Dr. Dre’s Compton era revisited long after the gangstas mellowed

IT CAN BE a letdown for LA Hood Life & Hip-Hop Tours customers, passing the Welcome to Compton sign and seeing an ice cream truck, tidy bungalows and the lot where the new Wal-Mart Supercenter’s going up.

“The perception is that Compton is a very decadent, dangerous place where you got guys running around wearing red or blue, with guns and this or that. That’s what they kind of expect to see,” said Hodari Sababu, who runs the tour company, selling $75 tickets from a Hollywood Boulevard kiosk. “It was like that at one time. Now it is a much kinder, gentler place. You can walk through without being accosted, mostly.”

The violent Los Angeles suburb the tourists pay to see mellowed in the decades after N.W.A put it on the map in 1988 as the birthplace of gangsta rap. Today Compton is rebranding itself as a center for commerce and affordable housing, braced for the effect of Straight Outta Compton, a movie which was released in the US in August about the rise of N.W.A and its seminal album, whose famous lyrical salvos include “f-ck tha police.”

Mayor Aja Brown’s attitude is, bring it on. “It’s a great opportunity to have a second look,” she said, predicting moviegoers will reconsider her 10 square miles and 100,000 constituents. The mayor, whose grandmother was murdered in Compton four decades ago, said it’s “almost never been safer.”

Stephanie Chavez, working behind thick glass at a KFC about a mile from the public skatepark a donation from Tony Hawk helped build, agreed. “A lot of people are scared of Compton, they hear Compton and freak out,” she said. But “it’s not even bad anymore.”

TAM’S BURGERS
For Sababu’s clients, it’s bygone Compton that sells, the days of warring between Bloods and Crips, the crack-cocaine epidemic, the Rodney King riots. Straight Outta Compton chronicles that era, when N.W.A — for Niggaz With Attitude — popularized West Coast hip-hop with lyrics some denounced as disrespectful to women and the police and exalting lawlessness.

Tour highlights include a drive-through funeral home, where gang members could bid speedy salutes to avoid ambushes, and Tam’s Burgers, a favorite of Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar. Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight allegedly ran over and killed a man outside Tam’s in January when the movie crew was shooting an ad. Knight has been charged with murder.

“Compton,” Sababu said, “still is Compton.”

N.W.A broke up in the early 1990s. Eazy-E died of AIDS, MC Ren continued as a rapper and DJ Yella, after becoming a pornographic film director, is a music producer. Dr. Dre went on to a varied career capped by last year’s sale of Beats Music to Apple, Inc. for $3 billion, and Ice Cube’s an actor whose films include Ride Along and 21 Jump Street.

MURDER-RATE DROP
The two share producer credits on the movie, some of it shot in their old stomping grounds. Dr. Dre was born in Compton in 1965, the year of the Watts riots in LA; Ice Cube was born in LA in 1969, the year Compton elected its first black city councilman. The city is now about two-thirds Latino.

The poverty rate is around 26%, compared with the California average of 16%. Still, Compton’s been on an upswing. The murder rate dropped 46% between 2004 and 2014, and tax revenues have increased since the Gateway Towne Center shopping area opened in 2007. Trammell Crow Co. is about to break ground on 1 million square feet of industrial space.

A selling point is its location, just south of downtown LA, east of Los Angeles International Airport and north of the two biggest US ports. Draw a circle around Compton, said Greg Ames, managing director of Trammell Crow’s local office, and “you can touch about 10 million people within a 45-minute to a one-hour drive.”

LA’S BROOKLYN
Housing’s relatively reasonable too, with 50 homes selling for a median $274,000 in May, compared with the Los Angeles County median of $485,000. That’s part of the mayor’s pitch, framing Compton as the affordable alternative to Los Angeles that Brooklyn used to be to Manhattan.

“We have new companies investing in the city. We have new housing that’s under development,” said Brown, who grew up in Altadena, about 21 miles to the north. “It’s a much better place to live.”

For F. Gary Gray, the director of the Universal Pictures movie, there’s no question it’ll be a boost to the city.

“We don’t depict it in a negative manner. There are no murders, no shootings. We didn’t go there,” he said. “I think people will walk away feeling inspired.”

He called the time chronicled in the film “a great chapter in American history.” It still resonates, and Compton’s still famous. Big Boy, an LA hip-hop radio host with a syndicated show, was reminded when his Japanese business partners visited.

MEXICAN RAPPER
“I’ve had to get them all in my mini-coach and take them to Compton,” he said. “They never asked about Disneyland and the Hollywood Wax Museum.”

Some locals complain that Dr. Dre and Ice Cube — born Andre Young and O’Shea Jackson — turned their backs on the city. They declined to be interviewed.

“What are these people that are millionaires doing other than getting more millions by using Compton as a prop?” said Benjamin Holifield, president of the Compton Business Chamber of Commerce. “They went straight out of Compton and didn’t do anything for us.”

But Kiki Smooth, an extra in Straight Outta Compton who describes himself as the city’s first Mexican rapper, said the famous former N.W.A members should be credited for leaving behind a flourishing rap culture. “They created a person like me, a person like YG, a person like Kendrick, a person like The Game,” he said. “They weren’t there to save the world.” — Bloomberg

Straight time

Movie Review
Straight Outta Compton
Directed by F. Gary Gray
By Noel Vera

F. GARY GRAY’S Straight Outta Compton starts out strong, with Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) attempting a transaction in a horror-show crackhouse complete with shotgun-wielding gang moll and a police tank (captured by helicopter-mounted camera flying overhead in a tremendous WTF moment) literally crashing the party. It later settles down to the familiar rhythms of the standard-issue musical artist biopic, introducing the rest of the group (Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre; O’Shea Jackson Jr. [looking remarkably like his father] as Ice Cube; Neil Brown, Jr. and Aldis Hodge in supporting roles as DJ Yella and MC Ren respectively) and chronicling the moment when they cut their first significant single, “Boyz N’ Tha Hood.” Gray does manage to capture the understated thrill of people unwittingly acting out a historic moment: the scene is played with little fuss, a lot of textural realism, a funny minor detail (the original rappers leave because of a dispute over the lyrics and Eazy-E, drafted into doing the vocals, has to be schooled on attitude). So far so fairly well-made.

The film even has its required Mephistopheles: Paul Giamatti as Jerry Heller* approaches Eazy-E and talks him into founding Ruthless Records. Giamatti and Mitchell are consistently terrific in their scenes together as one plays best friend, father figure, and seducer and the other plays innocent waif and collaborating dupe — yes we’ve seen this story more than once before, but done well and skillfully acted it can still retain a dramatic punch.

Mephisto wields his magic, sort of (you might also say the group’s drive and talent forged a record, and Heller rode on their coattails): their first album under the Ruthless label, the eponymous Straight Outta Compton, is a hit, and driving the album’s success is the single “Fuck Tha Police,” inspired by a harassment incident.

The middle I’d call the film’s high point: the Rodney King video surfaces, the police responsible for his beating are summarily acquitted, and much of metropolitan Los Angeles is rocked by the rioting that followed. Suddenly the musicians looked like journalists who’ve submitted an early report (“Fuck Tha Police”) on the violence in their corner of the city; suddenly the seismic upheavals in the rest of the world (LA being the media epicenter) seem in synch with the group’s anger and nihilism; suddenly the film itself is a furious reminder that things haven’t really changed, only hopped from city to city (Ferguson, Baltimore, New York). Gray doesn’t push the connections too hard, just enough to raise the hairs on the back of one’s neck as they unfold onscreen. Your reaction is more visceral than intellectual, but you react nevertheless.

The latter half of the film falls into another familiar narrative, The Band Falling Apart. Around a year after N.W.A was formed Ice Cube leaves the group over disputes on royalties Heller owe him and pursues a solo career; Dr. Dre leaves as well, and signs up with the equally shady Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor) to form Death Row Records (the subplot outlining Dre and Knight’s relationship is more than a little sketchily told). We have the requisite scenes of band members brooding, being threatened (and worse) by thugs if they don’t sign up, of experiencing money troubles, of living the high life complete with drugs, alcohol and gyrating women.

On those gyrating women — arguably the film’s biggest problem is its failure to address the implicit misogyny in the group’s lyrics and lives (Dr. Dre was charged with the severe beating of a female TV host and settled out of court). Arrests and lawsuits are of course a part of being a celebrity which the film openly if loosely acknowledges; arrests and lawsuits involving the assault of women is a somewhat different other creature, on which the film is unfortunately silent.

The film’s also silent on the group’s sister act, Ruthless Records’ female rap group J.J. Fad, whose hit single “Supersonic” (released months before Straight) helped established Ruthless’ reputation. Not that everyone or every group involved has to be given equal time onscreen, but the boys in N.W.A actively collaborated with the girls in J.J. Fad on their music — as Dania “Baby D” Birks put it: “They were our family. They were like brothers.” Telling even a few minutes of their story could have helped counteract the accusations.

Then the final trope, The Dying Artist — Eazy-E is told that he has HIV. His wife Tomica confronts him with documentary evidence that Heller has been cheating him (probably the only moment in the film of a woman actually fulfilling a function other than background ornamentation). Mitchell is strong in these scenes — his bewilderment at learning the virus is not exclusive to homosexuals (good point nicely quietly made), his anger and bitterness and despair, his eventual acceptance of his end. Again nothing really new, told well enough that it’s difficult to really object.

*(This just after playing Dr. Eugene Landy, Brian Wilson’s abusive therapist, in Love and Mercy — apparently when Giamatti pops up in your biopic you should immediately head the opposite direction. He’s good in both, he even manages to make them distinguishable characters, but performing the same essential function in two films is pushing it.)

MTRCB Rating: R-16