Straight Outta Compton and the Impact of Niggas With Attitude

:shock:

 

I really liked NWA and the dog pound, but it did'nt stop there at all.

With wu tang you had: Meth, raekwon, cappadonna, the rza, inspector deck, ghostface and old dirty and every last one of them could rap and do well on their own.

With NWA cube and dre was the bulk of the talent. Snoop was good but without dre he was like pippen without Jordan.

The west coast was were it was at for a while but the art continued to evolve and more talent came upon the scene.

 

What about eazy? Regardless, I hear what you're saying. I think if nwa had stuck it out we would've seen even greater talent emerge. Obviously we'll never know for sure but that's my gut feeling. Don't know that I believe wu tang was "just as good", but I'm admittedly not the most open minded when it comes to music lol. No matter how I may try, my heart keeps bringing me back to my roots lol

 

Easy was good but not on the same level as cube and dre.

You like Biggie and Nas?

 

Not really. I can tolerate them better than the jay z's of the world though. I actually like Ghostface, Mobb Deep, a little Raekwon (and a little less Method Man), so I'm not 100% wc. What pulls me into a song even before I really hear the lyrics is the beat and that's what I find lacking in so much of east coasts music.

 

Another thing I liked about the wu was that they all seemed to have specialty areas even though they were virtually equal in skill. Ghost was loaded with punch lines and was also good at r@b type rap. Raekwon was good at painting pictures and often spoke about "street life". Meth was able to be both commercial and raw, and I don't know how anybody could like comedy and not like ol dirty. Dude was stone cold hilarious.

But yeah I was trying to guage whether or not you liked anything outside of the west coast, you read me on that one lol.

Consider me mind blown at you not really liking NAS.

I feel you on the west coast beats tho.

 

This isn't about their talent..no one is disputing that its about their social impact on hip hop culture and the black community. NWA primary claim to fame is essentially wrapped up in one song. Fuck Tha Police. The controversy and response from the FBI catapulted them into an iconic status in their first album. The issue is they never followed up on it in any positive way. Once in that spotlight they promptly turned on each other and the rest of that album and other works they produced was basically kill a nigga kill a nigga.

As stated in the article:

NWA arguably put west coast rap music on the Hip-Hop radar, while there were already numerous Hardcore rappers and rap groups they were mainly on the east coast. Thanks to a rise in the profile and awareness of west coast gang culture spotlighted by the film Colors, Eazy E and his crew were able to marry rage over social injustice with a gangbanger sensibility in a way that I don't think anyone ever saw before. But what impact did that have on Hip-Hop as a culture? It killed the political movement. Audiences, enamored with the ultra-violent verbal imagery and hyper-masculine swagger, gravitated toward it almost immediately. As a result, there was less joy in the music as everything had to have a harder edge. Years ago I remember someone recalling it as "When the wheels of NWA crushed the daisies of De La Soul, that's the day diversity in rap died."

The shadow of that change fell over everything in the culture and music and it spawned new artists who embraced the harshness (Snoop Dogg, Oxny for example) and in order to try to stay relevant many established artists took on a darker edge. Hell MC Hammer went from Can't Touch This, Pray and 2 Legit to Quit to the Funky Headhunter and a faux gangster pose. Even female rappers like MC Lyte scored a Grammy nomination (the first ever for a female rapper) with a gruff song about how she needed "Ruffnecks". In the early to mid 90s things got dark and I mean REALLY dark in rap music and Hip-Hop culture culminating to the most infamous moments in the history of the music, the murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G within six months of each other. And it's no coincidence that you can do a six degrees of separation between them and NWA. And looking back at the beef between those two rappers, who it involved, how it escalated and played out it was just the next logical step from how NWA acted just three or four years earlier.

There was a sense of bad things getting more amped up year by year from 1990 on. There were too many personality clashes, too many egos, too much money, too much immaturity, too much testosterone, too many threats and way too many guns, it was only a matter of time before someone got killed. And once the two biggest names in rap music were murdered (both publicly and gang related) the trend didn't stop and hasn't stopped.

that's NWA's legacy more than anything else as far as their social impact on hip hop culture is concerned.

 

Ren as well. Once Cube left, Ren took over a lot of the writing. He's a strong rapper in his own right.

 

^^agreed, but he's not quite the household name like some of the wu tang members that Beasty mentioned are.

I liked one or two Nas tracks in high school (same with biggie), but I don't consider myself a fan really. But yes, I do venture outside my coast sometimes. ODB...I can take him in small doses only lol. Method Man is the same. Some of these east coast voices are too harsh for my liking. Too forced, trying to be unique almost. Idk.

I know east coast rappers deservedly get praise for their lyricism, but for someone who first has to get off on the beat, I find that I'm generally made for wc rap (and mid-west/south).

 

I guess no one checked out boyce. Well i tend to agree with him on what he said .

True nwa was a great rap group but they are not what one could called them upliftibg blacks xclan and public enemy was more on that tip

 

Yep .... pretty much sums it up

 

I finally saw it tonight. It was a good film, in my opinion. Not an epic, but touching.