'Straight Outta Compton'

The Moment We Weren't Privy To

Did you ever dream of there being a kick butt youth movement that you could belong to when you were young? Something really underground, anti-authoritarian, socially meaningful and far-reaching in its frankness? I did. And when it actually happened, I hated on it because it wasn't my shit. That's life in the slow lane for you - but I'm being brutally honest about it with you and myself. It was there for the taking except I was taken elsewhere by different things. You see, when Rap music broke, I was neck deep in Rock, playing in bands, recording demos, knocking on doors, and I was *committed* elsewhere.

The way Rap music broke was too far away from me in Sydney - I only got the reverberating shock wave of other rock musicians disapproving it before I got the real deal. It's amazing in retrospect that the negative view of Rap travelled to Australia far quicker than the medium itself. That's the post-modern global village for you.

Anyway, it's kind of cool to relive the crucial moments, even if one was on the wrong side of history and got bulldozed, and even if it is vicariously through a "historic reconstruction" of a biopic. 'Straight Outa Compton' is a triumphant film that spells it out. These kids were alright too.



What's Good About It

Sometimes all a film needs is a strong cast that can sell a mediocre script. My overall reaction to this film is that the script isn't too good, but the performances in this film are extraordinary. There's a furore going on about how black actors were totally disregarded in the Oscars nominations. I can feel the righteous anger in that indignation. This film has several performances that are breathtaking as they are complete.

It also captures the zeitgeist that was the late 80s and early 90s. It puts you face to face with the exact social angst that was writ large as it unfolded. It has the scope of 'Quadrophenia' and its Brighton Riots as well as moments that seem like riffs on'A Hard Days'Night'. N.W.A certainly were a socially important phenomenon, and that aspect is captured very well.

The music - yes, the brazen Rap music - is great.  I mean, bone-crunchingly, soul-shakingly good.
Really, warts and all, I loved this movie; so much so I watched it twice.

What's Bad About It

The directing had a few technical miscues. They cross the imaginary line a lot in this film, for no apparent reason so you can put it down to lack of discipline. Some of the shots are tricky but it's inconsistent stylistically so it ends up being more confusing than artistic. A film of this calibre shouldn't have problems like this, so you have to put it down to slackness. It's a shame because they're distracting moments.

The cinematography isn't particularly flash either. There's something generic Hollywood about the camera and lighting work. If anything the good bits were let down by the technical bits that Hollywood wouldn't necessarily get wrong in other movies. It could've been an excellent film, but it doesn't get there because of these blemishes. Instead, it's a kickass movie, but it's a shame that it could have been even more transcendent.

What's Interesting About It

What's truly interesting is the distance we've all travelled since the mid-80s when police brutality towards the black population was largely ignored or sweet under the carpet. I remember sitting in the AFTRS library and of all the printed material they could have, they had a copy of the Village Voice. You know, far, far away from America, cut off from information because there was no internet... I was glad I could get my hands on a Village Voice. So I flicked through the pages and what I discovered was a dystopian America where none of the racial tension made absolutely clear after the Civil Rights movement, had been addressed under Reagan and then Bush Snr. It was a stunning realisation that the black population in America had been economically cut adrift and persecuted through the police.

The rise of Rap was the black community talking back, making explicit the record of the anguish and humiliation. It was exactly the same impulse as the Blues, except it took a more sonically aggressive form. The realism - the social realism - of Rap lyrics was a sharp break from the entertainment mainstream, and the message it sought to convey was confrontational because there was nowhere left to run. Ice Cube was working in the best tradition of journalism, an astute observer who wrote down exactly what he witnessed and captured its full social meaning.

I look back on my band days and I think about what Ice Cube managed to capture and I have to take my hat off to him. He deservedly found a place in the world through his writing; it is no accident or anomalous turn of luck that made him succeed. When you listen to it altogether, it is impressive work.

Make Me Scream

I have to digress a little. There's this beautiful line in 'The Last Boy Scout' directed by Tony Scott, starring Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis plays a gumshoe named Joe; the villain captures him and ties him to a  chair. The gloating begins. The bad guy says, "you know Joseph, I'd like to hear you scream."
Bruce Willis' Joe replies, "that's easy. Just stick my head next to speaker and play Rap."
It's a great moment from an under-rated action movie.
That's how Rap music was viewed by the mainstream, even as late as 1991. We've come a long way since.

I think about it today, and I realise it's just a case of you can't be everywhere at once. Things are happening all the time, but you're not necessarily going to be able to get to it, because you're busy doing other things which are of no less importance. Nonetheless, the flip side to the regret is the understanding that I missed something really important as it rolled right by.

Rap As Poetry

Sometime in the early 90s, the esteemed literature academic Don Anderson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that poetry wasn't dead, it was alive and kicking in Rap. Around the same time, Neil Young made the observation that sometimes he doesn't want to sing a melody, he wants to rap his point, plaintively. To get to that point, Rap had to claim a platform. The film covers that battle to claim  platform from where they could speak their subjective angry truths.

What becomes clear in this film is just how much Ice Cube was switched on to his writerly mission. It's remarkable that he set out to capture the rhythm of speech and vernacular of his surroundings, and sublimate it into something he could deliver on stage. The stoic realism of that process puts most young writers to shame.

Is something that starts with "fuck the police" art? Many people think not. Indeed, they were so offended they tried to run N.W.A. out at many a town they toured. At each juncture, when asked about it, Ice Cube got up and took the line that it was indeed art - radically so - and that he made no apologies for something that stood as freedom of expression under the first amendment of the US Constitution.

It's hard to assess popular works; and by that I mean works that operate in the un-rarefied air of pop culture. Yet if one thing is a good indicator of the value of the work, it is the commotion it creates. If it were radically bad art, it is highly unlikely to have galvanised so many people. Instead the work done by N.W.A and other Rap artists essentially rewrote the social rules of engagement for the black population with the rest of America. Compared to the hope-filled beginnings of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the 1980s were the ugly confrontational decade where the nitty gritty was sorted out. N.W.A. essentially provided the hymn book for the re-constitution of black power politics, right for the picket lines.

So if a generation of youths found their identity in this phenomenon, charged by the words and meaning conjured by its authors, could it really not be art? We're at the point in history where we're finally seeing the outline of what that phenomenon was, and with it what meaning it carried.

But Most Of Us Rockers Missed It

This film is quite educational, if you are a student of Pop Music. It sounds so clear and present that you can actually feel the very architecture of the music mix. It's one of those rare films that just listening to the music alone is cool enough.

The stripped down sound of Rap is a highly calculated move. Pop Music had been going through man phases of construction and deconstruction and reconstruction. Through that process, Pop Music moved ever closer to a streamlined production with fewer filigrees. There is a fundamental issue of economic competitiveness inherent in the development of Pop Music that dates right back to jazz orchestras. Before electric amplification, you needed an orchestra to fill the concert room with sound. As jazz developed and played in smaller venues, this allowed for smaller combos. By theme Bebop came about, band sizes shrunk down to quintets, quartets and trios.

With the advent of rock music, the band sizes stayed at quintets, quartets and trios but the music itself became ever simpler. As early as the mid-60s, Paul McCartney mused of a possibility of a one-note pop song, even though he could not conceive of what that would sound like back then. All the while, the rhythm was getting more complicated. Rock'n'Roll started with a regular 4-beat, but eventually evolved to 8-beat; but then funk came along and were working 16-beat music.

When electronic music came about, it removed the band of a drummer with its machines, and ultimately gave rise to the DJ, who effectively fronted all the music through a record. And so, there was no longer a musician required. Merely the recorded sound being used against the economic interests of the musicians who recorded them. This is why rock musicians were so hostile to Techno, Dance, and Rap - those forms of music did away with dexterity-expertise,  and the entire vernacular of music that went with that dexterity-expertise. When that was gone, there was no more justification for a band to be a band. The writing was on the wall.

At Rap and Hip-Hop, Pop Music reached the point where a DJ would programme the rhythmic and harmonic content, and the vocalist would submit vocal sounds that did not feature a melody. It was (and probably still is) the ultimate end point for Pop Music's structural deconstruction as it reassembled itself for its own economic imperative. With Rap, you have music with only one musician-composer who essentially works off rhythm with minimal harmonic content. The vocalist raps. The rest is an elaboration of this structure. The way the five guys you see on stage for N.W.A. work the music, is nothing like the five guys you might have seen with say, jazz or rock quintet. Interestingly, it has more in common with how Kraftwerk work their music.

To join in with the phenomenon, rock musicians would have had to trade in their equipment for something else totally, abandon the complex accretion of the subculture, discard the musical vernacular that they loved, and go to the new music empty-handed. Some people made that move and became wildly successful. Others did not, and there is not a rock musician who didn't get left behind and becoming obsolete by staying with Rock. I do remember that moment when I was in a record shop (remember those?) in 1992, where the tough choice was going with the Public Enemy CD or The Baby Animals' CD. I ended up buying both, but through the 90s, I was acutely aware of the bifurcation in my engagement with Pop Music.

That aside, listening to the music track in this film is a singular treat. It plugs you right in to the energy and power of Rap when it was dangerous. It would have been something special to have been young and black in America, and to have N.W.A. blasting out of your ghetto-blaster as your anthem.
Then again, there's this advice from Chris Rock: