I started talking about Straight Outta Compton with my review of Dope, because I am super white and ignorant.
Basically, I don’t know jack shit about this album, nor do I know a lot about the artists who made up N.W.A. I do know the phrase before the internet meme sensation came out, but that is probably only due to the fact that Weird Al made a similar joke almost ten years ago. Weird Al continues to give me most of my music knowledge about what is hip and cool in the world.
Despite not being able to name even one song from the album, I would probably consider myself an expert on late 80’s and early 90’s rap music. As you already know, I have seen and reviewed the movie Notorious! Yeah, because rap on the west coast and rap on the east coast were basically the same thing. That sounds like something I heard once.
They find my joke hilarious, because I am so white and don’t know any better.
Lives used to suck for black people back in the day. I can keep that sentence vague, because in America is has basically always been true. Back in the day could be yesterday, technically. But in this case I mean 1980’s, where apparently everyone was free and equal under the law, and the law wanted to put the black youth in their place. Arrested for being black was a common occurrence, but also drugs, gang violence, and more. N.W.A. was a rap super group from Compton, California, composed of five members with various talent.
We had Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who was just in high school but a great lyricist. He wasn’t a thug, but he sure got harassed by the police. Dr. Dre, or Andre (Corey Hawkins) was hoping to be a DJ and produce music, not sit in a cubicle all day. There was Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), who had money and some clout in the music business and would help set them up if they had a good idea. But then he was forced to rap, and hey, he could do it well. And then there was MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.) were also in the group, but this film was a lot less about them and more about the other three. They wrote some rhymes and DJ’d too, I guess. I don’t know shit about them.
They are the two on the left so they don’t complain to me about under-representation. Now I can ignore them the rest of this review.
Either way, their first single Boyz-N-The-Hood was an instant success. Their whole city and area loved it, and it spread like wildfire. They weren’t being soft with their words and they were telling the street truth about their lives. It was gangster rap. They were quickly signed by Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) as their manager, because he does sleazy well, and he was able to get them to produce a few more hits to create their first album. Straight Outta Compton! They were signed by the same record company who was getting big off of the California Raisins and wanted to branch out, and next thing you know, they are touring around the United States to sold our concert arenas carrying a strong message. You know, Fuck The Police and all that.
This of course led to the arrest for being black and speaking out, and other shenanigans. The group was now super famous, but thanks to contract disputes and managers screwing people over, they also had to go their separate ways. First Ice Cube left, causing a big rift and song battles, then Dr. Dre founded his own company with Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) (Don’t fuck with Suge Knight. He will secretly give you aids, kill Tupac and Biggie and get away with it all).
And uhh. More stuff happens I guess. Shit. I can’t tell you about everything. I can’t tell you about Rodney King. I should let something be a surprise.
Other artists name dropped in the film include The D.O.C., Tupac, and Snoop Dogg. Actors aren’t even important in there. However, some of the women who would go on to be wives and lovers of the big three are played by Carra Patterson, Alexandra Shipp, and Elena Goode.
You can tell the band members apart by what their favorite teams are: All from California, surprisingly!
Not many people get to play their own dad in a movie about their life. First you need a famous father. Then you have to be the right age at the right time. You also need to look a lot like him. So O’Shea Jackson Jr. got to play his dad, Ice Cube, which is awesome. He is like the kid in Notorious, who played his dad for like one small age group in that film.
In particular, I thought Jackson Jr. and Hawkins did a phenomenal job playing Cube and Dre, which also happen to be the people I know more about thanks to how big they both got. But their stories, and Eazy-E’s story was a fantastic thing for almost anyone to hear and , despite it being over 20 years ago, oddly relevant to today still. Things don’t change that quickly, regardless of the size of computer chips. However, nothing made me cry! There were three scenes where they were going to attempt to bring out the tears, but I was able to resist them all. The last two would have totally gotten me if they just made those scenes a little bit longer, but when your film is already pushing 2.5 hours, it is understandable to make a few cuts.
Seriously, this movie was intense, dramatic, entertaining, a bit funny, extremely informative, and an all around fantastic film for just about everybody. Maybe not your kids, leave them at home for awhile. Honestly, this is now my second favorite music group biographical film, and I don’t even care about most of the music in this one! It will be hard for something to beat The Temptations, honestly, unless we eventually get a gritty Weird Al movie. Two references in one review, solid.
4 out of 4.
