Straight Outta Compton (1988)
13 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
Haha what a contrast with yesterday’s album, I love it. This is another one of those bona fide classics that have already been written about ad nauseam, so I doubt I’ll be bringing anything particularly new to the table, but I’ll give it a go anyway.
I was actually quite late to listening to this one all the way through as an album, as opposed to hearing tracks randomly here and there. When I did finally listen to it, it actually struck me as quite funny. Straight Outta Compton’s reputation preceded it as the record that solidified the moral panic around hip-hop and rap, especially with its stand-out track ‘Fuck tha Police’, but listening to it now, it seems rather tame. For starters, the rap style that was characterised as ‘hyperaggressive’ at the time seems nothing of the sort now; it’s not quite the nursery rhyme style that was around a few years earlier, but the rhythms are still quite simple and slow and the rhymes nowhere near as complex as they would become in the next decade of hip-hop. Even the lyrics – much criticised for their violent content – seem over-the-top in a cartoonish, rather than scandalous, way.
At more than 30 years since its first release, it’s no surprise that the record has aged somewhat. It’s not all turned more light-hearted in the interim though. For example, while some of the ways the group refer to women were shocking when it first came out, the deliberately provocativeness of the language has faded and now they just sound sad and disgusting, and to be honest a bit embarrassing in retrospect. What is still shocking, though, is ‘Fuck tha Police’, not in how much it has aged, but how much it hasn’t. It is clear how much black people, especially black men and boys, are the target for so much institutional racism from police forces (in the UK as well as the US), being so much more likely to be stopped by police, searched, arrested, beaten up and murdered by police for no reason other than the colour of their skin, with almost always zero repercussions – this is in 2019. It is absolutely disgusting and – again – embarrassing that a piece of music written more than 30 years ago can so accurately describe the exact same problems facing a huge portion of the population then as they are now, and seemingly nothing at all has changed. It’s pathetic.
…but politically-induced emotions aside, this is still a fun album. The music is funky – due in a large part to the many samples of straight-up funk used to create the instrumentals – and the lyrics are witty and clever, even if the rhyme schemes aren’t that complex. There’s no doubt that the controversy around N.W.A and Straight Outta Compton helped to elevate it to popularity at the time, and into legendary status since, but it is pleasing to know that the album still stands up now that the controversy has (mostly) died away.
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