Customer Reviews

Straight Outta Compton: 20th Anniversary Edition

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of those CDs that is a must have. Not just for a Hip-Hop fan but a music fan in general. This album defines an era. Great production, great raps, strong attitude. Could you ask for more?! This CD is as relevent today as it was 20 years ago. The second you hear it you feel the energy you want to take a stand.

The guy saying that they are not from Compton needs to check his facts. Why would you use 2000 census numbers for a group that started in the late 80's anyway. The only person in N.W.A. not from compton is Cube and he is from South Central.

This is the Rap record that you automatically think of when someone says the 80s. Every track is the bomb especially that one you know what I mean :). This is a must buy for Hip-Hop fans who love old school rap and not all this ringtone rap out nowadays. 5 solid stars.

okay they aren't as hood as they say but why would you care about their life instead of the music....the only reason why i wrote this review is beacause 2 stars is definatly the wrong rating for this album go cop this ish for sum old school ish

Straight Outta Compton my ass. Dr. Dre, Easy E, and Ice Cube are from Woodland Hills and all went to the William Howard Taft High School along with Lisa Kudrow of Friends, Everlast and Fez (Wilmer Valderrama) of That Seventies Show. Woodland hills has a 3.4% black population, and a 80% white one. In 2000 the median house price was $950,000 and in 2000 the median income was $72,568, in 2009 its $89,946. Yeah man thats the 'hood all right.

All the criticisms made by the 'kid's review' dude are valid. Using the 'plausible deniability' of a so-called 'work of art,' these guys confess to murders on these raps, and not only that, they brag about it. They also express a willingness to force themselves on women (and men, they call them the punk mfs in prison lingo), steal the property of and shoot and kill anyone they want with very little justification (they do play the race card often but they certainly do not consider themselves 'victims' in any way, except to a certain extent, former victims to police brutality who are victims no more), especially Police.

I can't imagine how many middle-class folks of all colors in the suburbs dumped in their pants and bought extra guns and ammo when they first heard this. I'm one of those guys. Here was the ultimate blaxploitation in its rawest form. But this wasn't a joke and these guys weren't Shaft or Superfly. These aren't actors here acting a part in "Goodfellas from the Ghetto," based on real events, these are the actual gangsters themselves (well, at least 2 or 3 of them for sure), glorifying violence, bragging about being completely ruthless, Ill-tempered, backstabbing, merciless jerks with no honor whatsoever. This album and hundreds of gangsta rap albums after it, cannot be morally justified in their lyrical content. Even Chris Rock admitted this. They certainly do more harm than good in society at large, in the short and long term, when art that imitated life is imitated in turn by life again and so on and son, the cycle continues.

More people got murdered in the inner-cities pursuing the ruthless, macho ideal glorified on this record and its legion of imitators, more blacks than ever ended-up in the prison system and more middle-class whites lost their manners and minds and got in trouble also, went to prison and experienced rectal discomfort. And yet, despite all this, despite being an immoral work, glorifying a harmul and degenerate attitude no decent or respectable person would or should imitate, it remains a work of art, a very powerful and skillfully constructed and performed, raw work of explosive and poisonous-as-an overdose-of-China-white-Heroin-if mishandled poetry , and hence, its undeniable power to influence. This is the glaring paradox which is the fascination of all 'gangsta rap,' the reason why this genre of rap remained popular while the others faded away. Most people will not analyze it but nevertheless sense this. How can elements that are harmful create a thing of ferocious and ruthless beauty? How did the synthesis occur?

Should S.O.O.Compton be officially censored because it does more harm than good when many so-called adults subconsciously take in its message and act on it to alter their behavior for the worse, like children would? Absolutely not. All works of art are pieces of a vast puzzle that illuminate different aspects of the human condition and this is just one piece. Those who see the one piece as the whole puzzle are the problem. What is needed are intelligent consumers who can understand, criticize and discern the many elements presented by a complex work and put it into context, rather than just accepting it wholesale as 'good' on a gut level. Works of art made by mass-murderers (Churchill), killers (Phil Spector), prostitutes (Judee Sill, Xaviera Hollander, Janis Joplin, Madonna, Billie Holiday), Thieves (Jean Genet) rapists (Polanski), pederasts (Proust, William Burroughs, Andre Gide, Allen Ginsberg), pimps (Iceberg Slim, Miles Davis), thieves/drug addicts (Chet Baker, Art Pepper and hundreds of others) and charlatans (that idiot on Oprah, Carlos Castaneda) all remain valid if they satisfy the main criterion of art which is an ability to communicate something new and fascinating about the human condition on a transcendent level, however wretched and low-life that condition.

The ruthless feelings of Ice Cube expressed in the lyrics of NWA are present in much less extreme form in most human beings or else how would they recognize it? No matter how much of a low-life Ice Cube is, he did what few people will ever accomplish in their lives, he created a genuine if dangerous work of art. Machiavelli expresses some of the same feelings and strategies in a much more refined but not necessarily more communicative way. Machiavelli in the wrong hands is also very dangerous. Pascal has a saying "Man's greatness is so obvious, it can be proven even by his wretchedness." If "Straight Out of Compton" had no artistic merit then it would not be dangerous and no one would worry about it or be interested in it for very long. It would not spawn hundreds of imitators which the social engineers puppeteering behind the scenes, working for the five giant companies that own all media, very cynically and deliberately used, along with desensitizing violent video games and movies to condition the already systematically dumbed-down masses, both black and white, inner city and suburbs, for the worse.

The social engineers realized that albums like "Straight Out of Compton" cause 'moral confusion' among people who are exposed to it for an extended period of time and then due to a lack of discernment and stupidity, they experience 'cognitive dissonance" and a resulting subconscious equating of 'good art' with 'good morals,' (even if consciously they realize, hey, what these guys are advocating is pretty obscene and wrong even under the extreme circumstances of war and ghetto life gangland warfare). Loosening of morals, and freedom from morals is then sensed as an opportunity for a lazier, 'better' way of existing. In other words, if the art is good and true and has ferocious beauty and strength, then the morals that go with it must be pretty valid too or beneficial to adopt or else how did these morals, however twisted and ruthless, manage to create the true art when other methods by Nickelback and L.L. Cool J failed? This subconscious equating of the artistic with the moral is gradually exploited to the point where like Pavlov's dog, the mouths of the masses start to water with the potential meat of "loosening of morals' at every ringing of the bell of anything 'gangsta rap' while the art (meat) has long been replaced with nothing, or mountains of completely or mostly harmful product with no redeeming value.

Nabokov said that creating a work of art is like composing riddles with elegant solutions. Once the elegant solution is found, the work transcends and remains valid and strong despite any other potentially harmful aspects such as unsympathetic, perverted characters. Well, that's what NWA did on this album, they somehow found a most vulgarly elegant and most direct solution to the riddle of how to express "the strength of street knowledge." They were not the first to do so, Iceberg Slim, Jim Carroll, Jean Genet, Edward Bunker and many others came before them. But they were one of the first to prove that 'vulgar elegance,' a seeming contradiction in terms, can be made to exist through art based on their life experience.