Last week I was buying some detergent at a local laundromat in rural Nebraska. Yet, at that moment, I didn't just want to fuck tha police, both physically and figuratively; I wanted them lynched, drenched in gasoline, and burnt alive. It's one thing to get a catchy couplet stuck in teenagers' heads; it's another to convert half the nation into murderous psychopaths hell-bent on riot and rape. Straight Outta Compton was not the first gangsta-rap album, nor was it the first album to use such disconcerting and scabrous blasts of sound, but the music was revolutionary for two reasons. First, Dre and Yella took the vitriolic, cacophonous rampage of Public Enemy and discarded all the motivation and history behind the anger; second, they sampled laid-back jazz, psychoastral-lovetron p-funk, sweetly romantic soul, naïve doo-wop, Martha Reeves, Charles Wright and Marvin Gaye, and proceeded to lay it under the most gruesome narratives imaginable, dead ho's and cop killers. It's cruel, duplicitous, perverse, horrifying, hilarious. In some ways, Straight Outta Compton is the archetypal rap album, the one you would send into space if you wanted to ignite a stellar holocaust. It unites the paranoia of It Takes a Nation of Millions with the chill of The Chronic, while still retaining an old-school, Run-DMC-style playfulness. I ain't no sucker! The mind itself is a ghetto, and the ghetto is universal. A lot of people, for whatever reason, take offense to such ideas. Burroughs writes the same thing and gets hailed as the greatest writer of the twentieth century. There is no hope, no messages, no politics, rarely an explicit suggestion of irony. People will get hurt here. The group, sans-Cube, is simply trying to further their status as icons of shock-rap. Unlike someone like Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson, though, N. The songs here sound like the Bomb Squad in the graveyard Superfly got buried in. It's complexly debauched, fantastically jagged terror-hop that at its best challenges anything on Fear of a Black Planet and at its worst challenges anything off Dre's 2001. It's also much funnier than Straight Outta Compton. Ten seconds can barely pass before someone is murdered or raped. It's the sound of an expletive anger at its breaking point. The reissues sound pretty tight, but high-quality audio was never really the point. The supplementary tracks are a more interesting point of discussion. The former may be a better song, but only because it uses more of the Wright sample, whereas the latter regrettably decides to disturb the propulsion of the original by inserting spoken dialogue. The title track, though, is easily one of the best rap songs of all time-- N. Listening to these discs again just remind me how ludicrous the whole Eminem controversy was. More than a decade ago, N. When Eazy-E does it, it's because nothing good was on TV that night. These are the most nihilistic, apolitical recordings since the Nixon tapes.
