I'd been eyeing N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton for over a year before it finally made its way to my CD collection. It wasn't necessarily an album I wanted because of all the great music on it I knew. Rather, it kept calling to me as pioneering gangster rap. This of course is a genre I have little to no interest in, so it was surprising to me how much I kept coming back around to it, considering buying it, passing on it, just to keep going around in circles. I still don't know what possessed me to finally make the purchase.
Despite being banned from numerous radio stations around the world, N.W.A. is often hailed for their social commentary, and revolutionary influence in the genre. It would impact so hard that the group would go on to sell over ten million units in the USA alone. Their debut album both shocked the world, while also evolving rap into its newest form.
The original founding members included Easy E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Arabian Prince, but would soon add DJ Yella, and MC Ren to the lineup. It would be this sextet that would enter the studio to record and release Straight Outta Compton.
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Hmm...Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about yesterday. This album is vulgarity and shock value for the sake of being edgy. Praise it all you want. Call it revolutionary. Say it's influential. For me, it's garbage.
It's a full-on assault to my ears full of cursing, violence, and candidly, it's lame. It's a waste of good beats, mixes., and my time.
This is not the type of album that anyone with a moral compass, nor even the slightest Chirstian values have any business listening to. The only place this belongs is in the trash can. I turned it off at track five.
Rap artists, the true ones, worked so hard to make the genre mainstream. It's a shame to see an album like this strip all of that away, and on top of that become the new benchmark for future artists.
Ice Cube would depart from the group in 1989, leaving the remaining members to record and release what would become their final album, 1991's Niggaz4Life. If it's anything like their debut, I'm sure it's not worth listening to.
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