Media Matters: Straight Outta Compton - An American Dream Remixed

"This (is) one of those dreams you don't wake up from/Then again, you don't sleep, if you come from where I come from." - Dr. Dre, "It's All On Me"

Dr. Dre is having one heck of a month. Chief among the multitude of historic accomplishments racked up by the hip-hop icon over the past couple of weeks: emerging from a 16 year absence (approximately two and a half lifetimes in hip-hop years) with a masterful new album, Compton, which quickly won on the charts, with the critics, and even in the notoriously finicky world of social media, and watching Straight Outta Compton, the long awaited biopic canonizing his former group, N.W.A, exceed projections by 33% in route to a $60 million opening. The film has been perched atop the box office since it's release three weeks ago. Perhaps most resoundingly, the good doctor almost single handedly elevated Apple music to the first tier of online streaming services, alongside Spotify and Pandora, thanks to the record setting 25 million first week streams of his album, available exclusively through Apple (at which he is an executive). From a pop culture standpoint, the twin triumphs of the album and movie thrust Dre into the nearly inconceivable  position of having both his classic and contemporary work positioned simultaneously at the pinnacle of the cultural zeitgeist.

Certainly, a sizable share of the credit belongs to Dre himself, who may be the shrewdest industry maneuverer to emerge from hip-hop not named Sean or Shawn. The circular synergy of piggybacking the album's incredibly cost effective marketing blitz onto the already outsized buzz for the movie, in turn stocking anticipation for the film even further, is the stuff of which Wharton dissertations will be written in twenty years. Yet, at a macro level, Dre's recent win epitomizes the victory of hip-hop itself, which in less than a half century has grown from marginalized urban expression to embattled counter culture, and finally into arguably the leading arbiter of pop cultural cache.

Gen-X hip-hoppers, reared on Dre's cacophonous sonic collages and the rugged rhymes of his N.W.A compatriots, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E (with DJ Yella on the cuts) like sonic Similac, predictably turned out in mass. But, there were nearly as many skinny jeans as low-slung Dungarees in the house, with 49% of Straight Outta Compton viewers under thirty years of age. While gangsta rap purchasers have always skewed heavily male, women actually accounted for 52% of the film's opening weekend audience. And, while African-Americans made up 52% of ticket buyers, the film performed respectably across ethnic lines; 23% of the audience was white, 21% Latino, and 10% Asian/Other. The fact that such a quintessential hip-hop story can so captivate the entire spectrum of 21st Century Americans is instructive as to why the genre has grabbed such a stronghold on our collective imagination. Simply put, hip-hop is the American dream sampled, remixed, and exalted in rhymed couplets; Horation Alger to an infectious beat. Dr. Dre's Best Week Ever proves that even as the language, setting and characters change, great stories will always inspire.

The phrase "American Dream" was coined in 1931, by author James Truslow Adams, defined as:

"a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

In a rather lyrical irony, the circumstances that birthed hip-hop expose the fallacy of Truslow's mythology, while the culture's astounding success proves the intrinsic power of its possibility. It is no coincidence that the twin themes that have driven the hip-hop narrative since its inception are depravation and decadence; squalor and luxury. Started from the bottom, now we here.

For the unindoctrinated (those over 55, under 25, or Mormon), hip-hop literally grew out of voids. In the 1970s, budget cuts forced New York City public schools to slash music programs from the curriculum. Inner city kids, suddenly deprived of musical instruments, began making music out of other music. Turntables and 12-inch records were ingeniously transformed from appliances of utility into tools of creation. Because many funk and disco records of the day lacked instrumental versions, DJs used paired turntables and duplicate vinyl platters to extend the "break" of a record (the pocket where most of the instrumentation drops out, leaving a sparse percussive breakdown) indefinitely, over which dancers flexed their skills in fierce battles for neighborhood supremacy (breakdancing). Most of the city's public housing projects lacked air conditioning, leading to temperatures well into the triple digits on the upper floors of high-rise tenements, driving neighborhood kids to street corners and parks to stay cool on sweltering summer nights. The sweaty crowds provided an eager audience for local DJs and dancers.

Given the absence of vocals on the extended breaks deployed to let the poppers pop and the breakers break, and the rhythmic loquaciousness that has long defined New Yorkers of all stripes, it was only a matter of time before the DJs began to lay chants over the propulsive drums, shouting out their blocks, schools and even favorite designer clothing brands. Suddenly, thanks to a microphone jerry-rigged between two turntables, a generation of urban youth marginalized by recession and gentrification had a platform through which to make their voices heard.

Quickly, the chants evolved into meticulously constructed verses, and the verses into songs. In 1979, the first rap single was released. "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang was a breezy blast of braggadocio rhymed atop the break from Chic's disco hit "Good Times." In what would become a staple of rap music for decades to come, the three New Jersey teens boasted incredulously of material trappings they had yet to attain ("I got bodyguards, I got two big cars, it definitely ain't the wack/I've got a Lincoln Continental and a sharp new Cadillac"), in a manner equal parts fantasy and aspiration.

Straight Outta Compton opens in 1986, seven years after "Rapper's Delight" cracked the Billboard Top 40, and on the opposite coast. The film conveys in shorthand (a Run-DMC song placement, a reference to LL Cool J's iconic Kangol hat) the influence rap music's larger than life braggadocio wielded on N.W.A's future members. It simultaneously paints a visceral picture of the depravity of their surroundings in Compton, a Los Angeles suburb where drugs and gangs had decimated what was once a beacon of the burgeoning black middle class; the brutal answer to Langston Hughes' oft-quoted musing on what becomes of a dream deferred.

The predominant mood of the film's first act is frustration, with all of the characters wanting more, but confined by an environment largely barren of opportunity. Yet, frustration beats the alternative, which is resignation. Resignation breeds passivity, while frustration breeds precisely the type of desperation and defiance that have long been hallmarks of hip-hop.
While rap masters of the early and mid '80s rarely delved directly into social commentary, the aggression with which they used the status symbols of mainstream America to defy its prescribed social order set a tone of fierce self-reliance.

 When Run-DMC bragged of their Adidas sneakers (My Adidas cut the sand of a foreign land/With mic in hand, I cold took command"), or LL waxed poetic about his JVC boombox (I play everyday, even on the subway/I woulda got a summons, but I ran away") they weren't simply flouting their newfound material gains, but announcing their presence on their terms. It was in that spirit that N.W.A was formed. While the resigned might cower in the face of police brutality, the five Compton renegades shouting "F*** tha Police."

Straight Outta Compton takes some narrative liberties, to be sure. Chief among them, its imbuing of the group with a sense of mission much clearer than it actually possessed. In truth, N.W.A didn't stoke the flames of political activism like Public Enemy, trumpet re-education in the manner of Boogie Down Productions, or invoke ancestral pride ala X-Clan. They were five kids from Compton unfurling their righteous (and not so righteous) rage on wax, in the most abrasive of vocabulary. But, if, as Adams posited, part of the American Dream is being recognized for what one truly is, the first step to achieving that dream is to make oneself impossible to ignore. The darker the recess from which the dream originates, the more extreme the measures the dreamer must take to draw the requisite attention. N.W.A grabbed the world by the throat and hocked a dazzling loogie of its deepest fears, darkest shames, and willfully ignored barnacles directly into its suddenly saucer-sized eyes. It was an aural assault wielding 400 years of oppressive stereotypes as a weapon of mass destruction against the complacency of the very culture that perpetuated them.

"Here's a little something 'bout a n***a like me

Never should have been let out the penitentriary

Ice Cube would like to say

That I'm a crazy m*****f***** from around the way

Since I was a youth, I smoked weed out

Now I'm the m*****f***** that you read about

Taking a life or two, that's what the hell I do

You don't like how I'm living well f*** you!"

It wasn't the specifics of the content that resonated with the 3 million enraptured fans who eagerly hoarded allowance coins and summer job checks to purchase the cassette sporting the still provocative "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" sticker. Many of the group's most obsessive fans were suburban teens, whose life experience couldn't have been more diametrically opposed to that of their new musical heroes. But, the spirit behind the content, one of defiance and strident independence, connected viscerally with a generation raised largely on the saccharine synth-pop anthems that had defined Top 40 radio for most the 1980s. As has been the case with adolescents since the first 13 year-old child snarled at his well meaning neanderthal parents, "eff your hunting and gathering," and stormed of to his cavern, a generation coming of age in the draconian wake of Reaganomics didn't necessarily know what they wanted to do, but they knew they wanted to do it differently than their predecessors.

Much of the steam that powers the film springs from the indefatigable insistence on the principals on doing it their own way, in their voice. From a young DJ Dr. Dre's defiant dismissal of a club promoter's attempts to cull his playlist, to Ice Cube's insistence on the use of decidedly west coast slang in a rap he ghostwrites for a befuddled New York crew, the vision is apparent from the beginning. The adventure comes in where it will take them.

That very same devil-may-care derring-do fueled much of the electric unpredictability that made the hip-hop of the time so exciting. N.W.A's trigger-happy nihilism took life right along side Public Enemy's black power bromides, which breathed the same air as Eric B. & Rakim's cerebral poeticism, which comfortably shared shelf space with the absurdist surrealism of De La Soul, and the whimsically comedic storytelling of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. It could be argued that the only singular theme of hip-hop's Golden Era (1986-1989) was brazen originality, and the freedom to thrust unfiltered thoughts upon the world in a distinctive and highly personalized voice. Hip-Hop's late '80s emergence into the mainstream lexicon represented a remixed version of Adam's dream, in that a generation of young people, largely poor, urban and black, seized world-wide recognition on their terms, despite coming, in many cases, from the most dire of circumstances.

If hip-hop had grown out of the failings of the American Dream in the '80s, the '90s brought an embrace of its promise, as the rap world took on the corporate world. Or maybe it was the other way around. Straight Outta Compton's second half pits the members of N.W.A against a new set of adversaries, after their unfettered expression begins to yield monetary spoils. These new gangsters emerge from the shadows of boardrooms, not street corners. Group manager Jerry Heller's contractual double-dealing ultimately leads to the exits of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, while Suge Knights' corner-officer gangsterism prompts Dre to walk away from the ultra-successful Death Row label, which he co-founded, with nothing to show financially.

Nevertheless, the genre's second Golden Age (1993-1996) saw artists go from simply using the music as a platform to make their voices heard, to claiming ownership of the valuable commodity that their bold statements were rapidly becoming. Questionable business tactics aside, Death Row Records was a juggernaut, literally re-defining the sonic template of the genre, thanks to Dr. Dre's seminal solo debut, The Chronic, and the Dre-produced Doggystyle, Snoop Doggy Dogg's transcendent debut. As the film depicts, the label came from the same streets that inspired the music, and it was quite literally seized - not begged, bartered or borrowed for. Having inspired the suddenly lucrative sub-genre of West Coast "hood" films (the first of the ilk, John Singleton's Boyz N The Hood, literally cribs its name from a song Cube penned for Eazy-E), Ice Cube too, began to grab a piece of the spoils for himself. Long one of rap's most vivid storytellers, Cube began to write and produce his own films, starting with the surprise hit Friday, which went on to spawn a lucrative franchise.

Even as middle and corporate America's fixation with inner city culture reached a fever pitch, thanks to the provocative portraits painted by top rappers, the second Golden Age saw hip-hop collectively begin to set its sights far beyond the block. Just as N.W.A's most prominent alums expanded their reach out west, back east, Shawn Carter (aka Jay-Z) and Sean Combs (aka Puffy Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy and Puff Daddy again) began laying lavish musical testaments to the lush life the would become the foundation of multi-media, even multi-industry empires.

Will Smith (The Artist Formerly Known as the Fresh Prince) saved the world from aliens in back to back summers, in route to becoming the world's most bankable movie star. Fugue's architect Wyclef Jean, who cut his teeth during the height of the culture's grand mid-'90s aspirations, would even go on to mount a presidential bid in his native Haiti. Even the ostentatious materialism, built into rap's DNA since the earliest park jams of the late '70s, took on grander scope. No longer content to boast of sneakers and radios, rappers began lacing their rhymes with references to Rolexes, Rolls Royces, and Moet champagne. While many of the antics wreaked unabashedly of new money, rappers were suddenly more Jay Gatsby than George Jefferson.

As with the rapid economic rise of marginalized demographics throughout history, be it the Irish-American bootleggers, or the Italian-American mafia, the ascension was far from clean. Hip-Hop entrepreneurs, many lacking formal education, were regularly lured into predatory business arrangements, and often resorted to street tactics to shake free, much like Dre's enlistment of Knight to "forcefully persuade" Heller to void the producer's Ruthless Records contract.

The exponentially escalating stakes of what had, almost overnight, become a multi-hundred-million dollar game, claimed more than its share of casualties, including two of the genre's greatest talents and most magnetic personalities, Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. (That's a movie unto itself, but I fear the fight over whether to title it  Ambitionz Az a Ridah or Mo Money, Mo Problems would ignite a new round of acrimony between the icons' still devoted fan bases.) Yet, in a way, that plays right into the undercurrent of Social Darwinism that has always given the glow of The Dream an ominous tint. It's a zero sum game, and only the strongest and shrewdest survive.

Only two of N.W.A's five members truly got to enjoy the spoils for which their seminal debut laid the foundation. As shown in the film, Eazy-E died suddenly of AIDS in 1995. Meanwhile, MC Ren and DJ Yella struggled to establish themselves outside the group. Moreover, "silent member" The D.O.C., who penned significantly more of the group's rhymes than the film suggests, and released a cult-classic Dr. Dre produced solo opus in 1989, severed his vocal chords in a drunk driving accident, and never fully recovered his voice. A prodigious talent, once projected to grow into the Rakim of the west, D.O.C. was relegated to a career of ghostwriting classics for others. Perhaps that's the nature of The Dream. For every beneficiary that successfully follows its dazzling glow along a path to the pinnacle, there are numerous casualties blinded by the light, or derailed by the seductive detours it illuminates on the periphery of the trail.

[Spoiler Alert] Interestingly enough, the true embodiment of the American Dream achieved by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube is only hinted at in the film. The movie concludes with Dre walking away from the corrosive, and ultimately doomed Death Row to start his own venture, which he proudly tells an incredulous Knight will be called Aftermath. Shortly prior, we see Ice Cube crafting the first draft of Friday, which would ultimately become his debut feature film as a writer/producer. Though Straight Outta Compton doesn't explicitly show the outcome of the pair's ventures into entrepreneurship, the film, in fact, is the outcome. Or, perhaps more accurately, the culmination.

As the closing credits role, audience members not bolting for the restrooms due to the movie's 147 minute run time, and the 72 fluid ounces that now constitute a medium movie theater beverage, are treated to impassioned testimonials from Eminem, 50 Cent and Kendrick Lamar - top artists from three separate eras, whose seminal works all carry the Aftermath logo. As the icons pay homage to the pioneers, "Talking To My Diary," the triumphantly autobiographical closer from Dr. Dre's Compton blares on the soundtrack, and the words "Cube Vision Productions" grace the screen in bold font. Thirty years after the group found its origin in a story untold, its two reigning conquerors are not only telling their own story, but owning its telling.

KRS-One once summarized hip-hop as "victory over the streets," and for all its rebellious bravado and outlaw swagger, it's precisely that embodiment of Adams' dream that has given the music and culture its hypnotic power over generation after generation of American youth (and judging by the number of power suits and briefcases in my Tuesday evening showing, a couple of generations of full grown adults).) America, after all, has always been a nation of rebels and outlaws: from the original colonists, largely prisoners and outcasts from England, to the founding fathers who took up arms against a royal tyranny. From the same spirit, emerged abolitionists, civil rights activists, and even renegades of industry like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, all of whom proved in thoroughly bold and singular fashion that there is nothing more American than confronting, frightening, and ultimately spinning America on its head, like so many early-'80s b-boys.

It's hard not to feel as though Dr. Dre's winning week represents the culmination of more than just the N.W.A story, but of the persistence, ingenuity and belief of an entire segment of society long held on the periphery of somebody else's dream. If the film shows how the race was won, Dre's album represents the ultimate victory lap - bold, proud, still fiercely defiant. It'a reminder to the world that thanks to he, his colleagues past and current, and the forgotten land that raised them, we have all officially witnessed the strength of street knowledge. What's more American than that?

Media Matters is look at the week's top news stories, and what they can teach us about communications, business and life.

About the Author

Jeffrey Harvey is a Washington, DC based communications professional with experience in broadcasting, strategic communications, public relations, marketing and media analysis. He has written prolifically on subjects including technology, healthcare and arts and entertainment. His original one act play, Coffee won a staged reading at the Kennedy Center in the Source Theater Festival.