Can't Stop Won't Stop (50 page)

Like a national map on the night of a presidential election, the Los Angeles grid was now being tallied into columns of red and blue. In the unbreachable logic of turf warfare, sets proliferated in the Black corridor, stretching through the colored suburbs west to the beach at Venice, south to Long Beach, and north to Altadena. Soon there were so many Crip sets they even went to war with each other.

“During the late seventies it slowed down,” Athens Park Bloods member Cle “Bone” Sloan says, “because niggas started working in the factories. When they took the jobs away, shit started back up. Then cocaine hit the streets and niggas were in it for real.”
⁴⁰
As the 1980s dawned, Raymond Washington was
dead in prison, killed by a rival, and 155 gangs claimed 30,000 members across the city.
⁴¹

Firestone, Goodyear and General Motors closed their manufacturing plants in South Central. In all, 131 plants shuttered during the 1980s, eliminating unionized manufacturing jobs in the rubber, steel, and auto industries and leaving 124,000 people unemployed in the center city. Job growth shifted to service and information industries located beyond the rim of the ten-mile ring. Bobby Lavender saw the effects: “Thousands of parents lost their jobs. Homes and cars were repossessed. People who had just started to become middle-class were losing everything and sinking down.”
⁴²

In 1978, California voters, spurred by the same right-wing strategists who would soon lift Reagan from his former governorship into the presidency, passed Proposition 13, an initiative that capped property taxes and dramatically altered state and local government financing, launching a national tax revolt and permanently plunging the state into the cruelest cycle of state budget crises in the country. Passage of Proposition 13 had the kind of effect on California's cities that turning off the water might have had on its farm belt. Three decades of investment had made the state's primary and secondary education, college and university systems the envy of the nation—a model of access and quality. After Proposition 13, the state's K–12 system tumbled down all national educational indices, and as fees exploded, its colleges and universities became increasingly inaccessible to the working-class and the poor. Now that the post-war generation had gotten what it needed for itself and its children, it was pulling up the ladder.

In Los Angeles, the signs of the new mood of the state's aging white electorate read, “Armed Response.” Around the downtown and at the edges of the ten-mile ring, in what Mike Davis called “post-liberal Los Angeles,” security fences and security forces sprung up in commercial buildings and around gated communities. Meanwhile, Chief Darryl Gates's army locked down the interior—the vast area running south of the Santa Monica Freeway, along both sides of the Harbor Freeway and back west with the Century Freeway that had been swallowed up into the construct called “South Central,” a heaving barbarian
space behind the walls, the Everywhere Else at the bottom of the ten-mile ring, viewed mainly through the nightly news or from behind the surveillance camera.

During the Reagan recession of 1983, Los Angeles's official unemployment rate hit 11 percent.
⁴³
But in South Central, it was much higher, at least 50 percent for youths.
⁴⁴
The median household income there was just half the state median. While white poverty rates in Los Angeles County actually declined to 7 percent, a quarter of Blacks and Latinos and 14 percent of Asians lived below the poverty line. In South Central, the rate was higher than 30 percent. Almost half of South Central's children lived below the poverty level.
⁴⁵
Infant mortality in Watts was triple the rate in Santa Monica, only twenty miles away.
⁴⁶
By any index, conditions had deteriorated for the generation born after the Watts Uprising.

What the South Bronx had been to the 1970s, South Central would be for the 1980s. It was the epitome of a growing number of inner-city nexuses where deindustrialization, devolution, Cold War adventurism, the drug trade, gang structures and rivalries, arms profiteering, and police brutality were combining to destabilize poor communities and alienate massive numbers of youths.

Chaos was settling in for a long stay. Even an otherwise innocuous knock on one's door could bring the threat of fathomless violence. The chief symbol of the new repression was the Batterram—a V-100 armored military vehicle equipped with a massive battering ram that police used to barge into suspected crack-houses. With the drug war in full swing, the Batterram was getting a lot of action.

By the summer of 1985, nineteen-year-old rapper Toddy Tee's “Batterram” tape was the most popular cassette on the streets. Telling a story of a working-class family man whose life is interrupted by cluckheads and the Batterram, the tape was one of the first to describe the changing streets. Toddy had written and recorded the rap in his bedroom as he watched the Batterram crash through a crackhouse live on television, then duplicated the initial copies on a cheap dubbing deck, and gone out in the streets to hawk them. To his surprise, the song became a sensation, a top request on KDAY. By the end of the year, he was recutting the track in an expensive studio with a major-label budget over music
produced by big-name funk musician Leon Haywood (whose 1975 hit, “I Want' a Do Something Freaky to You” would later be used on Dr. Dre's “Nuthin' But a ‘G' Thing”).

Toddy Tee was one of several teenagers who had hung out in the garage of a local rap legend named Mixmaster Spade. If Lonzo's empire was one center where South Central rap talent gathered, Spade's was the other major one. Spade was an older cat who had come up on ‘70s funk, and had developed a singing style of rap that made him a mixtape and house party legend from Watts to Long Beach. Although he never became more than a local rap hero, his style was carried on by artists like Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Warren G and DJ Quik.

At Spade's house on 156th and Wilmington, right under the flight path of the two-strip Compton Airport, he held court with a kind of advanced rap school, teaching the finer points of rapping, mixing and scratching to a burgeoning crew of kids that called themselves the Compton Posse—Toddy, King Tee, Coolio, DJ Pooh, DJ Alladin, J-Ro (later of the Alkaholiks) and others. But classes ended for good one afternoon in late 1987 when L.A. county sheriffs tried to raid the house, and Spade and seven associates engaged the sheriffs in a shootout. During the fracas, one of the sheriffs plugged another in the back and sent him to King-Drew hospital. When the smoke cleared and Spade and his crew had surrendered, sheriffs confiscated $3,000 in cash, a MAC-10 and twenty-five gallons of PCP—better known in the ‘hood as “sherm” or “water.”
⁴⁷

The local rap school had been doubling as the neighborhood narcotics factory.

These South Central rap songs were like the new blues. But the Mississippi blues culture had developed under the conditions of back-breakingly oppressive work, the toil of building a modern nation. Hip-hop culture, whether in the South Bronx or South Central, had developed under alienated play, as solid jobs evaporated into the airy buzz and flow of a network society. As Greg Brown, a resident of Nickerson Gardens, put it, “In the sixties, General Motors in neighboring Southgate was the future. In the seventies, King Hospital was the future. Now the future in Watts and South Central is jail. You see that new Seventy-seventh Street LAPD station? It's beautiful. You see anything else in the community that looks better than that jail?”
⁴⁸

Hip-hop was close to the underground economy because, more often than
not, it was being made by youths who were not exploitable, but expendable. The flatland ghettos of South Central had more in common with the distant hillside
favelas
of Rio De Janeiro, ‘hoods switched off from the global network, than with the walled estates of Beverly Hills just miles away. The main difference, though, was the proximity of the L.A. ‘hoods to the heart of the most advanced culture industry in the world. So from homemade cassettes, grandiose dreams were swelling.

These new blues captured the feel of the serpentine twists of daily inner-city life on the hair-trigger margin. With their urban-canyon echoing drums and casual descriptions of explosive violence, the new myths of crack, guns, and gangs sounded a lot larger than life. On
Straight Outta Compton,
they reached their apotheosis.

Bryan Turner was a young white SoCal transplant from Winnipeg. In 1981, he had set out to make a living in the Los Angeles music industry, going to work at Capitol Records' Special Markets department where he put together cheap anthologies for niche markets. He left to start his own label, Priority Records, and turned a profit from novelty records like The California Raisins. After selling two million units of the Raisins, Turner's staff swelled to ten and was securing annual sales of $5 million. Now he needed a real artist.

Eazy E's manager Jerry Heller had his offices in the same building. Despite the fact that “Boyz-N-The Hood” had begun moving thousands of copies, Heller was receiving rejection after rejection from major labels for Eazy's “supergroup.” The stuff was too violent, he was told, too street. Heller walked down to Turner's office one day and told him of his new rap project. He played Turner “Boyz-N-The Hood” and a rough demo of “Fuck Tha Police.” Turner could not believe his ears, and immediately scheduled a meeting with Heller, Eric Wright and the group.

As they discussed the group and the music, Wright impressed Turner as a man with a plan. Turner says, “Almost instinctively, without a lot of experience, I wanted to be in business with these kids.” He signed NWA as Priority's first act, and quickly sold over 300,000 copies of “Boyz-N-The Hood.”

When Jackson returned from Phoenix, he jumped back into the fold. He,
Wright's neighbor from Compton, Lorenzo Patterson, who called himself MC Ren, and an associate of Dre and Wright, Tracy “The DOC” Curry, penned the lyrics for Eazy E's debut,
Eazy Duz It
. Their diminutive character inflated stereotypes to their breaking point—equal parts urban threat, hypersexed Black male, and class clown. The album was not half as compelling as “Boyz-N-The Hood,” but when it came out in 1988, it went gold.

Then they turned their attention to the NWA album. Confident that they were on to something, they decided to go as far out as they could. Dr. Dre bragged to Brian Cross, “I wanted to make people go: ‘Oh shit, I can't believe he's saying that shit.' I wanted to go all the way left. Everybody trying to do this Black power and shit, so I was like, let's give ‘em an alternative. Nigger niggernigger niggernigger fuck this fuck that bitch bitch bitch bitch suck my dick, all this kind of shit, you know what I'm saying?”
⁴⁹

If the thing was protest, they would toss the ideology and go straight to the riot. If the thing was sex, they would chuck the seduction and go straight to the fuck. Forget knowledge of self or empowering the race. This was about, as Eazy would put it, the strength of street knowledge.

For the album's opener, the title track, Dre looped up the drum break from D.C. funk band, the Winstons' “Amen Brother,” a frenetic horn-driven instrumental funk take on the joyous hymn, “Amen,” that had been revived by Curtis Mayfield and was now played with Sunday-morning abandon. The raucous and herky-jerky breakdown—which later formed the backbone for the equally frenetic drum ‘n' bass sound a decade later—was the most stable element of the track.

These were not going to be the old Negro spirituals. Under Dre's hand, the “Amen” break took on a brutal, menacing efficiency. Although Dre's production was not as minimalist as Marley Marl's, it shared the desire for streamlining. He bassed up the kick drum, cued an insistent double-time hi-hat, and added a “Yeah! Huh!” affirmation and a scratched snare to propel the beat futureward. Then he inserted an sustaining horn line and a staccato guitar riff to increase the pre-millennial tension. It sounded like the drums of death.

Dre was creating a hybrid production style, adding studio player Stan “the
Guitar Man” Jones's vamps and Yella's turntable-cuts to sampled funk fragments and concrete-destroying Roland 808 bass drops. He slowed the tempo from technopop/electrodance speeds to more aggrandizing bpm's. High-pitched horn stabs lit up the tracks like rocket launchers.

Hip hop's braggadocio, too, was about to enter a new era. Jackson was exploring the contours of his new identity, Ice Cube. In “Straight Outta Compton,” “Fuck Tha Police,” “Gangsta Gangsta” and “I Ain't Tha 1,” he portrayed himself as an untouchable rebel without a cause. Police, girls, rivals—none of them could get in Cube's game.

Reaganism had eliminated youth programs while bombarding youths with messages to desist and abstain; it was all about tough love and denial and getting used to having nothing. Even the East Coast utopians like Rakim and Chuck talked control and discipline. By contrast, excess was the essence of NWA's appeal. These poems celebrated pushers, played bitches, killed enemies, and assassinated police. Fuck delayed gratification, they said, take it all now. “Gangsta Gangsta” was the first single released from these sessions. On it, Ice Cube hollered,

And then you realize we don't care

We don't “Just say no”

We're too busy saying, “Yeah!”

Oddly enough, the album ended with a techno-pop groove produced by an uncredited Arabian Prince, “Something 2 Dance 2,” more G-rated than G'ed down. It was as if the crew had hedged their bets. When the song was released as a B-side to “Gangsta Gangsta,” it became a mixshow and club staple and one of the biggest urban hits of 1988 in the West and the South. In fact, “Something 2 Dance 2” pointed sideways to the dance-floor-fillers Dre and Arabian Prince were doing for pop crossover acts like J. J. Fad, Cli-N-Tel, the Sleeze Boyz, and Dre's then-girlfriend Michel'le. J. J. Fad's
Supersonic: The Album
had easily outsold
Eazy Duz It
. But all these songs were like echoes of Eve's After Dark or an Uncle Jam's party, relics of an age of innocence that the rest of
Straight Outta Compton
was about to slam the door on forever. Nobody would be dancing anymore.