Can't Stop Won't Stop (52 page)

Music critic David Marsh and publicist Phyllis Pollack broke the Ahlerich story in a cover article in
The Village Voice
, and through their organization Music In Action, mobilized the ACLU and industry leaders to formally protest. Turner forwarded the letter to sympathetic congresspersons and the FBI backed off.

But NWA's scattershot test of the limits of free speech provoked outrage even in sympathetic quarters.

“I thought NWA was Satan's spawn. I was like, fuck these Negroes for real,” says hip-hop journalist Sheena Lester, then the youth and culture editor for the Black-owned, South Central–based
Los Angeles Sentinel,
later an editor at
Rap Pages and Vibe
. “I was reading about them—who are these motherfuckers? What do you mean, ‘bitch' this and ‘ho' that? Fuck them. If I'm a bitch, kiss my ass. I just felt like dealing with NWA was counterproductive.”

She was not alone. The political and cultural rads had become hip-hop progressives, deeply influenced by their elders' Third World liberation politics but drawn to the rapidly transforming landscape of pop culture's present. The media dam holding back representations of youths of color was near to bursting, and hip-hop gave them confidence the flood would soon come. They took over college and community radio stations, started up magazines, cafes and clubs, and created art, design and poetry with the same kind of energy they took to storming administration buildings.

NWA presented them with a thorny dilemma. There was the I-am-somebody rap rewrite of Charles Wright's Watts 103rd Street Band's “Express Yourself “ and the lumpenprole rebellion of “Fuck Tha Police.” But they certainly couldn't ignore the allure of lines like, “To a kid looking up to me, life ain't nothing but bitches and money,” not least when the rhyme was being delivered boldly over thrilling beats that made a heart race.

The first boycotts against NWA came from community radio DJs and hip-hop
writers, who were publicly outraged at the crew's belligerent ignorance, and privately ambivalent about the music's visceral heart-pounding power. Bay Area hip-hop DJs Davey D and Kevin “Kevvy Kev” Montague led a boycott of NWA and Eazy E on their nationally influential college radio shows, believing it would be contradictory to play such music while they were trying to create an Afrocentric space on the air. Both devoted hours of call-in radio to the debate, and their listeners finally supported the ban. The boycott spread to other hip-hop shows across the nation.

To the hip-hop progressives, the true believers who embraced rap as the voice of their generation, NWA sounded militantly incoherent. Their music drew new lines over issues of misogyny, homophobia, and violence. NWA had stepped up rap's dialogics; reaction was the point. They anticipated the criticisms, but silenced them by shouting them down. Defiant and confident, Yella even disclosed the in-joke, scratching in a female voice, “Hoping all you sophisticated motherfuckers hear what I have to say.”

The hip-hop progressives were hearing it and were conflicted. Three decades after Baraka's call for “poems that kill,” radical chic had become gangsta chic. Just as the blues had for a generation of white baby boomers, these tall tales populated with drunken, high, rowdy, irresponsible, criminal, murderous niggas with attitude seemed to be just what the masses of their generation wanted. Even more disconcerting, they lined up all the right enemies: the Christian right, the FBI, baby boomer demagogues. NWA was going to force every hip-hop progressive to confront her or his relationship to the music and choose sides.

When
Straight Outta Compton
crossed over to white audiences, things became very unpleasant. Gangsta rap was proving more than just “the new punk rock”; it became a more formidable lightning rod for the suppression of youth culture than white rock music ever had been. Yet the music was undoubtedly difficult to defend. To the hip-hop progressives, it sometimes seemed less than a cultural effect of material realities, a catalyst for progressive discussion, or objective street reportage of social despair, than the start of further reversal. Yet the music was undoubtedly difficult to defend. It sometimes seemed less than a cultural effect of material realities, a catalyst for progressive discussion, or objective street reportage of social despair, than the start of further reversal.

In the photo for a 1990
Source
cover story, Eazy E aimed his 9mm at the
reader, over the cover line, THE GANGSTA RAPPER: VIOLENT HERO OR NEGATIVE ROLE

MODEL? Inside, a fierce debate raged over gangsta rap. David Mills asked, “[Y]ou wonder whether things have gotten out of control, and whether, like radiation exposure, it'll be years before we can really know the consequences of our nasty little entertainments.”
⁵⁹

Worse yet, the culture wars seemed to stoke the political wars—the War on Gangs, the War on Drugs, the War on Youth. As Rob Marriott, James Bernard and Allen Gordon would write in
The Source,
“The saddest thing is that these attacks on rap have helped set the stage for the most oppressive and wrong-headed crime legislation. Three strikes out? Mandatory sentences? More cops? More prisons? Utter bullshit.”
⁶⁰

But the hip-hop progressives had always argued that the media needed to be opened to unheard voices. By calling themselves journalists, Ice Cube and NWA outmaneuvered the hip-hop progressives, positioning themselves between the mainstream and those voices. No one else, they claimed, was speaking for the brother on the corner but them—loudly, defiantly and unapologetically. So
Straight Outta Compton
also marked the beginning of hip-hop's obsession with “The Real.” From now on, rappers had to
represent
—to scream for the unheard and otherwise speak the unspeakable. Life on the hair-trigger margin—with all of its unpredictability, contradiction, instability, menace, tragedy and irony, with its daily death and resistance—needed to be described in its passionate complexity, painted in bold strokes, framed in wide angles, targeted with laser precision. A generation needed to assassinate its demons.

Many young hip-hop progressives would thus come to have their “NWA moment,” that moment of surprise and surrender when outrage turned to empathy, rejection became recognition and intolerance gave way to embrace. “I was going to a club called ‘Funky Reggae,' and I remember being in the middle of the dance floor, hearing ‘Dopeman' for the first time and stopping,” says Lester. “And going over to the side of the dance floor and just concentrating on what they were saying—which was tough to do because the beat was so bananas. The lyrics just struck me so tough I had to step to the side and really concentrate on what they were talking about. And that's when I fell in love with NWA. There's been moments in my life when I've thought certain things or put up with certain things and felt a certain way about things and then, with the snap of a finger, clarity came. And this was one of those moments.”

Suddenly the ghosts of 1965 seemed not only prescient, but present. They were gazing over Ice Cube's shoulder. They were pushing hip-hop progressives to give up the certainty of the past, to embrace their generation and its future, even if that meant coming closer to apocalypse and decay. A millennial impulse was brewing.

Richard Dedeaux's words from Watts seemed prophetic:

Ever since they passed them civil rights

Those fires have been lighting up the nights

And they say they ain't gon' stop til we all have equal rights

Looks to me like dem niggas ain't playing.

Ice Cube's Amerikkkan colors, 1993.
Photo © Daniel Hastings

 

 

Rap is really funny, man. But if you don't see that it's funny, it will scare the shit out of you.

—Ice T

Sometime in the middle of 1991, two icons of Black power—past and present, female and male, progressive and nationalist—sat down to break bread. It would be an eye-opening afternoon for Angela Y. Davis and O'Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson.

Ice Cube had just been through two years of turmoil. After coming off a tour that had ended with something close to a police riot, he returned home to the same bed he had slept in as a teenager. His mom had him washing the dishes and taking out the trash.
¹
The house got fired upon, mistakenly, in a gang drive-by.
²
What was he still doing here, he wondered, and what was up with his money?

Together,
Straight Outta Compton
and
Eazy Duz It
had sold three million copies. The tour grossed $650,000. Cube went to ask Jerry Heller about his cut. He received $23,000 for the tour, $32,700 for the album, and was told to leave it alone. “Jerry Heller lives in a half-million-dollar house in Westlake and I'm still living at home with my mother. Jerry's driving a Corvette and a Mercedes-Benz and I've got a Suzuki Sidekick,” he told Frank Owen. “Jerry's making all the money and I'm not.”
³
He got his own lawyer and accountant, and took off for the east coast.

The magnet was the Bomb Squad. “I just thought, at the time, there was two producers that was even worth fucking with—Dr. Dre and the Bomb Squad. If I couldn't get Dre, I was going to the Bomb Squad. To me it was simple,” he says.

Creatively and philosophically, Cube felt he had taken the idea of Black teen
rebellion to its logical end. He was ready to grow up, and in Chuck and the S1Ws, he found willing mentors. They gave him books to read, introduced him into the Nation of Islam, and he soaked it all up with the wide-eyed hunger of a younger brother. “Up to this point, I was just rolling through life trying to get money. That was my life before,” Cube says. “This kind of opened me up to a whole new world. It gave me my freedom mentally to deal with this world.”

Amerikkka's Most Wanted
was completed in February 1990 just after the Bomb Squad had wrapped up
Fear of a Black Planet
. If
Black Planet
had seemed tightly wound, the result of a need to regain control,
Most Wanted
was the opposite, like Cube had been waiting to exhale. Eager to flaunt his skills and his knowledge, he made every track a hot blast.

From police and street rivals, Cube moved to new targets, like naïve panAfricanists and jock-riding fans. But, reflecting his newfound interest in Farrakhan-style nationalism, he reserved most of his venom for the pathologically dependent.

On “Once Upon a Time in the Projects,” Cube's middle-class narrator pays his girl a visit in her public housing apartment. Her neglectful mom has abandoned one of her brothers to the gangs and left the other to run around in a dirty diaper while she cooks up crack in the kitchen. The detail may have come off as
In Living Color
–funny, but it barely hid his outrage: here was how government handouts degraded the weak-minded Black poor.

“You Can't Fade Me” leapt headlong into controversy with feminists. The narrator imagines “kick(ing) the bitch in the tummy” and going “in the closet looking for the hanger” to end the pregnancy of a girl with whom he had a one-night stand. The woman is “the neighborhood hussy,” looking to pin a man for child support. The song may have seemed equally merciless to its narrator—a jobless drunk trying to look good to his homies, more concerned about taking care of his dick than taking care of a kid—except that in the end the man crows when it turns out the baby is not his. Taking care of yourself was the only way to maintain self-respect. It was Darwinian politics, survival of the fittest. Weakness was feminized.

At the same time, Cube brought depth to the male characters he played—on
record or on screen. Tapped to play Doughboy in John Singleton's film
Boyz N The Hood
, Cube became a post-industrial Cain suffering from a mother's derision and a father's absence. Both Singleton and Ice Cube had strong, loving relationships with their fathers, but fatherlessness would always loom large in their work, the ghosts of Malcolm, Martin, Bunchy, and George appearing as absent fathers to a wayward generation gone nihilistic.

Cube now saw his experience being bused to the Valley as formative. He realized, “I was mad at everything. When I went to the schools in the Valley, going through those neighborhoods, seeing how different they were from mine, that angered me. The injustice of it, that's what always got me—the injustice.”
⁴
Cube was moving toward a racial and generational view, his gangsta aesthetic evolving into a proto-nationalism.

On the title track, Cube's criminal antihero is literally breaking out of South Central, heading into the suburbs, seventy years after Blacks spilled south out of downtown, to launch a “nigga invasion, point blank, on the Caucasian.” This is payback. Jacking, he muses, is “the American way, ‘cause I'm the G-A-N-G-S-T-A.” Suddenly the police crack down on him. “I said it before and I still taunt it,” he concludes. “Every motherfucker with a color is most wanted.” The ambiguity of “color”—did he mean blue and red or Black and brown?—summed up Cube's move from repping his streets to something bigger.