Remember, this is the height of the crack epidemic. Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cubeįrom the gang called Niggas Wit Attitudes Just look at the first four lines of the very first verse: On the other hand, words like “gang” and “gangsta” appear with some regulatory. Many murders take place throughout these songs if N.W.A had offed this many people in “reality,” they would have been the most accomplished serial killers in American history. “It was the media that called it gangsta rap.” It’s not hard to see why. “Back then we was calling it reality rap,” Ice Cube told Rolling Stone in 2015. This is how Ice Cube launches into the first track off N.W.A’s 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton. “When something happens in south-central Los Angeles, nothing happens. We could see this in hundreds of cities around the United States, but today we are most concerned about the city of Compton in Los Angeles County, California. For every million crack users, there were several million more people who felt the impact even though they didn’t use themselves. Ronald Reagan endorsed a program called Drug Abuse Resistance Education, of which the Surgeon General said in 2001, “Meets the criteria for Does Not Work.” For her part, First Lady Nancy Reagan offered, “Just say no.” Meanwhile, in the span of a few years, poor neighborhoods were transformed by the guns and gangs into warring kingdoms, with plenty of civilian casualties scattered among the fallen soldiers. The money and illegal nature of the business attracted guns, which attracted violence, which attracted newspapers, which attracted the office of the President of the United States. Between 19, cocaine incidents increased fourfold.” According to The Department of Justice, from 1984 to 1985, “The number of people who admitted using cocaine on a routine basis increased from 4.2 million to 5.8 million … cocaine-related hospital emergencies rose by 12 percent, from 23,500 to 26,300 and in 1986, they increased 110 percent, from 26,300 to 55,200. What followed has been called an epidemic, as crack spread from neighborhood to neighborhood and city to city like a virulent disease. The exact moment of inspiration is lost to history, but by 1981 crack cocaine had made its debut. The full innovative force of Capitalism was brought to bear on the problem, and a solution was found: a new manufacturing process that allowed the drug to be profitably sold for a couple of dollars per dose. In this sense, cocaine is better, with wonderful profit margins, but the problem throughout the ’70s was that you had to know rich, white people if you wanted to sell your product at a premium. There just isn’t a lot of money in selling weed, especially at the lower levels of the trade. You see, while marijuana is relatively popular, the price that consumers are willing to pay for it is only a little higher than the production costs. Let’s talk about a technological disruption, a bit of engineering ingenuity that solved a problem for drug dealers. This week, Wren Graves looks back at how N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton changed the direction of hip-hop forever. Dusting ‘Em Off is a rotating, free-form feature that revisits a classic album, film, or moment in pop-culture history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |