N.W.A.
Straight Outta Compton
Priority/ EMI


When albums come to be regarded as classics and afforded seminal status, it can be easy to treat them as museum pieces, impossible to be seen as anything but curiosities outside of their musical and cultural context. Now 20 years old, more people have heard of 'Straight Outta Compton', than have actually heard it, but despite that a lot of this music still deserves to be heard.

It's hard to name a more explosive triple threat than the opening of Straight Outta Compton, Fuck Tha Police and Gangsta Gangsta, the triumvirate going a long way to lay down the basics of N.W.A.'s gangster oeuvre, and threatening to dwarf the rest of the album. As the MCs (Ice Cube, MC Ren, Eazy E and occasionally Dr. Dre) tag team back and forth, Ice Cube especially sounds as immediate as ever.

Production-wise, Dre's drum machine, scratches and samples create a sound closer to a sparser Bomb Squad (Public Enemy) than his later G-Funk (though there are glimpses of that nascent style), but it sounds pretty damn good for the reported $8000 it cost to record. But this backdrop is exactly that; simply a platform over which the MCs can hit the listener hard, each sounding distinctive despite the fact that Cube wrote most of the scathing rhymes on the album. Though they called it 'reality rap', to everyone else this was gangsta rap.

Violence, misogyny and anger abound, and though audiences may be more inured now than they were in 1988, some particularly nasty sections still grate. Nevertheless, this is vital, living music, that continues to impact on what is being made today.

Possibly the greatest testimony to how well this music still stands up is the bonus material, which sees a number of other acts cover the tracks on here, and fail dismally, Snoop's attempt to turn his laidback drawl into a sneer on Gangsta Gangsta particularly laughable.

Alexis Buxton-Collins