Remembering the song that started it all...and one little city called Compton, the Shining Beacon on a Hill

When I heard NWA's album "Staight Outta Compton" back in 1988, that shit blew my mind. Where the fuck did this shit come from? Who the hell were these guys. Why are they so fucking angry? Where can I get this shit?

Of course there were thug-ass dudes that you heard about, but no one ever talked about them except if one of your mark-ass friends bragged about a gangster they knew or had one as a relative. I remember Cheo Brown, in elementary school, talking about Crips and Bloods in hushed tones in the cafeteria, like he was scared a thug was going to rise up out of a steaming pot of creamed gruel and fuck him up on the spot.

Naw, this NWA shit was straight eerie because it real. These dudes weren't dressed-up, jheri-curled(except of Ice Cube and Eazy-E, but hey-they hid their shit under a hat), high-top faded, S-curled pretty boys, dancing and shit. They were angry motherfuckers, and they spent the entire video running from the police and making menacing trigger-pulling gestures at the camera. They resonated with me because they looked just like the black dudes you saw when you rolled thru shitty parts of town; thru the ghettos that everyone avoided (like Martin Luther King Blvd in any city in the US). I got the feeling that they were talking about crazy, real shit that happened all the time in that mythical city of Compton, where only gangsters lived and everyone wore LA Kings and LA Raiders gear day or night, 365 days a year. Had everyone ever heard of Compton before NWA? I hadn't, and I was hooked. So if you never heard of Compton before and watched the video for Staight Outta Compton, you would think that Compton was in Beirut or some shit. Normal shit didn't happen in Compton-you could stand there all day and watch groups of gangsters running away from groups of cops. I hit up YouTube to jog my memory and found this shit

NWA was a fucking paradigm shift in rap. Oh yeah there were MCs before that spit about the 'hood and shit. But did they crack $bank$ like NWA did? Did they freak out American society like NWA did? NWA grabbed America by the both sides of it's head, slapped it around and made America look. Look at the ghettos, the destitution, the crime. And these dudes didn't give a fuck. They were laughing all the way to the bank when all those white suburban kids were buying their album by the millions. And me too. And literal army of imitators have followed them, all claiming some other ghetto as worse or even more fucked up than Compton. Neighborhoods in New Orleans, East St. Louis, Detroit, New York, any urban area in the US practically-all bullshit. You motherfuckers are all beeyotches trying to ride the nutsack of NWA and Compton.

• Check this shit out by folk singer Nina Gordon. She fucking sings Ice-Cube's part like it was fucking Simon & Garfunkle or some shit. And to her credit she fucking kills it. No bullshit, props to her for keeping it real. Natalie Merchant ain't got shit on her.
• Watching this video again, I know all you people remember your feelings when you heard/saw it for the first time. What did you feel? Revulsion? Shock? Agreement? Or did you bob your head at the beats, the scratching and the reckless rhymes by Ice Cube and Eazy-E (fuck MC Ren, that B-Team shithead)
• The cops in the video are fucking comical. White, mustachioed, mulleted, ready to fuck a nigga up in a heartbeat. Lounging around in vacant lots around Compton, polishing their batons, and ready to roll in a moments notice to round up "the element".
  
• When Eazy-E is rapping, watch when he's in the storm drain. If you look up and behind him, there are hundreds of motherfuckers lining the upper rails looking down on him. Brilliant. That's straight subversive imagery if I ever saw it. Like they have some sort of following and Eazy-E is one of the high priest or some shit.