I left the movie theater heavy-hearted after viewing Straight Out of Compton. I allowed the
positive buzz around the movie to suck me into seeing it even though I’ve never
been a fan of NWA. While I loved Public Enemy, NWA was a bit over the top for
me. I didn’t then and still don’t like music with explicitly sexual and/or violent
lyrics. Words are things. Words matter. So, I’m mindful of the words that fill
my head. I detest music that refers to women as bitches and hoes, and NWA
lyrics are full of such references. I cringed as I sat in the theater listening
to some of their infamous songs about life in the hood.
So, why did I want to see Straight Out of Compton? I was curious: Who was NWA? I wanted to
know their story. I wanted to get an inside look at the men behind the music. I’m
not the same person I used to be, and I wanted to see if they were different
than I thought them to be. I went seeking understanding; I went looking for
redemption. I wanted to be sympathetic to their plight as young Black men in
urban America; I wasn’t.
There’s a scene in the movie Doubt where the nun, played by Meryl Streep speaks with the mother
of a student at the school who the nun suspects is being molested by the
priest. Streep’s character wants the mother to say something. But the mother,
brilliantly played by Viola Davis, refuses. The mother wants to keep her son
free from the wrath of her husband who rejects his son’s perceived sexuality.
Never in my life did I think that I would be ok with not revealing the identity
of a suspected child molester! But she made understand why she was willing to
look the other way if her son was being molested if she thought it would save
his life.
In Nathan McCall’s book, Makes Me Wanna Holla, there is a chapter called Trains that is very difficult to read,
but so insightful into the psyche of some young men. McCall explains how the
young men in the hood looked up to the old heads, and how the old heads were
disrespectful of women. The chapter explains how the boys would trick girls
into compromising situations and gang rape (run a train) them. Later in the
chapter, McCall goes into detail about having a girlfriend and taking her to a
friend’s house for sex, but learns that his boys have set her up for a train.
He ends up getting into a fight trying to defend her honor. But a couple of the
guys take the girl to another apartment to finish what they started. McCall
does an excellent job of demonstrating the warped view many men held of manhood
and the roles of women and girls in their lives. He also shows a maturity that
I found lacking in characters in Straight
Out of Compton.
It has been said that members of NWA were revolutionaries,
but there was nothing revolutionary about their music or about their movie. It
was a bio pic—based on real life events, and they had the right to tell the
story that they wanted to tell. And they did. The only one who was really “about
that life” was Eazy-E. Both Ice Cube and Dr. Dre came from stable home
environments. It was a well-cast film that left me cold. I couldn’t wrap my
head around glorifying what I saw as a destructive force in the Black
community. Every time a movie about slavery or the civil rights movement comes
out, there’s a chorus of Black folk complaining that we keep telling the same
stories of victimization. Well, we’ve seen this story a thousand times as
well. I didn’t find anything revelatory
in the nearly 2 ½ hours that I sat and watched. Here are five sad truths that I gleaned from Straight Out of Compton.
1. We’re still oppressed—some of us more than
others. I was disappointed in how easily Eazy-E fell for the okey-doke. He
allowed their manager Jerry to swindle not only the group out of money, but
Eazy was also taken advantage of because he trusted this White man that he
didn’t know, to do right by him. Even after Ice-Cube and Dr. Dre tried to tell
him, Eazy still believed in Jerry. Yea, even the so-called hard-core members of
keeping-it-real, fuck-the-police NWA were still looking for a White Savior.
2. Consumption and greed continues to be our
downfall. As soon as the money started rolling in, so did the wild parties,
the drugs and the excess of material goods. There was never any mention in the
movie of them giving any money back to the community or doing any type of charity
work. It was all about how much they could get and spend. Though Dr. Dre and
Ice Cube managed to escape the downward spiral that so many of our athletes and
entertainers succumb to, Eazy Ended up being a casualty of never having enough.
3. Colorism is alive and well. Not only
did the members of NWA end up with light-skinned women as partners in real
life, there was a color caste system used to hire girls for the movie. When the
casting call went out, the request was for girls who were classified as A’s B’s,
C’s and D’s with the brighter complexions and straighter hair being A’s and B’s,
brown girls with weaves were C’s, and dark skinned, poor girls were D’s. I can’t
make this up! Here’s a link to the story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/straight-out-of-compton-casting-call_n_5597010.html
And this is what we saw play out on the screen. Most of the women in the movie
were light skinned. Early in the film, Eazy E was the only one who had a
brown-skinned woman, but she was also “upgraded” for a lighter model. Some of
the “blackest” men we know adhered to a Eurocentric model of beauty. Kathleen
Cleaver, member of the Black Panther Party and wife of fellow Panther, Eldridge
Cleaver spoke of being told to go inside during times of conflict so as not to
mess up her pretty light face.
4. Misogyny was and still is an issue. NWA
objectified women. They were boys with toys to be discarded at will. Though they
come off as decent guys in the movie, their lyrics and their lifestyles show
their disdain for women. Ice Cube married his girl and they’re still together.
It’s inferred that Dr. Dre’s desire to pursue a relationship with a woman who
didn’t want drama was partly why he left Death Row Records. And Eazy-E was also
married in the film, but their references to women as bitches as hoes seemed to
also reflect how they felt about women. An abuser doesn’t call his woman honey
or babe before he hits her; she’s probably a bitch, or a hoe. Maybe that
explains Dr. Dre’s abusive past and Ice Cube’s recent interview with Rolling
Out in which he reinerates why some women are bitches and hoes, and only women
who fit into those categories should be concerned. When Dr. Dre brutally
attacked journalist Dee Barnes, members of NWA thought she got what she
deserved. It was only with the release of Straight Out of Compton that Dr. Dre
saw the need to apologize for his past transgressions.
5. Hypocrisy at its best. NWA may have
made music that was raunchy and edgy, but at the end of the day, they were
entertainers shuckin’ and jivin’ for the master. Their gangster rap wasn’t for
the people in communities like Compton; it was for the masturbating voyeurs in
the suburbs who played out the racist fantasies of hood life in their minds.
NWA exploited what was happening in urban America for material gain. These are
the sad truths straight out of the book of conformity and status quo.
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