CHAPTER 5 Without a Gun and a Badge
. Though never released as a single or a music video, “Fuck tha Police” was, by the summer of 1989, the most recognized song in NWA’s repertoire. Its profane lyrics were quotable, the chorus an obscene three-word earworm, the conceit an anti-state tongue-lashing. “Fuck tha Police” was theatrical, funky, and unusually explicit, with the track’s very title censored on all packaging and promotional materials for the Straight Outta Compton album. It was also considered dangerous and inflammatory. According to the Parents Music Resource Center, the national Fraternal Order of Police, and at least one FBI public affairs officer, the song advocated violence.1 Even in an era of “punk riots,” “porn-rock” Senate hearings, and “parental advisory” stickers, “Fuck tha Police” was a grenade of controversy.2
Ice Cube called the record his “revenge fantasy.” It was a fictional courtroom drama in which each member of NWA took turns prosecuting the Los Angeles Police Department, on trial for abuse of power.3 With Judge Dr. Dre presiding, Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E portrayed ferocious attorneys and star witnesses, detailing in rhyme a litany of crimes including harassment (“Fuckin’ with me ‘cause I’m a teenager / With a little bit of gold and a pager”), excessive force (“They’re scared of a nigga / So they mace me to blind me”), privacy violations (“Search a nigga down and grabbin’ his nuts”), and racial profiling (“Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product / Thinking every nigga is sellin’ narcotics”). Each rapper punctuated his evidence with retaliatory, epithet-filled threats. Ice Cube promised to “swarm / On any muthafucka in a blue uniform,” and mused about a “bloodbath of cops dyin’ in LA.” Ren challenged his uniformed nemesis to “take off the gun” and stand toe-to-toe with him—“And we’ll go at it, punk, and I’m-a fuck you up!” Then, he imagined that with the officer disarmed, he would pick up his gun and transform into a modern-day wild-west vigilante, “takin’ out a cop or two.” Eazy-E, the “gangsta” with “flava,” echoed Ren with his own provocation: “Without a gun and a badge, what do you got? / A sucker in a uniform waiting to get shot.” At the end of the drama, Judge Dre issued his final verdict to the imagined defendant: “The jury has found you guilty of being a redneck, white-bread, chicken-shit mutherfucker.”4
“‘Fuck tha Police’ isn’t a metaphor for anything,” wrote LA Weekly’s culture writer Jonathan Gold in May 1989, attentive to the national furor swirling around NWA’s album cut. The rappers were as literal as they came, Gold concluded, even when they spun vengeance tales. They were also transparently tormented by the system the “chicken-shit mutherfucker” represented. The song that, by the summer, riled the censors and outraged law enforcement was, Gold wrote, “the sort of snarling anti-cop rant left unsaid until the black-and-white is around the corner and safely out of earshot.”5 It was the equivalent of kicking a trash can.
LA Weekly had spent a spring day that year interviewing the NWA rappers for their first-ever magazine cover feature. The paper determined that the once-obscure rap group, who in 1988 played second fiddle to pop-crossover label mates J.J. Fad, had earned the Weekly’s treasured spotlight. Straight Outta Compton was certified gold; hip-hop’s illustrious ambassador Fab 5 Freddy had profiled the group on the nationally broadcast Yo! MTV Raps; and the crew had moved from opening for the dance-crossover sensation Salt-N-Pepa to headlining over rap star MC Hammer. Plus, along the way, the music press eagerly underwrote the rappers’ claim to being “street reporters.” It was a title with growing cachet in the emerging culture of cable news and tabloid television—a genre that included Geraldo Rivera’s American Vice, the crowdsourced crime series America’s Most Wanted, and, by that spring, Fox Broadcasting’s Cops.6 The young Los Angeles rappers recognized the industry’s fascination with their “urban-gangster life,” and in a slew of media appearances, they delivered on the buzz. The newly-minted hip-hop stars prepared for their big LA Weekly photo shoot by rummaging through a canvas duffel bag stuffed with pistols, shotguns, and rifles. Ice Cube boasted to the magazine, “NWA can’t get any harder unless the streets get harder, know what I’m saying?” But the menacing props, just like the “gangsta rap” label affixed to NWA’s brand of hip-hop, obscured the deepest message embedded in the group’s most controversial song. As Jonathan Gold understood, “Fuck tha Police” was an uncensored expression of powerlessness—a fantasy about scoring a victory when defeat was already a burning reality.7
Through 1988, national headlines announced that “gang-related” crimes had become as much the hallmark of life in South Los Angeles County as the palm trees that hovered above. There were lurid features about “yuppie havens” under threat, where, in the worst of scenarios, upstanding citizens died in gang crossfire. Leaders in Sacramento warned of LA’s rampant “street terrorism” spreading like a cancer to the Inland Empire and as far north as Portland, Oregon. Film and television directors composed backdrops of urban blight and black crime, and white fear contaminated California’s vaunted promised land.8
With the swirling drama of the late 1980s as leverage, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates was able to amass the political and moral capital he needed to intensify his department’s already aggressive anti-gang operations. A popular mandate and the support of the LA County Sheriff’s Department allowed the chief to redeploy the six-ton battering ram that had been retired in 1985 after public outcry. He reauthorized his drug task force to coordinate cover-of-night raids in residential communities thought to house narcotics traffickers. And, with the cooperation of the county sheriff, Gates conducted his signature gang sweeps in predominantly black “gangland areas” throughout South Los Angeles. South Central native Maxine Waters, an LA councilwoman at the time, lamented that as her community grappled with real challenges including drug abuse and gun violence, Chief Gates had made it dangerous for black residents to call for help. His bellicosity, she argued, produced a “Catch-22” for her people, who were frustrated with the “abuse” of their trust, their safety, and their children. An African-American legal aide serving Los Angeles citizens caught up in gang sweeps and drug raids was blunt: “Who will protect us from the police?”9
National attention to LA’s street gang crisis rose throughout 1988 and peaked in 1989. As it did, police action in these local gangland regions broadened and intensified to such a degree that one Los Angeles civil rights activist characterized it as “police gangbanging.” Yet, with all the media coverage of juvenile crime, turf wars, and drive-by shootings, there was little room for and little interest in a discussion about the parallel—and historically rooted—dilemma of police violence, which, in Los Angeles, directly affected the day-to-day lives of people already challenged by crime in their communities.
In the midst of escalating tensions in his hometown, Dr. Dre addressed his band’s growing reputation as Los Angeles rap outlaws. NWA was “nasty and hardcore,” he readily conceded to a Los Angeles Times reporter, but that was beside the point. His group’s music, and specifically a track like “Fuck tha Police,” mattered because it laid bare a basic truth about kids in black communities like Compton: “That’s how they feel about the cops.”10 Ice Cube reaffirmed Dre’s point, explaining, “You have no voice. Nobody can hear you scream.” As music artists with access to the tools of production and promotion, Cube said, NWA aired “all that pain and frustration” with the expectation that someone would listen.11
The members of NWA argued that their intent in making such provocative music was to get attention, not only from the world of hip-hop, which had long thumbed its nose at the West Coast, but from a nation that either had no sympathy for them or ignored them altogether. It was the same compulsion felt by many generations of disempowered people who have made art to comment candidly on their underrepresented position in society. Back in the mid-1970s, as the black arts movement began to wane, the NAACP had talked about “the urge to think, act, and feel black” in the public arena without restrictions; NWA’s music was a product of that. On the broad spectrum of “black identity,” hardcore rap was a point, and thus a contribution to the ever-changing cultural dialogue about black experiences in America. And, as civil rights activists had predicted years before the decade of cable television, portable CD players, and music videos, innovations in the production and consumption of media could animate and, more significantly, amplify those experiences as never before. The “power” of popular culture in the late twentieth century could, black leaders hoped, revive critical discussions about racial inequality that had gone quiet as Americans allowed themselves to believe that the nation’s racial problems had been solved in the Sixties.12 Those imagining the form a new radical black arts movement might take, including those who had embraced the violence and hypermasculinity of blaxploitation films and other controversial creative works of the post–Black Power era, may not have anticipated NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” or its impact.
Straight Outta Compton was, first, a product of and response to a climate of oppression in South Los Angeles County—an environment in which young men were subject to a brutal and indiscriminate “by all means necessary” police plan to eradicate gang crime—where, as MC Ren said, kids were targeted for what they wore and where they lived.13 Just as Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” had, four years earlier, roared from cars cruising through African-American neighborhoods under siege, “Fuck tha Police” served as an outlet for young people who wanted to vent frustration over their inability—and their community’s failure—to check the omnipresent forces governing their lives. “I’m black, male, and young, so what’s happening to me is likely to be happening to NWA’s audience,” Ice Cube said of the track he co-wrote, pinpointing a key reason that his lyrics resonated in his hometown. “I know what it’s like,” one LA gang member said of the song’s core sentiment. “I’ve been harassed by the police, I’ve been thrown down on the ground, and I had to hop fences.” Alert to his own oppression, he reveled in the spirit of insurrection emanating from NWA’s lyrics, and he claimed it for himself: “That was my freedom of speech.”14 For Louis “B-Real” Freese, a Chicano kid from a mixed community just north of Compton, “Fuck tha Police” was as cathartic as it was revelatory. The aspiring rapper, who later penned his own indictment of police abuse as a member of Cypress Hill, appreciated hearing NWA describe the same indignities he endured.15 When he began film school, South Central native John Singleton considered Rob Reiner’s 1986 movie Stand By Me incomparable as a work of coming-of-age cinema, but the story represented only white childhood. As he puzzled over how to dramatize the lives of boys in the ‘hood, he heard in NWA’s music young black artists just like him, “giving voice to everything I had seen growing up.”16
But by the end of 1989, Straight Outta Compton reverberated more widely, with “Fuck tha Police” emerging as the linchpin of its popularity. “That’s my shit,” Brooklyn rapper Glen “Daddy-O” Bolton said of NWA’s “Fuck tha Police.” He told Spin in early 1989 that even in New York, a city notoriously protective of its exclusive claim to hip-hop, and where attitudes were generally averse to West Coast rap, the record was consumed like a powerful new drug “you never had … before.” He thought NWA mesmerized kids in New York because “they’re visual, they’re talented,” but more importantly, the group hit big in his city “because they’re saying what people want to hear.”17 Another Brooklyn native, Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, discovered in NWA’s music something that, in his view, had been “missing” from even the most militant New York rap. Criminal Minded, the 1987 debut from South Bronx-based Boogie Down Productions, and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the radically political album by Long Island’s own Public Enemy, appropriated themes of the inner-city ghetto in ways that spoke to some of Jay-Z’s experiences. He heard in their music some acknowledgment of poor, black kids like him who adopted the ways of the “street hustler,” did not always abide by the law, and rejected victimization. But in songs like “Straight Outta Compton” and “Fuck tha Police,” he found more than a nod in his direction. He heard his own voice.18 Meanwhile, in a Philadelphia high school orchestra class, Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter passed his headphones to Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson and invited him to listen to Straight Outta Compton. Already a hip-hop enthusiast, the sixteen-year-old ?uestlove was thunderstruck. “There were certain things that artists didn’t do,” he remembered. “You just didn’t say, ‘Fuck the police.’” With a sense that he was witnessing something both musically and culturally transformative, he borrowed the cassette. “I ditched chamber orchestra and sat in the furnace room with a cheap-ass GE walkman and listened to that album from start to finish.”19
In 1988, before NWA recalibrated the rap landscape with Straight Outta Compton, hip-hop had already begun to shift in favor of greater regional and artistic diversity. Whereas only a handful of hip-hop acts (Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Dana Dane, Fat Boys, and Whodini) managed to break into the Billboard Top 100 in 1987, all of them from New York and most tied to production teams at Def Jam or Profile, 1988 marked a watershed moment when the genre broke free from Russell Simmons’s mold. That year, the pop charts were studded with hip-hop albums, including commercial triumphs from New York’s EPMD, Eric B & Rakim, Biz Markie, Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions, dance crossovers from Salt-N-Pepa and Ruthless Records’ own J.J. Fad, a first release from Philadelphia’s DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince and a rerelease from hardcore Philly rapper Schoolly D, a Miami bass rap album from South Florida’s 2 Live Crew, and Los Angeles rap hits by way of Ice-T’s Rhyme Pays and the Colors soundtrack, a rap compilation tied to Dennis Hopper’s film. Recognizing the sea change, large record distributors, including RCA, Columbia, and Warner Brothers, moved to sign artists from across the rap spectrum and leapt into partnerships with smaller hip-hop labels, like Jive and Cold Chillin’ Records, providing precisely the access to industry resources and retail markets that these small enterprises had long desired. The impact of industry investment in hip-hop on the genre was especially dramatic after Yo! MTV Raps ensured that rap artists would enjoy the same visual platform that had fast-tracked the careers of acts like Duran Duran, Madonna, and Whitney Houston. Within just two years, the destiny of hip-hop as an evolving, thriving, commercially viable creative force tipped from uncertain to manifest.
The same was evident for West Coast rap, as a disproportionate number of California-based hip-hop artists snagged spots on the charts for both top pop and top black album well before NWA headed out on its first multicity concert tour in the summer of 1989. Already by 1988, Too $hort and MC Hammer, both natives of East Oakland in Northern California, and a roster of Los Angeles rappers, including Crenshaw’s Ice-T, Compton’s Tone Loc, King Tee, Eazy-E, NWA, and The D.O.C. (who came to LA by way of Dallas) had scaled the Billboard charts. The center of gravity for hip-hop seemed to be shifting away from New York’s concrete jungles and toward the land of infinite coastline. Moreover, the new cultural archetype of the California “gangster” continued to take hold. Ice-T invoked it in advertising for Power by claiming to be the “world’s biggest dope dealer” and when he boasted that the guns used as props on the album’s cover were in fact his. Roger “King Tee” McBride’s studio debut Act a Fool, for all the pleas for peace in its lyrics, had him on the album cover stepping purposefully from his white Cadillac onto an LA street with a sawed-off shotgun dangling from his right hand. Also wearing Locs sunglasses and “house shoes,” he epitomized Compton street style.20 Public enthusiasm for an LA noir redux—a fresh iteration of the classic noir juxtaposition of urban nightmare and California Dream—was apparent to Ice Cube, and he drew from it in promoting Straight Outta Compton. “When most people think of LA, they think of palm trees and beaches and girls in bikinis,” he told Melody Maker in August 1989, “but there’s another side to the city which is kept hidden from view.”21
“Fuck tha Police” was a breakout hit on an album that benefited from these cultural shifts. Supported by word of mouth, cassettes, and handheld devices like ?uestlove’s “cheap-ass GE walkman,” it captivated hip-hop fans across the country and fed their growing appetite for West Coast rap and gangster aesthetics. Priority CEO Bryan Turner believed that much of NWA’s appeal to consumers in 1989 was in its willingness to push the boundaries of hip-hop’s established street canon. Whatever the reasons, within weeks of its release, Straight Outta Compton did what few other hip-hop albums, and virtually no non-New York projects, had. It penetrated far-flung consumer markets, broke the top 40 on the Billboard 200, and spent nearly fifty weeks on the top black albums chart. Very quickly, the group found itself in an elite class that included music acts like Bobby Brown, Paula Abdul, and New Kids on the Block.
“Fuck tha Police” was like no LA rap hit before it, particularly because it hooked listeners who had never set foot in South Los Angeles County. It was quite unlike Toddy Tee’s “Batterram,” that locally cherished early track virtually unknown outside of the battering ram’s LA theater of operations, and it surpassed the grassroots success of “The Boyz-N-The Hood.” By the time Straight Outta Compton debuted, NWA could benefit from the dramatic changes in entertainment media and in hip-hop production that had occurred since that 1987 single hit the streets. But content mattered as much as context. The fundamental message in “Fuck tha Police” did not depend on knowledge of phenomena unique to South Los Angeles. The “Batterram” was site-specific, resonating with those familiar with the LAPD and its bizarre armored weapon. Similarly, “Boyz” played best in markets in the West and the South, where rap fans were well-versed in lowrider car culture. “Fuck tha Police” was, of course, grounded in local grievances. But it also spoke directly to a problem plaguing all of black America.
When talk-show host Arsenio Hall addressed how the track had underscored poor police-community relations in the group’s hometown, Dr. Dre corrected him: “Not only Compton. Not only Compton.” MC Ren spoke up, too, to say the record he co-wrote was not, by intention, a revolutionary cry, but rather an expression of a common—though privately voiced—feeling about state authority. “In everybody’s lifetime, they get harassed by the police for no reason,” Ren explained, “and everybody wants to say it, but they can’t on the spot ’cause something will happen to them.” With fame working as both megaphone and shield, NWA dismissed the risks that normally accompanied such a protest, seizing an opportunity to confront police power as others could not. “We’re getting back at them,” Ren told Hall’s television audience, “for all the years we couldn’t do nothing.”22
“We as a country, and we as a police organization, can’t stand by and let people feed this to the youth.” In the summer of 1989, Dewey Stokes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police (essentially a labor union for the nation’s law enforcement officers), announced that his organization was drafting a resolution to advise its members to “refuse to work at or provide security for concerts by any group advocating violence against police officers”—in effect, making a coordinated effort to keep NWA from being able to stage concerts. The Fraternal Order of Police also implored private security firms not to provide their services. The national organization, with its 203,000 members, also passed an official resolution to boycott any event or product associated with the rappers “who are out trying to get brother police officers killed.”
The Los Angeles rappers, who were riding a wave of album sales and publicity that spring, had just announced their first national headline tour when the attempts to silence them started. Local police departments in cities on the planned tour began receiving messages via an informal “fax campaign” from other officers around the country. Managers of performance venues, too, shared copies of lyrics from Straight Outta Compton with their counterparts in other cities, highlighting the most “inflammatory” language in “Fuck tha Police.” All these communications served to galvanize law enforcement communities from Philadelphia to Shreveport in opposition to gangsta rap.23
In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, enraged patrolmen called for city managers to rescind an event permit for an NWA show booked at the Richmond Coliseum—and asked the public more broadly to boycott the music. The acting mayor of Kansas City declared that the rappers were not welcome in his town. On- and off-duty officers from Toledo refused to provide security for the group’s Ohio stop. In Baltimore’s Prince George’s County, police successfully barred NWA from appearing at a rap festival held at the Capital Centre. In Shreveport, Louisiana, police positioned barricades all around a concert site so it could monitor everyone coming and going on the grounds. The Cincinnati Police Department tripled the number of officers it typically assigned to large concerts at the Riverfront Coliseum, expecting trouble.24
Local police officials in Detroit tried a different approach, sending members to stake out the NWA show at the Joe Louis Arena from inside so they could monitor the “bad boys of hip-hop” and their fans who reportedly chanted “Fuck tha Police” at every concert. Of particular interest was whether NWA would respond to the chants and perform its most controversial track, despite having agreed to leave it off the set list. So far, in other cities, NWA had chosen not to perform it. But, perhaps as a statement on Detroit’s more aggressive policing, or perhaps as a spontaneous celebration of this final tour show in Detroit, the group used an encore to launch into it. They had not completed the first verse before management at the Joe Louis Arena cut sound and turned up the house lights, ending the show. After tussling with NWA’s staff, and later detaining members of the group briefly at their hotel, one Detroit officer told the press, “We just wanted to show the kids that you can’t say ‘fuck the police’ in Detroit.”25
The real problem for the FOP and for local law enforcement in most of these cities was not that NWA itself would insult them. The bigger threat was in the group’s swelling popularity. Rumors of fans gleefully yelling anti-cop expletives at each concert suggested that NWA had become a conduit for protest. Police abuse was a hot-button local issue in many of these concert tour stops, in which black residents had contended with patterns of harassment similar to the kind described in “Fuck tha Police.” In the months before NWA first arrived in Toledo, Ohio, its police chief, Martin Felker, had responded to an uptick in crime in the city’s Old West End district by instructing his officers to “pay attention to groups of black juveniles.” He issued orders to stop and question these youths, implying in his directive that race was probable cause enough. When an association of African-American lawyers filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Toledo law enforcement, Felker rescinded his order, but the relationship between the city’s small black population and its mostly white police force remained strained; in the weeks leading up to NWA’s Toledo appearance, a prominent black clergyman quoted the rappers in a letter to Police Chief Felker noting that the city’s black community was of the mind that “police think they have the authority to kill a minority.”26 In another corner of the state, Cincinnati, juvenile courts had become flooded with teenagers from “inner-city black areas” as local police acted on the theory that poor, African-American kids were working as cocaine couriers, bolstering Ohio’s sudden “culture of the crack house.”27 The anger in Detroit, one of America’s most racially segregated and violent cities, had been simmering longer. There, black residents complained about “racist” police functioning as if they were private security forces serving the white suburbs—whose residents were “truly terrified,” in the words of social commentator Ze’ev Chafets, by Detroit’s “racial composition, and the physical threat they associate with blacks.”28
As NWA headed out on its first national tour, these tensions plus a ream of high-profile cases of police misconduct in the East put the growing conflict between individual rights and urban systems of law and order on full display. The result was an amplification of the problems portrayed in Los Angeles rap at the same moment that NWA’s promotional push for its controversial debut album was at its apex.
In August, the group was slated to headline a rap showcase at the Capital Centre in Washington, DC, but the late summer timing put the show right in the midst of turmoil surrounding a recent police killing. A couple of months earlier, just east of DC, four white officers in Prince George’s County, Maryland, had beaten two Ghanaian brothers, Martin and Gregory Habib, during a traffic stop. The four county cops left Martin with a broken jaw and internal bleeding; Gregory Habib was killed, a result of crushing blows to his chest and abdomen that damaged his heart and lungs.29 “It’s unfortunate and I feel very, very bad about the death of the young man,” the county’s police chief, Michael Flaherty, told a local reporter, “but as unfortunate as it is, I don’t know if there was any misconduct on the part of the officers.”30 The Washington Post profiled Chief Flaherty, emphasizing the burdens of his job, particularly in light of an “exploding wave of crime and violence, fueled by an epidemic of crack cocaine,” and record-breaking homicide numbers.31 A county grand jury considering charges against the four patrolmen issued no indictments. State’s Attorney Alex Williams, the first black prosecutor to hold the job, cried foul, warning that tensions between the mostly white police force and the mostly black community had been mounting for years, and Gregory Habib’s death might be a tipping point. The local press noted that NWA’s planned concert appearance had come at a bad time for police, particularly because the rappers refused to sign a contract promising that they would not perform any portion of their song “Fuck tha Police.” Under pressure from county officials, Capital Centre promoters dropped NWA from the showcase.32
At the same time, in New York, where NWA had no planned concerts but its fan base was swelling, a cascade of alarming reports highlighted the tragic consequences of, as one criminal justice advocate put it, the “racist attitudes permeating the New York Police Department.”33 In Brooklyn, for instance, police dragged a father from his car for protesting a parking violation, knowingly endangering the man’s three-week-old baby, who was left alone in the cold by arresting officers who referred to the child as “the little nigger.” In a 1987 case, a white resident who attempted to document the bloody beating of a cuffed black teen at a Manhattan subway station was himself handcuffed, injured, detained on specious charges, and kept in custody for two days.34 In January 1989, outrage grew over an incident in Queens, in which New York police surrounded seventy-one-year-old Ann Hamilton while she sat in her car eating peanuts. Officers smashed in the elderly woman’s windshield and dragged her from the vehicle, arresting her for “reckless endangerment,” an accusation the department justified by noting that Hamilton had been digging in her glove compartment while parked in what police described as a drug zone. Calls from the woman’s family, from African-American religious leaders, and from the local black press to prosecute police for their involvement in a “reign of terror” resulted in an apology from Mayor Ed Koch, but little else. In early 1989, Hamilton’s lawyer told New York Amsterdam News that police misconduct was a product of the Koch administration and its unwillingness to protect black New Yorkers from civil rights abuses.35
In the wake of that incident, news broke that eight black and Latino boys had been arrested for the brutal rape of a white Central Park jogger named Patricia Meili. After Manhattan’s District Attorney announced charges against five of the teens, described in the national press as “wilding” (a term derived from a rumor that rapper Tone Loc’s hit “Wild Thing” was the inspiration behind the boys’ alleged crimes), civil rights advocates and police watch dogs in New York poked holes in the evidence and accused investigators of subjecting the boys to torturous interrogation conditions reminiscent of Russia in “the Josef Stalin era.” Meanwhile, prominent New York real-estate mogul Donald Trump paid for a large ad in the New York press—Trump’s “High-Priced Graffiti,” as one critic referred to it—sounding the alarm about “the complete breakdown of life as we know it” and calling for New York’s political leaders to “unshackle [cops] from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s.” Trump’s full-page indictment of “wild criminals … of every age” and his explicit call to “bring back the death penalty” was black-and-white proof of the cultural chasm between those who lived with the injustices underpinning legal processes and those who denied any injustice existed at all.36
“Advocating violence and assault is wrong,” Milt Ahlerich, an FBI public affairs officer, wrote to NWA’s label in his August 1989 letter, “and we in the law enforcement community take exception to such action.” The “fax campaign” undertaken by an informal network of police officers to alert other departments to the lyrical content in Straight Outta Compton had apparently reached Ahlerich’s office, and claiming to represent “the FBI’s position,” he scolded Priority Records for music that was “discouraging and degrading” to police officers at a time when the number of cops killed annually in the line of duty was on the rise. Without explicitly referencing “Fuck tha Police,” his letter detailed the government’s concerns about “this song and its message,” noting “music plays a significant role in society.”37 It was the first time an FBI official had so formally objected to a form of creative expression. Moreover, even though local law enforcement activism in protest of NWA had been ongoing since the group first announced its multicity tour in May, and although rap music had already seeped into regional clashes over juvenile crime and the policing of black communities, the August FBI missive thrust NWA into the center of a national dialogue about free speech. As a cover of The Village Voice declared that October, “The FBI Hates this Band” (Fig. 5.1).38
Fig 5.1 Village Voice cover, October 1989, featuring NWA and in bright red, the title of the issue’s lead story: “The FBI Hates This Band.” Village Voice.
The spectacle made NWA the poster child in a campaign against federal government overreach—a liberty-protecting position that, in the 1980s, seemed more aligned with President Ronald Reagan and his “government is the problem” ideology than with black youths wanting to call attention to police brutality. “The black kid out there don’t give a fuck about who’s mayor or who’s governor or who’s the president,” Ice Cube explained. “All that shit don’t matter to them. The only piece of government they see is police. The police is the government in the ghetto.” By the end of 1989, the group could credibly claim that “Fuck tha Police” was not simply a comment on law enforcement abuses but a grand statement about institutional state power. “It’s like fuck Uncle Sam,” Ice Cube told The Source in 1991. “We just narrowed it down to the police.”39
FBI admonishment and law-enforcement boycotts were designed to derail NWA’s promotional campaign for Straight Outta Compton and to prevent the group and its handlers from profiting off what critics defined as “cop killer” music. NWA and Priority Records, however, treated the conflict as a springboard for broad exposure and, ultimately, public sympathy. “That song,” and in turn the reaction to it, as Ice Cube remembered, was “the essence of what the group had become.”40 The group’s publicists, with eager reception from music journalists, reacted to the Milt Ahlerich letter as an Orwellian attack on free speech, and argued that this pressure from a governmental authority “makes valid everything” described in “Fuck tha Police.” When Dr. Dre heard that NWA was now on the FBI’s radar, he later recalled, “That’s when I knew we had something.” Ice Cube agreed: “When the FBI has your name, you know you’re doing work. You know you’re making a difference.”41 The Los Angeles rappers were no longer metaphorically kicking trashcans but could claim, with an air of pride, that they did have the power to “threaten society,” as MC Ren asserted. With its music officially declared dangerous, NWA welcomed in the new decade with a new identity: as “the rappers the FBI tried to silence, the group the police messed with.”42
The “Fuck tha Police” track, with its fictional courtroom setting, kept the spotlight trained on NWA long after the group had moved on from its studio debut and began promoting new projects, including an EP teaser called 100 Miles and Runnin’. Their condemnation of the police in Los Angeles and their brazen resistance to the FBI’s attempt to intimidate them continued to drive the group’s publicity and kept them at the forefront of tense national conversations around policing, racial violence, and the First Amendment. NWA’s popularity continued to rise even as the group created a set of problems for itself that threatened to undermine its brand. It had become known for its fearlessness in the face of authority, but news about the group emerging in the summer of 1991 suggested something more akin to recklessness. For instance, Denise “Dee” Barnes, host of a television series called Pump It Up, filed a $23 million dollar lawsuit against Dr. Dre, charging him with assault and battery; with plenty of witnesses to the beating standing by, Dre quickly settled for an undisclosed amount. Eazy-E attended a Senate Republican fundraiser where George H. W. Bush was speaking, bewildering many; “It’s pretty nice coming here, you know,” he told a reporter. “It’s cool. I’ve met some nice people.” And Dre and Eazy-E each made disconcertingly insensitive jokes about Rodney King not long after he was brutally beaten by LAPD officers, defying the expectations of anyone who knew NWA’s usual outrage over police abuse.43 Beyond the off-brand signals, there were obvious signs that the group was dissolving amid contract disputes, the departure of Ice Cube, and rumors that Dr. Dre would defect next.
Yet NWA had accomplished with Straight Outta Compton, and especially “Fuck tha Police,” something that would allow its members to transcend the criticism and preserve their images as radical heroes. “In all their irresponsibility,” pop writer Jon Pareles wrote in 1989, “NWA’s songs illuminate tensions that wouldn’t go away if the band were silenced.”44 Pareles was referring then to the music rather than to the men and their controversial behavior in the early 1990s, but his observation applied broadly to what ultimately mattered to rap fans. Within hip-hop, NWA exploded a powder keg, blowing the boundaries of the genre wide open, giving new permission for artists and their labels to explore an unlimited range of topics, including the most politically and culturally divisive ones, without restriction. It mattered less and less to fans whether the purpose was public enlightenment or personal profit—NWA freely admitted again and again that controversy made them rich. Rap audiences were drawn to the sound and pleasure of defiance that LA gangsta rap delivered. When Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote about NWA in the New York Times in the summer of 1990, his article was headlined “Rap: Slick, Violent, Nasty and, Maybe Hopeful.” Hardcore rappers like NWA and 2 Live Crew, he pointed out, along with young black filmmakers like Spike Lee and John Singleton and comedians like Eddie Murphy and Keenan Ivory Wayans, were now expressing “things we could only whisper in dark rooms. They’re saying we’re going to explode all these sacred cows. It’s fascinating, and it’s upsetting everybody—not just white people but black people. But it’s a liberating moment.”45
That following summer, mired in legal trouble and public-facing dysfunction, NWA released its sophomore album Efil4zaggin. Like Straight Outta Compton, it defied the odds of the music industry. The group still lacked the production and promotional resources afforded by major label representation. They continued to rely upon Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records for capital and the independent Los Angeles-based Priority Records for marketing and distribution. Scathing early reviews of the record’s X-rated content, flagrant disrespect for women, allusions to rape, and glorification of homicide threatened to undermine Priority’s promotional push. Indeed, with its objectionable title—Niggaz4Life, spelled backward—and luridly misogynistic tracks like “To Kill a Hooker,” “Findum, Fuckum, & Flee,” and “One Less Bitch,” Efil4zaggin proved even more of a challenge for distributors than Straight Outta Compton had been. Major record outlets in Canada and Europe refused to stock the album. In the United Kingdom, the government’s Obscene Publications Squad seized twenty-four thousand copies of the record and effectively banned sales of the album in the country.46 In the United States, anti-pornography crusader Jack Thompson led a successful campaign to remove Efil4zaggin from all Musicland stores, and many businesses throughout the country chose not to stock it rather than risk criminal prosecution for selling material labeled “obscene” to minors.47
Yet Efil4zaggin was a commercial triumph. The record debuted on the Billboard Pop Album chart at number two, the highest debut for an album since Michael Jackson’s Bad and the best chart showing for an independent album in over a decade. Within just two weeks of its release, Efil4zaggin reached number one and earned platinum RIAA certification for selling over one million copies.48 In spite of what record buyers cited as a moral quandary, American distributors stocked up and sold out. Eazy-E marveled at it in a Rolling Stone interview: “How can some motherfuckers with a street record get Number One over motherfucking AC/DC, Paula Abdul?” DJ Yella ventured a response: “everybody’s buying it just to see what the fuck is going on.”49
In a rare social critique of an album’s content, a Billboard writer commented on the implications for NWA’s crossover success with Efil4zaggin: “Some would say it is clear evidence of the acceptance of rap in the mainstream. Cool. But look at it this way: A lot of kids paying to hear a group of black gangstas call themselves ‘niggaz’ not once but continuously throughout the album rife with images of violence and personal disrespect—that’s gotta be popular in the new racially charged era.”50 NWA, as Billboard charged, was producing something far more corrosive than anything the anti-obscenity crusaders of the PMRC could have imagined in the mid-1980s. The debates over the group’s promotion of “gangsta chic,” misogyny, violence, and conspicuous consumption mattered far less than the fact that Los Angeles gangsta rap appeared to be exacerbating race prejudice. NWA and its affiliates, including Ice Cube, stood accused in the press of feeding Americans a set of toxic ideas about black youth and the inner city. The danger was, as Billboard’s writer argued, that NWA threatened to further divide the country along racial fault lines. The group, throwing caution to the wind, risked crystalizing the very racial anxiety and bigotry they railed against in their music. All the while, they composed seductive anthems of resistance for those who sympathized with their perspectives on injustice.
As the new decade opened, Compton City councilwoman Pat Moore appealed to her black constituents, many of whom shared precisely the concerns outlined in Billboard. Moore asked her community to acknowledge that even the most vulgar rap was an honest response to hard times, and that young fans—their own children and grandchildren—found precious value in that. Replying to local alarm over the announcement of the 1990 Compton Rapfest, a music showcase starring NWA, Councilwoman Moore told the Los Angeles Sentinel, “Members of these groups have survived and are still alive and they have mastered the system better than we (as parents) have because they are talking about things that are real to our young people and they have their attention.” To those still outraged by the music’s content, she explained that these black performers “are reaching our young people and are role models for them.”51 The preeminent hip-hop journal The Source asserted that LA rap mattered not only because black kids in LA County were engaging with it but because, more broadly, its artists compelled the nation to litigate its own flaws: “To discuss NWA is to discuss the fundamental problems, conflicts, and opportunities of our society.”52
NWA’s public spat with the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency helped re-center the national conversation about hip-hop, turning the focus to the West. The group’s relentless assertion of its right to free speech, and sophisticated and sometimes unabashed employment of “truth” as a promotional tool, made it a champion of nonconformity and, at the same time, a harbinger of mounting crises. NWA’s ability to cover so much ground made it the first rap group to appeal simultaneously to four distinct kinds of listeners: the traditional, mostly nonwhite hip-hop fans in the proverbial “urban North”; the grassroots LA rap loyalists; the southern black rap fans who had been primed to gravitate toward West Coast rap; and the predominantly white, suburban listeners who, as cultural commentators were beginning to describe, were filled with burning anger and disillusionment exacerbated by recession and who, until Straight Outta Compton, had found punk and heavy metal more compelling than rap.53 (Buyers for national record chains Camelot and Kemp Mill noticed that, from 1989 through 1991, NWA product sold best in suburban shopping malls and stores typically specializing in heavy metal and rock, a detail that implied white teens were buying but that didn’t preclude the possibility that nonwhite rock fans were also crossing over.) Randy Davis, a record buyer for StreetSide stores who was well versed in the history of rock ’n’ roll, noted that Los Angeles had made rap “the rebellious music of the ‘90s.”54 As The Source noted about the chart-topping popularity of NWA’s sophomore album (which it referred to as Niggaz4Life), “For every Black hip-hop fanatic driving through Detroit, Houston, and of course Los Angeles pumping Niggaz from their rides, there’s a group of baseball-cap wearing white kids listening to Niggaz in their room.… Everywhere you turn, the youth of America is tuned in to NWA.”55
Vernon Reid, black frontman for the rock band Living Colour, was uncertain about the ramifications of such cultural influence. “What frightens me about them is that they’re really good.”56 He wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Within music industry circles, there were others who argued even more forcefully that LA rappers had abused their public platform by promoting an apolitical version of black militancy, even violent anarchy. According to management at A & A Records & Tapes, which pulled copies of Straight Outta Compton from all of its chain stores, NWA’s music could only be called “blatantly destructive.”57 In the same vein, voices representing earlier waves of hip-hop argued that LA rappers had undermined the narrative of black uplift that had been a mainstay of 1980s b-boy rap and so central to the New York-based “four elements” hip-hop philosophy, a cultural doctrine sacrosanct on the East Coast. Andre “Doctor Dré” Brown, the Yo! MTV Raps host and hip-hop trendsetter, expressed concerns about the “idiotic brothers out there” who might find in NWA’s music a convenient justification for making trouble. He considered “Fuck tha Police” specifically to be reprehensible. “Instead of worrying so much about what the police are doing,” Brown argued in the black press nearly two years after the song was released, “we need to be policing ourselves.”58 Music critic Nelson George, a long-time champion of hip-hop, told the Los Angeles Times in 1990 that NWA made “black exploitation records.”59 A music writer at the Sentinel labeled gangsta rappers “the ultimate sell-outs.”60
But a more ominous critique came from inside South Central Los Angeles, where youth counselor and black activist Leon Watkins fretted over the swelling popularity of NWA, predicting that “nothing good” would come of music so contemptuous of social order. He was particularly concerned about the additional burdens Los Angeles gangsta rap might create for the communities in his city already struggling against gang domination. While the Village Voice made a pitch for recognizing LA rappers as delivering “an organic expression of south-central LA’s half-hidden gang world,” Watkins worried that NWA and Ice Cube were normalizing gang violence and urban blight, thereby aggravating the “frustration” already crippling his city and his people.61 These young men penning lyrics about the real crises Watkins watched metastasize, including socioeconomic isolation and distrust of systems of justice, were “taking advantage” of “a volatile situation,” he argued. Watkins conceded that NWA’s records alone were not likely to spark an uprising, but he supposed that a crisis of some kind would “[set] things off, and then the music becomes a battle cry.”62
On the night of March 3, 1991, during a police traffic stop along the San Fernando Valley freeway, an African-American motorist, twenty-five-year-old Rodney King, was brutally beaten. In the presence of twenty-one LAPD officers on the scene, at least four patrolmen Tasered, clubbed, and kicked King to such a degree and at such length that the young man thought he had died. (According to King, the officers thought the same; he remembered that in the moments after the hitting stopped, someone threw a sheet over his head.)63 The beating was not fatal but it did leave King debilitated, with a broken ankle, a broken jaw, a cracked eye socket, a shattered cheekbone, skull fractures, brain damage, partial paralysis, a dozen electrical burns, and internal bleeding. In a news conference, King’s attorney said of the injuries, “None of the POWs taken by Saddam Hussein came back beaten this badly.”64 As noted later by black Angelenos, leaders of the local Coalition Against Police Abuse, the NAACP, the ACLU, and police watch activists nationwide, the brutality exhibited that night, though reprehensible, was not remarkable; there were recently documented cases in Los Angeles, New York, and Baltimore, too. King was only the latest victim of law enforcement violence.65
But the March 3 traffic stop was an extraordinary event because, unlike other cases, this one was captured on home video. Watching from his apartment balcony above the strip of the busy street where King’s arrest turned violent, Lake View Terrace resident George Holliday had grabbed a camcorder and captured nearly ten minutes of the beating. The video that became widely known as the “Holliday tape” was aired nationally and on loop, the gripping images tailor-made for television news. As NBC’s nightly news producer Steve Friedman explained, the tape was undoubtedly the only reason King’s beating became a network news story at all. “It’s a picture medium,” he said, noting that “you don’t mention” an event without images, no matter how tragic or deadly. “If you have great pictures of flames leaping out, you use it.”66 In the King footage, networks across the country found a fire like none other. It spurred immediate outrage, particularly among those who had never before witnessed or experienced such an egregious display of state barbarism. It also primed the viewing public for more damning details to come about that night and about rampant racial bigotry inside the most powerful police force in the country.67
Once the tape became public, over a dozen witnesses came forward to fill in details of what had happened before local resident George Holliday began filming. Many of them disputed the LAPD’s official claim that King’s erratic and defiant behavior had compelled them to respond so forcefully. One nearby resident who, like Holliday, had been awakened by the sound of police helicopters overhead and voices over a loudspeaker below, told reporters that she saw King trying to cooperate with officers, who nonetheless struck him again and again, even as he lay prone on the ground. “He was face down and he wasn’t fighting or anything,” Dawn Davis told the Los Angeles Times. “I was crying. I was praying for the guy.” Other witnesses, who did not want to be identified, said that the officers seemed intent on killing King. “They weren’t beating him to subdue him,” one remarked, “it was like they were really angry.” A local couple, who tried to return to bed after watching paramedics cart King away from the scene, reported that they were left “just numb” realizing that “if it could happen to him, it could happen to anybody.”68
Then, in the midst of the gripping coverage of the “Rodney King beating,” transcripts emerged of LAPD patrol car communications. In them, police joked about “gorillas in the mist” (alluding to a 1988 film by that name), called King a “lizard,” indicated he was “dusted” (high on PCP, or, colloquially, “angel dust”), and bragged that his arrest was “a big-time use of force.” One seemingly boastful dispatch sent from the car assigned to two of the officers appearing in the Holliday tape read, “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.”69
The responses from citizens and local, state, and federal leaders came swiftly. Days after the Holliday tape emerged, some three hundred people marched in front of LAPD headquarters in protest, chanting, giving speeches, and sharing stories of their own experiences with police harassment and racial bigotry.70 California lawmakers Maxine Waters and Don Edwards made public statements demanding that the Los Angeles District Attorney issue swift indictments of all police officers involved. Following Police Chief Daryl Gates’s curt characterization of Rodney King’s beating as nothing more than an “aberration,” a chorus of public figures, including stalwart conservative George Will, Democratic US Senator Joe Biden, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, called for the LAPD chief’s resignation. In anticipation of a City Council meeting to address Gates’s leadership, the Los Angeles Urban League told local reporters that city officials must make the chief accountable for his officers’ being “out of control.” Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley issued a stern response that no “objective person” could “regard the King beating as an aberration.” Taking one of his own agencies to task for misconduct, the mayor announced, “We must face the fact that there appears to be a dangerous trend of racially motivated incidents running through at least some segments of our Police Department.” The city’s police commissioner, Melanie Lomax, also broke ranks with the chief by choosing to publicly decry the department’s treatment of King. It looked, she said, like something “straight out of South Africa and the Deep South.”71 Meanwhile, the Southern California chapter of the ACLU referred to Gates’s police force as a “gang” in “blue uniforms,” echoing the words of Los Angeles gang members who had, for nearly two decades, drawn the same parallel. ACLU leaders also called on the chief to resign. In many ways, the Rodney King beating was an eerie echo of an incident across the country in 1989, when another black motorist, Gregory Habib, was ruthlessly beaten by four police officers during a traffic stop in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The violence had resulted in Habib’s death—but efforts of activists to force police officials to take responsibility for the killing proved futile.72
At the federal level, the Congressional Black Caucus demanded a recognition by Congress that the catastrophe in Los Angeles was emblematic of a national crisis. Armed with a deep file of cases collected by the ACLU and the NAACP, the CBC took pains to demonstrate in DC that the Rodney King beating was only an anomaly because it was caught on film, and that, in fact, such abuse was epidemic in American policing. Members called for the US Justice Department to broaden the scope of its investigations of police abuse to include all urban law enforcement agencies throughout the country; only such an expansive review could uncover “the systematic nature” of state-sanctioned brutality in the United States. Congressman John Conyers of Michigan beseeched his colleagues, “If we can’t protect citizens against the kind of videotaped violence that occurred in LA that night, we’re a nation in jeopardy.”73
At the same time, the Holliday tape gave leaders like Conyers, and the general public, reason to be hopeful. It was widely believed that the existence of videotaped evidence of such a flagrant, even criminal, abuse of authority ensured there would be justice. With irrefutable proof of felony misconduct, there would likely be a jury trial, convictions, and perhaps lengthy sentences; under California law, an individual convicted for inflicting severe bodily injury could serve up to seven years in state prison. More crucially, people thought, there would be a long-overdue reckoning inside law enforcement agencies around racial bias and its ramifications. “Without the tape, the LAPD might have argued anything and been believed by a jury,” said a member of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s investigatory team in March 1991. “With the tape, it looks like the city might as well just start writing the check to King’s lawyers.” The consensus among city leaders, legal experts, and the broader public was that gross misconduct would net guilty verdicts in Rodney King’s case against the officers and, perhaps, new legislation limiting law enforcement agencies’ use of violent force. And there would be no new Watts Rebellion; justice would defuse outrage and mitigate protest in the streets. As one victim of police abuse said, in hopeful anticipation of an institutional transformation after the publicity of King’s beating, “We are blessed that this incident happened.”74
That spring, Compton rapper Eazy-E told a reporter that the Holliday tape vindicated his group and their controversial music. It reaffirmed NWA’s claim that news could be reported from the ground, and that the very people who bore witness to injustice and made a record of it were as close to “truth” as were journalists. Though he and bandmate Dr. Dre were quoted in Spin as “laughing hysterically” at King’s misfortune—after such a beating, Eazy-E guessed that King “don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground!”—both also made the case for crediting George Holliday rather than King with any progress it might fuel. “Rodney King didn’t help us,” Dre emphasized. “The muthafucka that videotaped it helped us.”75 As Eazy-E argued, the American public could no longer dismiss as hyperbole his group’s complaints about police abuse or the ways in which Los Angeles rap music reflected real black lives in danger. Once the raw, black-and-white footage of King’s beating became a media sensation, captivating television viewers across the country, Eazy-E said, “They understand now.”76
Ice Cube’s reaction was similar: “We finally got y’all … on tape.’”77 Estranged from NWA for over a year and growing into his new roles as chart-topping solo artist and Hollywood actor, Cube found fresh cause to revisit his old defense of “Fuck tha Police.” It was, after all, a song he had co-written and then wielded like the burning symbol of the First Amendment it was, shaming censors for muzzling his group’s honest response to a real American crisis. Now, having seen the news about Rodney King’s beating and the grizzly images of King’s broken body and disfigured face in print and on television, Cube was again in a position to warn his critics against dismissing gangsta rap’s tales as mere burlesque.
With a certified platinum solo album and a critically acclaimed EP under his belt, plus Hollywood credibility—and an NAACP Image Award nomination, thanks to the success of John Singleton’s film Boyz N the Hood—Ice Cube prepared to release his much-anticipated second album, Death Certificate. Buoyed by the silver-screen exposure and his durable reputation as a rap provocateur, he spoke of his second album in the context of an escalating climate of racial bigotry and anti-black violence in Los Angeles, along with “drugs … the penitentiary and this capitalist system.” Death Certificate, he told The Source, was as much a response to the beating of Rodney King as it was to the killing of Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old Compton girl shot to death by a Korean storekeeper over a bottle of orange juice.78 Death Certificate, in that political context, was a move to double down on themes he had explored as a member of NWA, and to force a public reaction.
It worked. After Death Certificate’s November 1991 release, music distributors, pop critics, civil rights groups, and religious leaders denounced it as violently racist and xenophobic, citing especially a set of bars in “No Vaseline” interpreted as anti-Semitic and the racial slurs used in the song “Black Korea,” in which Cube as protagonist tells a Korean merchant to “pay respect to the black fist / Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.” Still vilified for rapping on “Fuck tha Police” about “a bloodbath of cops, dying in LA,” Ice Cube found himself newly castigated for indulging in vengeance fantasies and for conflating black militancy with vigilante justice.79 The fact that Cube leaned into the charges further infuriated those who viewed the LA rapper as a danger to society. He told the Los Angeles Times, for instance, that he did indeed mean his lyrics in “Black Korea” to be taken literally, because “if things don’t get better, we’re going to burn their stores down.”80 In protest, thousands of Korean merchants across the nation boycotted St. Ides, a beer brand Ice Cube had promoted. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, lobbied record chain stores to remove Death Certificate from shelves. A writer in the Village Voice, the progressive weekly that had put NWA on its cover in 1989 to champion them as heroes in the fight against a “cultural crackdown,” referred to Cube as “a straight-up racist, simple and plain”—a flagrant reference to Cube’s musical ally Public Enemy and the group’s critique of white supremacy in “Fight the Power.”81 And in a wildly unprecedented move, Billboard published an editorial charging Ice Cube with “the rankest sort of racism and hatemongering,” and argued that his lyrics, which the trade journal characterized as the “unabashed espousal of violence against Koreans, Jews and other whites,” blurred the line between art and “advocacy of crime.”82
Meanwhile, Death Certificate smashed sales records, entering the Billboard 200 Top Albums at number two and tying NWA’s Efil4zaggin as the highest-debuting rap album in the history of the genre.83 The attention to the record and its content, however, was evocative of Straight Outta Compton. During a period of heightened racial tension in Los Angeles, and following the decision by an LA judge to fine Korean storekeeper Soon Ja Du $500 for the murder of Latasha Harlins, Ice Cube’s song “Black Korea” created an uproar reminiscent of “Fuck tha Police.” While not a single, “Black Korea” became Death Certificate’s most notorious cut, and the public outcry it generated provided him a platform to highlight, by any means necessary, the relationship between the exploitation of power and the degradation of black people. Ice Cube reveled in his ballooning public role as one of hip-hop’s “most streetwise and politically complex” voices, and used it to argue, yet again, that black lives were systematically discarded in Los Angeles, just as they were nationwide. In interview after interview, he warned that it was a mistake to assume that gangsta rap, which reflected the fantasies, pleasures, travails, and fears of black kids on the block, was devoid of social or political meaning. And to vilify him or his violent lyrics was to miss the point and to willfully ignore the inhumanity in the Du sentencing and the Holliday tape. The demoralization was nothing new, Ice Cube noted, but the repercussions for it might be. As he told The Source in late 1991, “Pretty soon, shit’s gonna blow up.”84
Months later, it did.
On April 29, 1992, veteran news correspondent Dan Blackburn drove with his television crew into South Central Los Angeles, through neighborhoods only recently memorialized in Ice Cube’s lyrics and John Singleton’s film. They were on a mission that night to cover the ugly first hours of a major riot in Los Angeles. As mayhem unfolded, Blackburn and his news crew became, themselves, targets of the violence borne of decades of political and economic neglect and unchecked police abuse. As Blackburn reported, “I was in the Chicago riots. I covered DC when the riots happened after the Martin Luther King assassination. I’ve never seen anything that comes close to this.”85
The violent uprising escalated quickly. By the end of the first day, Los Angeles was in a state of emergency. Governor Pete Wilson made preparations to deploy National Guard troops; the California Highway Patrol blocked exits from the Harbor Freeway and the Santa Monica Freeway to prevent motorists from entering zones of protest in Inglewood, South Central, and downtown Los Angeles; the city halted bus service in the area; Los Angeles Unified School District announced its plan to close schools; the Federal Aviation Administration redirected flights approaching LAX; and LA’s mayor, Tom Bradley, issued a desperate plea for peace, then signed a curfew order.86 Two days after Dan Blackburn and CNN began covering the unrest, the riots had taken hold of the whole county, and leaders declared a full-blown national disaster. FBI SWAT team officers, Border Patrol agents, California National Guardsmen, and Los Angeles police officers joined some 4,500 members of the US Army and the Marine Corps, many of them recently deployed in the Persian Gulf War, who descended upon Los Angeles “as if they were responding to an international crisis in Panama or the Middle East.” Troops were outfitted in fatigues, flak jackets, and helmets, and armed with M-16 rifles and 9mm pistols. Ready for battle, they rolled through smoke-filled avenues in Humvees, ten-ton trucks, and armored vehicles. One National Guardsman offered a summary of the scene as he took up his position in South Central, the heart of the riot zone. “Welcome to Beirut West.”87
Through five days and nights, every major television news organization and cable news outlet, most of them employing news choppers, streamed live footage of the so-called Rodney King Riots.88 It was a national media event like no other in American history, a spectacle of unrest precipitated by two other unprecedented media spectacles that were considered, as CBS-TV reporter Harvey Levin said, impossible to “match … from the standpoint of drama.” First, there had been the airing of the videotaped police beating of twenty-five-year-old black motorist Rodney King. Then had come the widely reported trial (including live, gavel-to-gavel coverage on Court TV) of the four Los Angeles police officers charged in King’s assault.89
Yet, on April 29, 1992, following weeks of nationally broadcast trial proceedings, the nearly all-white jury declared the officers not guilty. Los Angeles resident Linda Johnson Phillips was in the Simi Valley courtroom when the verdicts were announced. Outraged, she ran out, and through tears told the gathered reporters, “The color of your skin determines the degree of justice you get.”90 Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton, also in Simi for the announcement, expressed frustration but little surprise. As he told the press, “There is still no justice in this country.” Across the nation, protesters gathered in front of courthouses and police headquarters, activists planned marches, university students held candlelight vigils, high school students staged walkouts, local communities scheduled gatherings to discuss racial injustice, and police officials and citizens alike registered their shock at how, as Syracuse Mayor Tom Young said, “the legal system failed.”91 In San Francisco, the Brooklyn rap group X-Clan interrupted an afternoon concert on the San Francisco State University campus to share the national breaking news with its audience, then led them in a spontaneous protest march chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” and “Fuck tha police!”92 In the city’s downtown shopping districts and in the Mission, San Francisco police in riot gear kept watch over crowds of demonstrators and arrested some caught vandalizing property.93 From further away, the foreign press assessed the weight of the acquittals. The Munich Muenchner Merkur, for instance, asserted that “the whole world” now viewed United States justice as “a disgrace.” From Tokyo, the Asahi commented more specifically that the verdict demonstrated in dramatic fashion “how weak the rights of the black minority are in front of the white majority (in the United States).”94 As a black business owner in Inglewood told Newsweek, “That verdict was a message from America.”95 Rose Brown, who had driven from her home in LA to the Simi Valley courthouse to hear the verdicts, told a local reporter she was heartbroken. And then she predicted violence. “You just watch,” Brown said. “Something’s going to break.”96 John Singleton agreed. “This is a time bomb,” he said. “It’s going to blow up.”97
The speed with which the arson, violence, and looting spread throughout Los Angeles that first day after the verdicts were announced stunned even those who had experienced the Watts Rebellion firsthand. “With the Watts riots in 1965 it built and built and on the third day the city went mad,” one Los Angeles police commander noted. “This was completely different—the city went wild in just an hour and a half.”98 In San Fernando Valley, at the original site where King had been beaten, a mostly black crowd gathered along the busy thoroughfare, holding signs declaring “Honk Your Horns for Guilty” and chanting, “We want justice!” In South Central, along Normandie Avenue, black Angelenos gathered on sidewalks to vent their anger, placing handmade signs in the street decrying racist cops. Some along the avenue threw rocks and bottles at passing cars. Others shouted their dissent as if to an entire nation at fault. Tonia Smith stood on the strip yelling, “We’re tired of being slaves!”99 Meanwhile, angry citizens flooded phone lines at local newspapers, radio, and television stations. By the evening, twenty-five square blocks of central Los Angeles were aflame. Opportunists of every race, class, and age had gutted chain stores, strip-mall businesses, and mom-and-pop shops in the area. At the intersection of Florence and Normandie, groups of black men dragged white motorists from their cars and beat them. A news helicopter captured one particularly brutal attack of white gravel-truck driver Reginald Denny, and the bloody scene was broadcast live. In Compton, where a year before the fatal shooting of ninth-grader Latasha Harlins and the virtual exoneration of her killer, Soon Ja Du, had heightened an already-combative relationship between African-American and Korean Angelenos, black protestors trashed Asian-owned businesses while some Korean residents armed themselves in defense. Downtown, the city’s symbols of law and order were under siege, with the guardhouse outside LAPD headquarters torched, a fire ablaze inside City Hall, and the glass facade of the Criminal Courts building smashed to bits.100 And across the riot zone, graffiti declaring, for instance, “BLK PWR,” “Latasha Harlins,” “This Is For Rodney King,” “Look What You Created,” and “Fuck Tha Police” testified to the layers of extreme tension fueling insurrection (Fig. 5.2).101
Fig 5.2 Graffiti on a wall in the Los Angeles riot zone referring to NWA’s 1989 anthem, spelling and all. Photo by Peter Turnley, 1992 / Corbis Historical / Getty Images.
“I’m not saying I told you so,” Ice-T told the Los Angeles Sentinel early that May, before the smoke of the uprising had even cleared, “but rappers have been reporting from the front for years.”102 Tupac Shakur, then an emerging Bay Area rapper and aspiring actor following in the footsteps of Ice Cube, echoed Ice-T. “We’ve been reporting this,” Shakur said of West Coast rappers, with a nod to Los Angeles. “We’ve warned, ‘If you don’t clean up, there’s going to be … mass destruction.” Luther Campbell, frontman for Miami’s oft-censored group 2 Live Crew, blamed the nation’s self-proclaimed moral guardians for covering their ears. For years, he noted, rappers had been “screaming out what the problem is,” while authorities were effectively muzzling them, “screaming back, ‘Don’t say what you’re saying.’”103
But more than any other rap celebrity, Ice Cube proclaimed to have prophesied the 1992 uprising. “Anything you wanted to know about the riots was in the records before the riots.” Indeed, he could plausibly claim the longest and most varied track record as an artist offering tracings of the problems brewing in Los Angeles, which by April 1992 included his work with NWA and three solo recording projects. Beyond the music, there was his breakout performance as a young Crip named Doughboy in the film Boyz N the Hood, which had illustrated the fateful impact of daily indignities, big and small, on the lives of black boys in South Central. For half a decade, Ice Cube noted, he had “given so many warnings on what’s gonna happen if we don’t get these things straight.”104 In the immediate aftermath of the 1992 LA uprising, he had cautioned the nation against dismissing the rioters as it had dismissed gangsta rap artists, considering them mere nihilists. And he warned moral crusaders and law-and-order politicians against summing up youth rebellion in the streets as mere delinquency. “The whole country can be shut down,” he asserted. “America needs to know that these kids are willing to shut the country down for liberation.”105
Because Los Angeles rappers, in particular, were so vocal in demonstrating “the feeling” undergirding the 1992 insurrection, some charged that the artists themselves were to blame for the disaster and all of its economic and political fallout—an indictment that many wore as a badge of honor.106 NWA’s MC Ren championed those who participated in the uprising, framing them as insurgents using extreme measures to demonstrate that it is not “all right to destroy black males.” Channeling the black militants and revolutionaries of his parents’ generation, Ren refused to decry the violence, seeing it as a tool for challenging the assumptions of an entire system of oppression. “Everybody looks at black people different now,” he stressed. “Black people are no joke.”107
Then, as the post-riot reconstruction began, some rappers took the spirit of the spring rebellion into the recording booth. The Get The Fist Movement, a collaboration bringing together a roster of emerging gangsta rappers, including Compton’s King Tee, MC Eiht of Compton’s Most Wanted, South Gate’s Cypress Hill, and Ice Cube’s protégés Da Lench Mob, recorded music that framed upheaval, even bloodshed, as empowerment. The movement’s self-titled single “Get the Fist” stood in stark contrast to pre-Riot increase-the-peace rap anthems like “Self-Destruction” and “We’re All in the Same Gang,” which were aimed at addressing problems of black-on-black crime rather than police-state oppression.108 Every verse of “Get the Fist” was an account of rebellion, told from the perspective of a righteous rebel with no regrets. “Get a taste of the heat / While I burn down the streets,” King Tee began, referencing “what they did to Rodney,” and warning those “skeezin’ on my race / I’m black and I’m proud to be lootin’ in your face.” MC Eiht challenged the champions of respectability politics, who aimed to blame young men like him for black plight—“I guess it’s time for brothers to turn the page”—and provoked his listeners in the tradition of NWA by toying with the fantasy of outlaw vigilantism—“Let out some rage and bang a Caucasian.”109
Ice-T also tapped into dark fears about the potential implications of black rebellion. In the 1980s, the pioneering LA rapper had touted his very real gang affiliations, but when it seemed his commercial exposure was at risk he adhered to the old adage that it paid to soften the hard edges of his music and his image. But NWA, and then Ice Cube, had demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that uncompromising rap records sold, and some of them crossed over, turning fringe artists into national stars. On his album, Home Invasion, recorded in the wake of the uprising and released months later, Ice-T took something that the press had referred to as rap’s “cultural invasion” and hurled it back at white America: “I’m takin’ your kids’ brains / You ain’t gettin’ ’em back.”110 The Washington Post asked him to clarify, and he obliged, emphasizing the fundamental connection between rap music and the Los Angeles riots. The public, particularly “white kids,” could not look away, which meant “black rage” finally had a mainstream audience.111
Through the first two years of the 1990s, the prognosis for gangsta rap and its “hardcore rap” kin remained nearly as dire as it had been in the mid-1980s. From the perspective of the prophets of the music industry, all the sensationalized attention paid to, for instance, Ice Cube’s militancy, Public Enemy’s black nationalism, the controversy surrounding 2 Live Crew’s sexual vulgarity and the Geto Boys’ grisly themes, and, of course, NWA’s confrontation with the FBI, may have generated a spike in sales and some measure of celebrity. But the popularity was unsustainable. In late 1990, Variety predicted that, from that point forward, “video will drive hip-hop toward the pop mainstream” leaving “more hardcore rap acts” without a clear course forward. The future of hardcore rap, the trade journal asserted, was radio blackouts, a diminishing fan base, and exclusion from the commercial mainstream.112 The implication was that gangsta rap was dying, and for sure this time.
But the 1992 Los Angeles riots proved to be a catalyst for the commercialization of the very genre of rap that had been pigeonholed as too dangerous and too divisive to thrive. The riots made palpable the complicated, and sometimes destructive, human responses to oppression that LA rap had narrated for years already. Put another way, the twenty-four-hour streaming news coverage of rebellion in Los Angeles functioned, for gangsta rap, better than any music video in drawing widespread attention to the music and making a case for its cultural relevance. Thus, Variety was only half right.
Two of the bestselling, highest acclaimed, industry-shaping rap records in the history of the genre were released in the months following the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Both studio albums—Ice Cube’s The Predator and Dr. Dre’s solo debut, The Chronic—were from former members of LA’s trailblazing gangsta rap group, NWA.113
In The Predator, Ice Cube explicitly engaged with issues of black economic marginalization, mass incarceration, abuses of power, and white supremacy, as he had in his first three solo projects and in the music he made with NWA. Again, he role-played as the outlaw vigilante, taunting his song’s villains, including the Ku Klux Klan, racist political leaders, white juries, and the police—“Nappy head, nappy chest, nappy chin / Never seen with a happy grin”— all the while pondering his fate—“Will they do me like Malcolm?”114 Interludes included segments of news reports from the 1960s, excerpts from television interviews with Louis Farrakhan, and clips of a Malcolm X speech. In the album’s liner notes, Ice Cube invoked W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of African-American double consciousness. But in his lyrics, he drew the history of black protest forward, examining the Rodney King beating and the Simi Valley trial in “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up” and “Who Got the Camera?” to explain mass insurrection—“To get some respect we had to tear this mothafucka up.” He also detailed his violent fantasies about King’s abusers, including the officers at fault—“Born wicked, Laurence Powell, foul / Cut his fuckin throat and I smile”—and the justice system that pardoned them—“Somebody knows the address of the jury / Pay a little visit, ‘Who is it?’ (Oh, it’s Ice Cube) / ‘Can I talk to the Grand Wizard,’ then, BOOM!” As the nation scrambled to draw meaning from the seemingly implausible verdict in the Rodney King trial and the anarchy that followed, The Predator furnished Ice Cube’s reply—“April 29th was Power to the People / And we might just see a sequel.”115
The Predator was Ice Cube’s most commercially successful album to date. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart, and it was certified platinum within two months of its release. It was a controversial record, one bolstered by the sensational coverage of the riots in the months leading up to its release, but The Predator was also a thoroughly listenable record. Although the lyrical content earned it a Parental Advisory sticker—the mark of Cain in terms of radio play—its singles had commercial appeal with the speaker-thumping production of respected LA DJs Pooh and Muggs. Featuring a tapestry of recognizable soul and funk samples, including melodies mined from Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” The Ohio Players’ “Funky Worm,” and the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark,” clean versions of “Wicked,” “Check Yo Self,” and “It Was A Good Day” became favorites at urban contemporary and crossover outlets.116
Like The Predator, much of Dr. Dre’s debut solo project, The Chronic, was recorded before, during, and after the Los Angeles riots unfolded. “I don’t know what kind of album The Chronic would have been without the riots,” said Kurupt, a Los Angeles–based artist and guest on the album. “It was coming from the middle of it all, saying this is what happened.”117 A Compton native born the same year as Rodney King, Dr. Dre used his music to respond to the fact that his city was on fire. In “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” he paired verses describing the arson, shooting, and looting with excerpts from interviews with black Angelenos in South Central reacting to the acquittals of the LAPD officers charged with the near-fatal assault of Rodney King. “If you ain’t down for the Africans here in the United States,” one man proclaimed in a sampled audio clip, “Devil, you need to step your punk ass to the side and let us brothers and us Africans step in and start putting some foot in that ass!” The Chronic, however, diverged sharply from the tone of Ice Cube’s project. The title alone, a slang term for high-potency marijuana, signaled a contrasting perspective on a set of similar topics. While The Predator forced the audience to relive the events and, in doing so, to confront the forces of oppression as tirelessly as Ice Cube did himself, The Chronic provided a way for its audience to memorialize and then move on from the uprising. Dr. Dre’s soul and funk samples, including selections from Parliament, the Ohio Players, Solomon Burke, Leon Haywood, Isaac Hayes, The Kay-Gees, Willie Hutch, and Bill Withers, paired with live instrumentation and the booming bass lines he had become known for as a producer. And the laid-back lyrical delivery of Dr. Dre and each of his guest MCs—particularly his young protégé Snoop Dogg—invited listeners to reflect, rage, and, willfully, escape.
The Chronic was a certified hit album that outperformed even The Predator, an industry triumph in its own right. The Chronic sold more than twice as many copies as Ice Cube’s The Predator in its first months of release, and within just one year, The Chronic had been certified three times Platinum by the RIAA. The Chronic spent ninety-three weeks on the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart, peaking at number three, and it topped the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. Its three singles, “Nuthin But A ‘G’ Thang,” “Dre Day,” and “Let Me Ride,” were each ranked in the top ten on the Billboard singles charts. And across the spectrum of the recording industry it was critically acclaimed for its production. Plus, the commercial success of the album helped launch the careers of an all-star line-up of West Coast MCs and vocalists, including Snoop Dogg, Warren G, Kurupt, That Nigga Daz, Nate Dogg, and eventually Tupac Shakur. Rapper and producer Kanye West explained years later that The Chronic, through the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, was the benchmark for commercially viable black music. Artists, engineers, producers, and labels looked to Dre’s music for inspiration. Asked by a Rolling Stone journalist whether hip-hop artists had gained reverence for Dre after he delivered The Chronic, West replied, “It’s like asking a Christian if he believes Christ died for his sins.”118 Brooklyn MC Talib Kweli, recalling the hip-hop landscape after December 1992, said Dr. Dre “smothered the game.” If the curious gaze of rap audiences had first been drawn westward by early gangsta rap, along with the news emanating from Los Angeles, the Rodney King incident, and the 1992 Uprising, The Chronic provided them with a more lasting impression. It recast hip-hop in the mold of LA rap. Even in New York, a city with a long history of ignoring the West Coast scene, The Chronic was a revelation. As Kweli remembered, “That was it, that’s what everybody was listening to.”119 LA rapper Kurupt, who described The Chronic as “a blueprint and a map through the emotions” of Los Angeles in 1992, summed up the response to the music: “Not only did the streets feel it, Americans felt it.”120 As Billboard put it, The Chronic made rap “mainstream.”121
The first generation of LA gangsta rappers, with NWA as its vanguard, presented in their music and their promotional pitches evidence that sixties rebellion, organized black militancy, grassroots civil rights organizing, police-watch advocacy, respectability politics, electoral wins, and the growth of the black middle class had failed to make their young lives matter. Their art was a counterpoint to the zeitgeist of the 1980s—a decade that saw an awkward marriage in mass politics of small-government doctrine and law-and-order champions, a broad rejection of race and racism as meaningful frameworks for thinking about injustice, and the rise in calls for censorship to fend off social degradation. But LA rappers did more than rile their critics by muddying truth and fiction, reflecting viscerally on hardship, indulging in vice, complaining of abuse while condoning it, tying militancy to millionaire dreams, and thumbing their noses at every faction—the hip-hop establishment, included—that viewed them as a threat to black advancement.
LA gangsta rap represented an insurrection, and a social threat, because its artists improvised ways to ensure a broad, expansive audience for all of it. NWA was not “the most dangerous group” because its members pointed to the unraveling of American society. It was the most dangerous group because its members reshaped the commercial music scene in their image. They popularized their own rebellion, and in doing so, made young black perspectives on American society the industry’s driving force.