

… So it was just too much to bear, to be under that kind of occupying force, who was abusive. So the way we dressed and the way we looked and where we come from, you can mistake any good kid for a gang member. “A war on gangs, to me, is a politically correct word to say a war on anybody you think is a gang member. “At the time, Daryl Gates, who was the chief of police over at the LAPD, had declared a war on gangs,” Cube told Rolling Stonein 2015.

So we went to the studio and created the song.” Ice Cube, who wrote the lyrics with Ren, remembers it as general social commentary. “The cops caught us and we were face down on the freeway, with guns pointed at us,” Dre recalled in 2007, according to Irish Examiner. Dre has recalled a story where he and Eazy-E went around shooting paintball pellets at people waiting for the bus. The inspiration for “Fuck tha Police” is up for debate.ĭr. “And Compton and South Central is two sides of the same coin, so to speak.”Ĥ. “It just felt silly yelling ‘South Central’ when everyone else was yelling ‘Compton,'” he said, according to the book Original Gangstas. He’d met Eazy-E as a teenager and gave him the lyrics to “Boyz-N-the Hood.” When it came time to write the title track of the group’s debut album, he just decided to shout out his friends’ home locale. The rapper was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Ice Cube wasn’t from Compton, but that didn’t stop him from writing about it. Before he returned in September 1988, he’d written two new songs for Eazy-E’s solo debut, Eazy-Duz-It.ģ. The emcee went on to get a diploma in architectural drafting and design from Arizona’s Phoenix Institute of Technology. “The rap game wasn’t looking too solid at that time, so I decided to go ahead and go to school,” Cube once said, according to the biography Attitude.

At the time, all N.W.A had released was the “Panic Zone” 12-inch. N.W.A almost didn’t make it to Straight Outta Compton.Īt the conclusion of the group’s autumn 1987 tour opening for Salt-N-Pepa, Ice Cube informed the crew that he would be going to college. The album subsequently surged back up to Number 38 on the Billboard chart and was certified triple-platinum that year.ĥ Fascinating Things N.W.A Told Rolling StoneĢ. It was later included in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and had a second act decades later, after its onscreen counterpart about N.W.A, also called Straight Outta Compton, came out in 2015 to blockbuster success. Straight Outta Compton was made in a matter of weeks for a reported $12,000, and when it came out on August 8th, 1988, it slowly became a hit without much traditional music-industry support, going gold by the following April and platinum by July as momentum built. Thanks to the notoriety around “Fuck tha Police,” which the FBI condemned, and their single “Straight Outta Compton,” whose video was banned from MTV, N.W.A quickly became not just the world’s most dangerous group but also one of its most intriguing. Gangsta rap was already a growing genre when N.W.A released their full-length debut, Straight Outta Compton, but none of the group’s peers inspired the same level of public vitriol or interest.
