when visual consumption of music came to the fore and controversy was currency. The group and its label spotted opportunities and used them strategically to garner the kind of attention that would drive commercial success, to pull the focus of hip-hop to the West Coast, and to expose Americans to a veiled corner of LA society. The members of NWA viewed these goals as compatible and even mutually reinforcing; fame promised them strong sales numbers, a spotlight for West Coast rap, and clout as “truth tellers.”

It was a path that made NWA the focal point of hip-hop. It made Los Angeles gangsta rap a target of the FBI. And it primed the public for Rodney King.