LAPD Triples Security for ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Premiere

“He picked her up by her hair and “began slamming her head and the right side of her body repeatedly against a brick wall near the stairway” as his bodyguard held off the crowd with a gun”, wrote Rolling Stone.

The circumstances surrounding the release of Dr Dre’s third album are intriguing.

AP: How was it rapping your dad’s words, and Ice Cube, how was it watching him do it? You remember Heller: He’s the one whom Cube once denounced as “a white Jew tellin’ ya what to do”.

Filled with giddy glee at expressing the taboo, N.W.A.’s music becomes a kind of prophecy. The brutal truth Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E spit on wax became a battle cry for the marginalized and disenfranchised-most notably during the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the subsequent Los Angeles riots. “Who would have thought that here we are at this point, making a movie of those five guys?” The first single from the titular album couldn’t have been an apter statement of goal.

What I remember most about the show was the whole crowd (yes, even me) joining in an exultant version of the anthem “f*** tha Police”, and then, a few minutes later, when a fight broke out near the stage, audience members yelling for the police. The video has a hyper-realist bent (see the ominous opening PSA) which enhances the music’s visceral effect. As reported by the Inquisitr, the “Straight Outta Compton” memes are already breaking the Internet with their popularity. Lyrically, though, it’s largely a condemnation of censorship and hypocrisy.

“When generations come of age, they bring their culture with them”, Boyd said. The effort certainly paid off, because Jackson delivers a completely convincing and riveting performance as Cube in Compton. I am going to give you the solution.

And what was true back then remains all too true today, even with Barack Obama in the Oval Office and LAPD’s policy of less confrontational community policing. “Nah. But 90% of ’em are”, Ren fires back defiantly. “But we stood for so much more”.

Prior to speaking on Straight Outta Compton, Jackson Jr. was asked who the primary disciplinarian was out of his two parents. The song was the most overt inter-NWA diss to date, next to Ice Cube’s “No Vaseline.” It followed on the heels of Dre and Snoop’s tremendous success with “Nuthin but a “G” Thang”. Will co-star Armie Hammer hit the trifecta of tanking movies based on midcentury heroes (after his parts in the aborted Justice League: Mortal and the abortion The Lone Ranger)?

Still, it’s generated a lot of buzz, thanks in large part to a successful marketing campaign that began in February at the Grammy Awards with a promotional spot featuring Dre and Cube revisiting their hometown of Compton. Perhaps the filmmakers assume we know all this. You always want your kids to step up at the moment of truth, and he did more than step up.