Straight Outta Compton

NWA

Our art is a reflection of our reality

                The movie “Straight Outta Compton” was just straight up a great movie. The movie is about five young men from Compton, California. Using their rap music and their lyrics, they put their frustration and anger about their life in one of the most dangerous places in America into the most powerful thing they could think of; their music. This movie tells the story of how these “music rebels” stood up to the cops that were trying to keep them down and trying to force their authority upon these boys. NWA (Ni**az Wit Attitude) spoke the truth that no one in America knew, that life in the hood was awful, and that they were going to start a revolution to change life for everyone for the better.

                The movie starts out when Eazy-E (Eric Wright) goes to a drug house to try and make a deal, when the police raids come into town, and he gets away. The movie then goes to show Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella all meeting up with Eazy-E at a club called “Dooto’s”, which was incredibly famous back in the day. Dr. Dre gets the whole crew into a recording studio and they find out that Eazy-E just can’t rap. So he makes everyone get out of the studio, and it is only him and Dre in the studio. They boys start the record company called “Ruthless Records” and the album “Boyz-n-the-Hood” raised up the charts. A manager named Jerry Heller, talks to Eric and they make a deal to manage the group.

                The boys preform for a bunch of bigger record labels and a man from “Priority Records” signs the group. The boys make a bunch more songs and during one of their recording sessions, they get beat up and abused by the cops. This led Ice Cube to write the song “F*k tha Police”. With their old and new songs, Jerry Heller decides it is time to take the boys on tour. When they get to Detroit, the cops give them a huge talk about all the things that they cannot do during the show. They tell them that they are prohibited to play the song about the police because the song encouraged the people to fight back against them. The boys weren’t going to have any of that. So they did the song, the police arrested them and the riots in America started. The boys then went into an interview and people asked them why they were rapping about the things they were, and that is when Ice Cube said the famous words, “Our art is a reflection of our reality”. What that means is that, they just say what they have seen and what they have gone through and what they are currently going through.

                Ice Cube wants to get his contract, when he realizes that Jerry Heller is screwing him out of his money so Ice Cube decides he is done with Jerry’s business and signs solo with “Priority Records”. The rest of the guys that are still with NWA make a song about how Ice Cube is a trader, and a back stabber. Then a diss track war comes up and everyone gets mad at each other. After a while, Dr. Dre starts to realize that he is getting screwed by Jerry. So Dr. Dre decides he is going to leave and sign with “Death Row Records” which he started with Suge Knight. Suge and his crew beat up Eric to get him to release Dre from his contract situation. Dre then releases his new album “The Chronic”. Dre then starts finding all these new talents, people like Snoop Dogg, and Tupac. But all the while the Los Angeles Riots were still going at full force, and even got worse when four police officers beat up the innocent man named Rodney King. So what do all these boys do? They all start writing songs about the riots, and the police, and just everything that is going on. Again, this is where that phrase comes into place; their art is a reflection of their reality. They wanted people to hear what was going on; they wanted people to realize that the people who were rioting weren’t bad people. They were just people who wanted to be treated fairly; they just wanted people to hear their cries for help. Yes I agree that maybe rioting is not the correct way to get help from others, but they had the right idea.

                Now that Dre and Cube are gone, NWA is no more. Eric starts getting the hint that something is actually going on with this Jerry guy, and he finds out that Jerry has been stealing his money for years. So, he fires him. Eric feels awful about what he did to his friends and decides that he wants to get the group back together again. He calls up Dre and Cube and mends together any broken or torn parts of their lives together. When they are working on music, Eric collapses and finds out he has HIV. This breaks the hearts of not only the boys in the group, but everyone who has ever heard Eazy-E. I believe that this sad time started to bring back peace in the country. When Eazy dies, everyone everywhere couldn’t help but feel sorrow for a man, with the help of his boys, “single-handedly” started a revolution.

                Our art is a reflection of our reality. Think about that. All these boys did was rap. They didn’t take part in the riots, they didn’t get into fights with the police, and they didn’t do anything but write songs and rapped them. Their reality was the things they grew up seeing. Watching people get shot, seeing people lose their lives to drugs and alcohol, watching or maybe even experiencing innocent people get beat up, harassed, and abused by cops for no reason, other than them just being black. So what did they do? They wanted people to know that this is how it is, that these are the things that they are going through. Music was there answer, music was their release from the grasp that their reality had them in. Did they succeed? I feel so that yes they did succeed. They got people to listen to their music, they got people to fight back against the abuse, and they got people to realize the corruption that was happening on the west coast. Most importantly though, these boys were straight outta Compton.