Going into Straight Outta Compton I already had a
general idea of the history of N.W.A. I’m not a gangsta rap fan, but I
was transitioning between childhood and angry teenager during the same
time as their run and I watched MTV. I remembered
the riots (there were always riots back then, no matter the genre) and I
remember the death of Eazy E. I knew that Ice Cube left and formed
Public Enemy. This film filled in those gaps.
This is your straight forward biopic and what’s
most striking about it is the how the themes that have played out
throughout the annals of music history continued to play out. As a
whole, N.W.A. was a great unit that is torn apart by the
oldest reason in the record business: money. And it’s not them fighting
each other for it (not quite), but how yet another group of young stars
is manipulated into giving up their rights because they’re naïve, while
the agent or promoter, or the record executive
lives high on the hog. That’s the typical story, but the layer that
sits on top of that is the environment these guys came from and how they
expressed it in their music, even to the point of having to take knocks
from the police and competitors. The weight
of this brave new world of gangster rap was on the shoulders of these
young men.
I’m kind of leery when your subject matter is
the producing the film and I think there were a few tid bits that were
glossed over, but overall Straight Outta Compton is a great film that
details the birth of a new art form as it shows us
the business as usual attitudes of the industry.
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