B (16:55)

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A (18:00)

Skateland USA was a local Compton hangout for teens and young people. A roller rink that would host MCs, DJs and touring rap artists. It was a neutral space where once you were inside you were supposedly safe from the gang warfare happening right outside its doors. But there was only one way in and one way out. Once you walked out of Skateland's doors, it was blood country. The gangbangers would line up and beat down anyone who looked funny or looked at them funny upon their exit. Skateland was also where Dr. Dre got his first real shot at performing with his group World Class Wreckin Crew, a hip hop infused electro collective drafting off of disco's last gasp of relevance. Ultimately, the group was going nowhere and Dre was unhappy, though he appreciated collaborating with the group's other DJ, DJ Yella. Yella cracked him up. It was the mid-80s, the radio was all about New Edition and Top 40 was blanketed by syrupy pop and R and B. But on the east coast, rap was evolving into something much harder. Run DMC's sucker MC's B side from their 1983 it's like that single was a shotgun blast whose kickback reverberated all the way from Queens to Compton. Dre was possessed by the beat. It was so fucking hard. But World Class Wrecking Crew's manager pushed Dre to produce what Dre called the soft shit in hopes of cracking the FM dial. And they came close. One of their singles, Surgery, received local airplay and sold a respectable 50,000 copies. But Dre's heart wasn't in it. He wanted to make something bigger, something that sounded hard, like Run dmc, but that also incorporated the hyper real lyrics being spit out at the time by west coast pimp turned rapper Ice T. Best demonstrated on one of his early B sides, Six in the Morning, a track Ice says was heavily influenced by Philadelphia rapper Schooley D. In his track what does it mean? Ice t's 6 in the morning is now credited as the first gangster rap song. Its lyrics at the time totally unique. If you were young and black and growing up on the violent gang controlled and LAPD patrolled streets of South Central Los Angeles, these lyrics were your first and only opportunity to hear your world represented on the radio or anywhere else in pop culture. It was your only shot to see what so many other Americans get to experience every day and take for granted their world reflected back to them from mainstream culture. Six in the Morning was released in 1986, the same year that the Cosby Show, Family Ties and Cheers were the top three rated television shows. Falco's Rock Me Amadeus, Madonna's Papa Don't Preach and Berlin's Take My Breath Away were the year's top selling singles. And Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee and Platoon were the highest grossing films at the box office. There was not an ounce of street reality in any of these top selling mainstream performances from 1986. So for Dre, hearing his life, his reality, his and so many of his neighbor's story and lifestyle spit back at him over the radio through the speakers of friends alpines rolling down Crenshaw in the middle of the neighborhood that inspired the track. Six in the Morning was powerful. Dre knew that this was where his future was. Hardcore street lyrics like the ones from Ice T over hard beats like the ones from Run dmc. And Dre had a secret weapon. A sound that would separate his musical fusion from everything else. A sound that anyone anywhere would be able to recognize as his own. A sound that even he would be able to hear a mile away. When his song eventually blasted from passing car stereo, he and everyone else would know it was a Dr. Dre jam. When they heard his signature sound, the Compton whistle. It was that high pitched squealing synthesizer that Dre first heard on the Ohio Players track Funky Worm. Dre went to work implementing it in and around the beats he was fucking with in the back room at Skateland during off hours. This sound would eventually grow to become the staple sound of the genre. Dre would eventually help invent G Funk. Dre's new friend Eric was way down with what Dre was cooking up. And Dre convinced Eric he didn't need to invest in a record store. He needed to invest in a record label. They had what they needed. A signature sound, big ass beats and an original point of view. Their songs would rep their reality and they, as rappers, would rep their hometown, Compton. Just like east coast rappers repped Hollis, Queens in the Bronx. They had $250,000 of Eric's drug money that they could invest into their new venture. But they also had a problem. Neither of them wrote lyrics. But Dre had a friend who did. O' Shea Jackson, only 16, was a natural born lyricist with drive. He was from Inglewood, next neighborhood over from Compton, but every morning he bussed out to a high school in the burbs with white kids who rolled to school in BMW convertibles. Eventual Bret Easton Ellis. Characters who o' Shea could not relate to at all, but whose easy way of life stirred in him envy and resentment. Their galling entitlement made it clear to o' Shea that there was another potentially better, easier way of life if he played the game right, hustled, fostered his talent, and didn't get caught up in the gangs or catch a deadly beating from the cops. O' Shea hated the gangbangers. He knew they were evil and running down his community, but he hated the cops more. The twin influences of the gangbangers and South Central Police tactics would combine to give o' Shea his lyrical point of view. And like all great writers, he wrote what he knew. The streets outside his door in Inglewood and a neighboring Compton where his friend Dre lived and was fucking with that hustler Eric, the one who gave up the game and was now calling himself Eazy. E. Dre, the doctor, mad scientist that he was, was now conducting a full on experiment. He knew that if he got himself, o' Shea and Eric in a room together, they could unlock a new evolution in rap without fail. O' Shea was inspired by Eric's larger than life, well, life, and wrote lyrics about him. But the group Dre picked to perform the track was a bust in the studio and they couldn't relate to the hardcore lyrics. They were put off by the gangsta language and bailed. It was down to Dre and DJ Yella who'd made the scene. Eric and o'. Shea. Then it happened. Dre somehow convinced Eric to jump on the mic. After all, o' Shea wrote the song about him. It took some coaxing, but ultimately he did it. And with careful, patient producing, Dre was able to ease his friend Eric Wright fully into the character of Eazy E. Everything was there. The authentic gangster drug dealing backstory, the man in black hip hop fashion, the take no shit attitude. Why wouldn't it work? And Dre was right. The fully produced track was electric and once pressed and distributed throughout la through the strength of its hard beat, the attitude and the vocal performance, and the authenticity and reality it repped in its lyrics, the track Boyz N the Hood became an instant hit. K Day, the Redondo beach outfit that was one of the top, not to mention one of the only rap friendly radio stations in America, was flooded with requests. Within months, the newly minted Eazy E went from selling pressings out of his car to a former distribution deal. Fuck that soft shit. The hard stuff was where it was at. All you had to do was go out on your front yard and listen to the cars rolling by to hear the influence of the track. It was everywhere in South Central at the end of 1987. You couldn't help but hear it as long as you were listening outside during the day. At night, the lyrics stopped and the story that the lyrics told began for real. A big beat built from gunshots, ghetto bird choppers, batter rams and police sirens. Real life sounds soundtracking life for the citizens of South Central. We'll be right back after this.

B (25:43)

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A (26:16)

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B (26:36)

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A (26:45)

See terms AH DSW Earth. Place of the humble. Brag here. The shoes are so good no one would ever know how little you paid. If you didn't go telling everyone that is. And with never ending options for every style, mood and occasion, all at really great prices, they'll definitely give you something to brag about. So go ahead, stock up on fresh sneakers from your favorite brands or try those boots you always secretly knew you could pull off. Find the shoes that get you at prices that get your budget at DSW stores or@dsw.com Let us surprise you. At first the chant from the audience was familiar to Eric. We want Easy. Over and over again. And he loved it. Why wouldn't he? It was validation for all the hard work and the risk he took, investing a quarter million of his hard earned street dollars into himself, his record label, and ultimately the success of his group. He had worked out his own version of the American Dream for himself. But the adoring chorus gave way to a different chant. It was also a song title which showed that the crowd loved the music they were putting out, but this one was less satisfying, more jarring. It reminded him of something more menacing, confrontational. It reminded him of the cops back in Compton, the ones that pulled him over a couple months back, yanked him from his vintage, vintage VW bug, the one with the Freaks come out at night lettering airbrushed across the back and slammed his face, cheek side down hard onto the hood of the car, who then pulled him upright, spun him around to face him, and pressed the barrel of a standard issue Glock 22 straight into Easy's temple. They wanted the drugs and they knew he was a dealer. But what they didn't know was that he'd cleaned up his act and taken his talents to the music industry. So they, lapd, would walk away empty handed, but not without making a point. Compton was their turf, not Eazy's local drug dealer or rapper or whatever the they owned the night. They owned the streets, not him. For E, it was humiliating, and if he was being honest, scary as o' Shea was next to Eazy on stage, he was now going by the Name. Ice Cube. He heard the same chant as E, but he had his own memory winding up his heart rate as the crowd yelled back a phrase that he had written. He flashed back to the cops outside of the studio as the members of NWA had secluded themselves in to record their group's masterpiece. An effort that took only eight weeks and cost only $10,000 to make. Those cops meant business, just like Cube did. Maybe they recognized something in him that they saw in themselves. An unwillingness to take any shit at all. Which is why they braced him on the sidewalk. And when he asked why they were questioning him, they threw him to the pavement, stepped on the back of his neck and demanded to know why he was just hanging out on the corner doing nothing. And they weren't buying the truth. The Cube was taking a break from the hard work of making a record. Not until the band's manager, Jerry Heller, a white man, came outside to squash the beef. Even then, the cops refused to accept that Cube was an actual musician. After all, rap wasn't music. It was a fad. Whatever it was, it would save Ice Cube from the rage roiling inside of him due to a lifetime of similar incidents just like this one. Dr. Dre hated the chant. It annoyed him. He just wanted to make music. But the chant. Something about the pointed anger of it, so direct, aimed straight at the cops from back home. The same cops who did next to nothing to protect his dead brother or to find his killer. The ones who let them to bleed out and die on the streets of Compton. Trey didn't want the grief within him stirred. And that's all the chant did. Yella didn't mind. And neither did MC Ren. The two other group members, they had their own baggage to sort through. And the chant did to them what it did to the others. Forced them to remember where they came from. How fucked up life on the streets of Compton was. Pure violence. Deadly gang members and deadly cops. A violent vice that squeezed you into. Into submission. The cops scared them more than the Bloods and the Crips, though. But at least to the gang bangers, NWA Were now celebrities and not to be with within reason. They were NWA Compton's greatest export since Dennis Johnson, who at the time was busy helping the Boston Celtics gang entry into yet another Eastern Conference finals. But I digress. NWA was Eazy, E's brainchild. A supergroup that included all the men currently standing on stage next to E. Lyricists, the Doc. They were now NWA and they were a supergroup with attitude. The idea of a posse this deep was Easy's their first real album. Straight out of Compton was Dre's sonic vision. Reality raps over hard beats come to life in album form over 60 minutes, and it was as hard to ignore as fresh spray from an AK47. Its opening salvo you are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge quickly smacks you in the face that then pummels you with a sledgehammer beat that somehow also grooves. While Cube, Eazy and Ren kick off verse after verse after verse with the lines Straight out of Compton detailing a life spent dodging violent cops on the streets of their home hood. There's no mistaking where these dudes were from, and that wasn't an accident. Dre and E wanted to rep their hometown just like east coast rappers rep theirs. Except Compton wasn't exactly the same as Hollis, Queens or the Bronx. Compton was a war zone. So to properly do it justice, NWA relied on their own experiences and the street reality that they faced on a daily basis to inform their lyrics. That meant violence, drugs, crooked cops and backward misogynist attitudes toward women, AKA bitches and hoes with no sugar coating. They spit it out all over beats that hit you hard and peppered everything with humor. Humor they learned from the blue comedy records of Rudy Ray Moore and Redd Fox that their parents vibed on. To an adolescent music fan in 1988. It all added up to something as infectious, if not more so, than Aerosmith or Guns N Roses or any other mainstream rock blanketing airwaves at the time. The violence and profanity depicted in the lyrics made it almost impossible for radio to get behind the album, and MTV outright banned their first video videos. But it didn't matter. The record was too good, the lyrics too real. Through the power of strong distribution for Eazy's new record label, Ruthless Records, and even stronger word of mouth, news of this new type of wild rap or reality rap, or what the press was fast calling gangsta rap, spread quick, not only through urban neighborhoods and schools, but through lily white suburban neighborhoods and small towns all across America. And of course, the gang bangers loved it, too. It was their world come to life on record. But what made NWA so revolutionary is that they embraced the Persona of the gangsters. They weren't objectifying the gang violence they saw in their neighborhoods. They were personifying it. They were the bad guys. Long before Tony Soprano or Walter White, Five Kids from Compton made it okay to root for the bad guys. They were the protagonists, the antagonists, the lapd over on the east coast public Enemy may have been bringing the noise by commenting on the social injustice they saw, but NWA was cutting through the noise by playing the part of the villain wearing the black hat, shooting down the cops in their wraps, dealing weight in their wraps, beating down rivals in the wraps. A first person fucking of the system. NWA had had enough. Enough with with the drive bys and the senseless murders, enough with the police harassment, enough with the lack of opportunity. But they didn't play the victim card. They took a truly defiant stance, redefined the theater of war and fought back through music and made their way through their own fucked up reality by any means necessary. A motto coined by Malcolm X, stolen by Daryl Gates and stolen back by NWA American teenagers ate it up. They sold millions of copies of Straight Outta Compton and Eazy E was laughing to himself at the absurdity of it all. But not everybody thought it was funny. The LAPD were pissed, as were their police brethren throughout the country. And tonight, here in Detroit at the Joe Louis arena, in front of upwards of 20,000 people, it all seemed to be coming to a head. While Eazy e, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Yella and MC Ren said out on stage, letting the chant of Fuck the Police rain down on them in front of 20,000 strong, they could feel the tension. They could see it in the eyes of the cops and the crowd there, ostensibly to protect the band, though it felt like they were there more to intimidate and to oppress. NWA was warned before the show not to play their song, Fuck the Police. The song had sparked a nationwide debate over NWA's claims of police brutality and of what life was raised really like in the streets they grew up on. Were gangster rappers really repping the reality of their surroundings? Or were they just cashing in on the profanity and violence? Police forces around the country took the song and its direct title as an affront, many of them refusing to provide security for the group while they were on tour. The lyrics were too controversial. The lyrics go on to detail Ice Cube's first person account of crooked LAPD and the justified beating off and quote unquote, slaughter of the police. The lyrics were a live wire, and on this night in particular, the tension in the room made it feel like the song. If the group decided to play, it might incite a riot. The crowd would not stop chanting the title over and over. It was deafening and inspiring. It was time for the group to kick into one of their other songs, Gangsta Gangsta. Eazy was ready, Cube was hoping for something, nothing more. And Dre was milling about, hovering over his tables on stage. Yella, as always, was dutifully awaiting direction from Dre, and Ren was wondering what the fuck was with the delay. And the crowd kept chanting. Cops were now nervously making their way through the audience to the front of the stage, some of them uniformed, most of them undercover there on the scene in the crowd to prevent whatever the fuck was about to happen from happening. Dre's eyes caught Cubes across the stage. He motioned him closer, and when he got into earshot, Dre asked, you ready? Cube said nothing, just gave him an approving scowl and a defiant nod. Dre shouted, come in on the two. Then the police. The crowd lost itself, screaming every word back into Cube's face. Cops looked visibly scared. They were outnumbered by the tens of thousands the song was killing and worth every ounce of bullshit it brought on because it was real. You could tell from the response. It was undeniable. Kids loved it because it tapped into something totally authentic, totally unique. It was a look into an American reality that was underreported in the media. It was a crisis, this reality of gangs and abusive cops, A cycle of violence that made it near impossible to find your way through to the American dream. And it was pissed the fuck off, just like nearly everyone in the audience, which is why the crowd began to riot. The sound of gunshots, or what was later learned to be firecrackers, set the riot off. Yella heard them first on stage and quickly fled. This no protest song was worth dying for. The rest of the group followed suit, trying to escape backstage while the crowd tore up in the house. But the members of NWA were quickly corralled by the local cops and halls in for inciting a riot. But in the end, it all worked out. The Detroit cops were not like the cops back home. They were more interested in autographs for their kids than they were pressing charges. It seemed like they had arrested them just to prove they could, and the group was quickly let go. Cube even joked to the cops, maybe we can produce a song for you guys called Fuck nwa. Fuck the Police is the greatest protest song in the history of music, period. No other song got to the point quicker and or had a greater impact. You can come into my podcast studio and stand on my desk and yell at me about Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Sam Cooke and Joe Strummer and hell, even Public Enemy. But name one song by any of those artists that generated a formal response, a thinly veiled threat from the United States government, the FBI. You can't. The letter The FBI wrote to Ruthless Records reads in part, a song recorded by NWA Encourages violence against and disrespect for law enforcement. Advocating violence and assault is wrong. 77 law enforcement officers were feloniously slain in the line of duty in 1988. Law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to the protection of our citizens and. And recordings such as this one from NWA are degrading to these brave, dedicated officers. I wanted you to be aware of the FBI's position relative to this song and its message. I believe my views reflect the opinion of the entire law enforcement community. Signed, Milt Aldrich, Assistant Director, Office of Public Affairs, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. department of Justice. The FBI response was the apex of criticism and heat. NWA Caught from the song. Critics throughout the country railed against the group. Their criticism of the cops, it was stated over and over again, was a fabrication, an exaggeration, and way over the line. Nothing more than sensationalism contrived to sell records. But Ice Cube and the rest of the group held firm in the face of their critics. They knew what their reality was. They knew that Daryl Gates and the lapd, at least the cops policing the neighborhoods they came up on, were corrupt and violent. And at NWA or not, the world would soon know their shocking reality. George Holliday, for one, was shocked. Shocked at what he'd seen firsthand and caught on videotape. Shocked that the police would do that and also shocked that CNN was not interested. So he got himself a meeting quickly with an enterprising reporter at ktla, the local Los Angeles television station. When he arrived, the newsroom was abuzz. Magic Johnson's Lakers were on a run and heading toward what was expected to be an epic NBA Finals showdown against the freak Michael Jordan. Holliday and the reporter entered a Bear conference room. Holliday found himself nervous, chatty and recounting, unprompted, the events that led him to the KTLA newsroom that day. It was a helicopter that got my attention. It was too low. I live by the highway, so I hear them, but never that low. And then there were the sirens and the cruisers. I looked out my window and realized they were all outside my door, right across the street. So I grabbed my camcorder, brand new, not even out of the box. I just hit the little button and pointed. I was out on my balcony, so I had a straight shot. CNN doesn't want it. Says they can't run it, Says it's too much. I thought you guys might be able to use it. The reporter said nothing. Just fidgeted with the wires behind the television and the vcr. When he was done, he slid the VHS tape that had Holliday so worked up out from the manila envelope and popped it into the vcr. That sound, plastic hitting plastic, then the cartridge sliding back into the console, the VHS tape in his grip. The creak of the tape heads and spinning gears, the anticipatory sound of it all had George Holliday's heart in his throat. The reporter was calm, sitting back in his chair, notebook in his lap, pen between his lips, staring at the tv. The sounds of the KTLA newsroom keyboard, telephones ringing, pagers buzzing, angry editors shouting began to fall away as the sound of the home video Holiday capture began to fully transfer from the VHS tape to the tiny television speakers. Helicopters, sirens, muffled shouting, and then the image came to life on the TV screen to accompany the sound. Holliday watched the reporter lean in, transfixed. It's dark workout nighttime. A white Hyundai on the side of the road, three of its four doors open, a man, a black man, presumably its owner, lying on the ground above him, four white Los Angeles police officers. Above them, a helicopter shining down, its powerful floodlight on the scene in effect providing big budget action film quality lighting for George Holiday and his camera perched a few yards away on his deck, videotaping the beating that would set his city on fire. A beating that shocked Americans, but a beating that did not shock NWA it was a beating they'd warned us about over and over again on Straight Outta Compton. The sound of their account on record was shocking, sure, but it was nowhere near as shocking as the sound of the real thing. The sound of a defenseless black man, a man whose name America would soon come to know as well. Rodney King being struck 56 times with batons by a gang of white thugs. Young, angry, violent, heavily armed LA cops, defenseless on the ground, writhing in pain, struck 56 times. Anything? The evidence is new, it's dramatic and it's devastating to those Los Angeles police officers and involved in the March 3 beating of that black motorist. One of the two officers who wielded.

B (43:57)

Batons that evening relayed a message after.

A (43:59)

The arrest to another call saying, quote, sounds almost as exciting as our last call. It was right out of Gorillas in the Mist. This is a professional organization. What do you think? We. The Trump said they suspected King was high on drugs and resisting arrest. King said they never left. I think it's disgrace. This is a professional organization. Where you think we are? I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgrace. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if you not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelandpod.com Membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook @DisgraceLandPod and on YouTube at YouTube. Com @DisgraceLandPod Rocka Rolla He's a bad, bad.