Friday, August 28, 2015

Straight outta Compton

I am not the biggest fan of gangster rap.  Having had a sawed off shotgun pointed at me during a robbery, and being called a punk mark, and having my work place (a store in Sacramento) shot at by gangsters, all makes me less inclined to find this type of music as entertaining.  

But this was a movie about the origins of West Coast gangster rap, a movie about people chasing and reaching a goal.  

It was interesting to see how quickly NWA fell apart as a group, certainly not surprising.  The actors were pretty much all newcomers, except for Paul Giamatti.  O'shea Jackson was great as Ice Cube.  I did not know that Ice Cube wrote the movie Friday, so that gave me more respect for him as a creator. But it makes sense because he wrote many of the raps for NWA.  

This certainly is a timely movie, with all of the focus on police brutality lately.  There is a scene where all the artists are standing outside of the music studio and the police come up and harass them.  Fuck the Police resulted from these types of interactions, so it put that whole thing, that at the time I only read about in the newspapers, into a different context.  

I would have to say that by the end of the movie I had more respect for NWA and what they accomplished.  

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