![]() ![]() The album's got more strengths than the lyrical impact, too (and luckily, the sense of breaking new ground and making a stand makes those lyrics oddly timeless). Express Yourself proves the rule - it appears to show a glimpse of what Dre would become as a lyricist, on tracks such as The Watcher, when he went solo, yet Ice Cube wrote the entire song. It's no surprise that the group would effectively die as soon as he left for a solo career - hell, he pretty much killed them himself with the graphic diss track No Vaseline. Every lyric you'll remember, every verse you'll recite, is Cube's. Plus, each of their best moments were written by - surprise! - Ice Cube. MC Ren and Eazy-E, while mostly solid, just aren't on Cube's level on this showing. Dre hadn't come into his own yet, and anyway, he's here mainly as a producer. This was the only mainstream NWA release that featured Ice Cube, who drives the album lyrically. If today's mainstream rap has a textbook, it's this.Īnd, like most records with that level of influence, it towers over pretty much everything that followed it. You can trace the line back, and it stops here, as soon as Dre tells you - 'You are about to witness the strength of street knowledge'. ![]() You can hear the seed of Public Enemy in Mos Def, The Roots, KRS-One, Common, and even the early works of the Manic Street Preachers - but every time you hear a rapper talking about getting drunk, dismissing women as inferior, or shooting someone, NWA are right there. The divide between the two approaches is STILL around today. To draw out the analogy, if Public Enemy were The Clash, NWA were most definitely the Sex Pistols. Travis Barker has called PE and NWA the most 'punk' bands ever, and he has a point. NWA's, however, came through in a blatant, nihilistic disregard for society. Public Enemy had expressed controversial opinions, but their beliefs manifested themselves in the same progressive politics and anti-racist polemic as The Clash (a group they acknowledged as an influence). Hip-hop had never sounded like this before. In this world, that was - and in many ways, still is - the most incendiary opening verse in history. ![]() Jesus, at the time, in the UK, the Beastie Boys were considered a massive threat to the nation's youth just because their live show contained a prosthetic pe nis! It would be a full year before 2 Live Crew struck one of the most important blows against censorship ever with 'Me So Horny', and would also be a full year before Public Enemy would themselves sample Nelson George's assessment that this album was 'too black, too strong' for MTV. That was Public Enemy, on their debut Yo! Bum Rush The Show. The most controversial thing anybody had done in the genre was proclaim it 'the black CNN'. Back then, hip-hop was barely a blip on the radar. That might not seem much today, but imagine that in 1988. So when I'm in your neighborhood, you better duckīut when I come back, boy, I'm comin Straight Outta Compton Until them dumb motherfu ckers see clearly Niggaz start to mumble, they wanna rumbleĪin't no tellin when I'm down for a jack move The police are gonna hafta come and get meįor the punk motherfu ckers that's showin out Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfu cker named Ice Cubeįrom the gang called Niggaz With Attitudes ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |