N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton – Rap’s “Reign in Blood”

By Neil James

Spent much time in a metal band, or hung out with metal fans? Here’s something I guarantee you’ve heard before.

“I hate rap music! It doesn’t take any talent to make.”

I could probably pay off my house if I had the proverbial nickel for each time I’ve heard this statement or its countless variants. 

Interestingly, one might think that, given the child-like ease with which rap songs can allegedly be made, some metal guy out there would have created the best album ever in the history of rap in his spare time just to prove a point. After all, if Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and their neophyte-level understanding of music can sell millions of records, just imagine potential commercial dominance were someone capable of sweep picking through all seven modes at 212 beats per minute to sit in the producer’s chair.

Yet, for some reason, this has never happened.

Maybe this rap game does require a little bit of talent. And maybe, this talent resonates on a little different frequency that what your average metal fan is attenuated to detect.

All of this is somewhat sad, because rap and metal share far more in common than practitioners of the latter are often willing to acknowledge.

Yes, rap does not often have guys playing their own instruments. It does not have blistering guitar solos. It does not have hair-raising vocal arias. It does not celebrate rhythmic jackhammering through EMG active pickups.

Ultimately, what rap shares in common with metal can’t be seen through the mixing console or sheets of tablature. Good rap – classic rap – 80s rap – was dangerous music.

The greatest threat that shareholder-sanitized metal acts like Five Finger Death Punch and messianic self-preening artists like Kanye West have posed to their genres is that they have made people forget that their genres, at heart, are supposed to be dangerous.

The 80s and early 90s were certainly the golden period for dangerous metal. Motley Crue’s success was as derived from their excess as their music. Ozzy’s career was built on his ability to identify guitar players with iconic potential and his willingness to do things that nobody, even in a drug-addled state, would do. Guns’N’Roses represented pure non-acknowledgement of authority and order and personified this attitude in their music.

Interestingly, rap was a little slower on this game, but experienced a period of unprecedented dangerousness that reached its height in 1992 with “Cop Killer”, finally culminating with the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

Rap music by its nature had always flirted with these dangerous elements, but did not see them fully come to fruition until 1988.

In 1986, Slayer released one of metal’s most defining albums, Reign in Blood. Kerry King himself states that if this album was released today, nobody would give a shit, but at the time, this album represented the ultimate in dangerous metal.

While many people consider the album’s lyrical themes and artwork to define this album’s evil, these were not the only aspects in which Reign in Blood pushed the envelope:

• The album itself clocks in at 29 minutes….an unheard of album length in any era.
• The album is almost entirely devoid of verse-chorus-verse structure.
• As a whole, the album’s average tempo is 210 beats per minute.
• There is little head paid to traditional theory or composition.

But perhaps most interesting, and likely unknown to Slayer fans, is that following Hell Awaits, Slayer and their management made the decision to leave Metal Blade Records for Def Jam Recordings, owned by Russell Simmons of hip-hop fame, and primarily a rap label. Jeff Hanneman himself was intrigued by Rick Rubin’s interest in the band and was an admirer of his work with Run DMC and LL Cool J. While Reign in Blood was ultimately released under American Recordings after Rubin dissolved his partnership with Simmons, one of thrash’s most seminal recordings owes its existence to a partnership between hip-hop and metal.

Throughout most of the 80s, rap was edgy, but it wasn’t dangerous. Public Enemy, despite being legends, were far too intelligent and cause-oriented to be truly dangerous. Run DMC reshaped the genre in terms of image and sound, but were a mainstream act at heart. LL Cool J helped establish the notion of a rap artist as a larger-than-life persona, but wasn’t necessarily trail-blazing.

The foundation for Reign in Blood’s lyrical content and artwork was laid by artists such as Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Bathory, Venom, Celtic Frost, and even Slayer’s own prior work. Each of these bands dwelled within the realms of the occult, sometimes as a metaphor for their perceptions of the world, other times for its own sake. To that end, Reign in Blood’s success wasn’t derived from its theme, but rather its visceral execution.

Similarly, N.W.A. wasn’t the first to rap about the abominable conditions of inner-city life – it was merely the first to do so through the lens of a YouTube documentarian. N.W.A’s music was entirely uninterested in how it should be – it was only concerned with how it was.

It is from this perspective that Straight Outta Compton derived its dangerousness. N.W.A.’s lines about life in South Central Los Angeles were dangerous because, well, life in South Central Los Angeles was extremely dangerous.

Consider the following lines:

• “More punks I smoke, yo, my rep gets bigger” – Straight Outta Compton
• “Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown and not the other color so police think they have the authority to kill a minority.” – Fuck Tha Police
• “Do I look like a mutha fuckin’ role model? To a kid lookin’ up ta me, life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.” – Gangsta Gangsta
• “Some musicians curse at home but scared to use profanity when up on the microphone. Yeah, they want reality but you won’t here none. They rather exaggerate, a little fiction. Some say no to drugs and take a stand, but after the show they go lookin’ for the dope man.” – Express Yourself

N.W.A. lyrics were illustrative of life of urban youth in Compton at the time and shone a light on a slice of American pie that few of its bakers wanted its customers looking at. In fact, Straight Outta Compton is the only album to have ever been condemned by the FBI for advocating violence against law enforcement officers.

Straight Outta Compton and Reign in Blood were both over-the-top records. To date, there is little evidence that Hanneman, King, Araya and Lombardo have ever forcefully separated muscle from bone, conducted rituals aimed at bringing about the return of the Antichrist or sacrificed any living creatures to satisfy an unholy deity. Similarly, I’m willing to bet that the actual murder count of Ice T, MC Ren, Eazy E and Dr. Dre is far smaller than reputed.

While both records were clearly dangerous, each was dangerous to the establishment in different ways.

For the Republican-driven PMRC, Slayer represented a threat to Christianity. Their flagrant blasphemy of religious tenets certainly encouraged immorality among impressionable youth, but perhaps more importantly, it reduces sacred spiritual bedrocks to comic books. The more bands like Slayer were allowed to exist, the more youth would view Christianity with the same reverence that the modern world holds for Zeus and Odin.

NWA posed no such threat to God and Jesus. Rather, Straight Outta Compton represented a threat to the other holy pillar of the right-wing establishment, capitalism. In the eyes of the establishment, it’s simply irrational to sell drugs and join a gang. You’re supposed to work through school, get a degree, and become a productive working drone whose labors institutionalize the wealth of white collar masters.

Yet, for many youth in South Central, going straight was simply too difficult to warrant pursuing. You dealt drugs and joined gangs as a matter of survival and a means to prosperity. You didn’t do it out of some James Dean Rebel Without a Cause sense. Straight Outta Compton brought to the surface that the system wasn’t working – an inconvenient fact for bureaucrats in power. Worse, Straight Outta Compton was so visceral, so crisply executed, that its power to galvanize people in the belief that the system did not serve them that it posed a significant threat to white people institutions.

In both cases, the impact on their genre was undeniable. Reign in Blood was the holy text that influenced and continues to influence the genres of black metal, death metal and thrash metal even today. Similarly, the most defining rap artists and albums in the 90s, (The Chronic – Dr. Dre, Doggystyle – Snoop Dogg, Me Against the World – Tupac) owe a significant debt to Straight Outta Compton.

How powerful was Straight Outta Compton? Three of its members (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy E) are considered among the most titanic figures in their genre. How many metal bands featured three individual members whose legacy is looked upon as genre-defining? Pretty darn few.

In all my years, I have never heard rap artists lamenting the critical success of metal musicians, yet this seems to happen routinely in the metal community, which is sad. Maybe Slayer fans don’t like Straight Outta Compton based on personal tastes – that’s fine – but they should absolutely have an appreciation for it. Serious metal musicians and artists understand that these divergent genres share much of the same pixie dust that makes their brand of music special.

Sadly, the marriages between metal and rap have been predominantly awkward and forced. Only twice have metal and rap artists at the peak of their powers and artistic credibility collaborated (Anthrax+Public Enemy, Run DMC+Aerosmith and yes I realize I’m stretching the definition of metal when I cite Aerosmith.) In both instances, their collaborations are considered legendary.

But for every Bring the Noise and Walk This Way, there are hundreds of rap-metal collaborations whose output is reminiscent of a dish that combined jellybeans and oysters. Most rap-metal collaborations involve untalented metal musicians (Limp Bizkit, Korn) or simply shoehorning a rapper who happens to be friends with a metal band onto a track (Mudhoney and Sir Mix-A-Lot), or sometimes both (Linkin Park and Busta Rhymes).

That said, I think there’s plenty of fertile ground for awesome rap-metal collaborations to take place. The key is to match like-sounding artists at the top of their game. Where does this start? Who knows, but if we had more tracks like this, perhaps the outright dismissal of rap by metalheads would finally wane.

Kix - Blow My Fuse

Disclaimer: I do not guarantee that you will lose weight by listening to Kix’s seminal album “Blow My Fuse”.  I can however assure you that there is no greater album in the history of mankind to listen to while you are working out.

Perhaps Kix did not realize this at the time of its release in 1988, because you won’t find any weights, exercise bikes or neon headbands in its lyrics or promotional materials.  Perhaps they were trying to distance themselves from the attempted pop / rock crossover album “Cool Kids” and its video single “Body Talk”.  I could probably write an entire article about that video itself… I still don’t know if the video is hilarious or creepy (actually, I’m gonna go with both) but that song will probably be stuck in my head for another week after writing this.

Let’s dive into a little ancient butt-rock history before we get to the album at hand.  Kix were indisputably the greatest thing to ever come out of Baltimore, at least until The Wire showed up on HBO many years later.  They started out in the late 70’s as a bar band covering things like AC/DC, Van Halen and other hard rock staples, and then branched out into original material.  They paid some serious dues at the local clubs and developed a reputation as an insanely good live band.  They were so good that Brett Michaels and some of the other guys from Poison would come all the way over from Pennsylvania to see them play.  The word on the street is that the Poison boys took really good notes, adopted Kix’s performance and musical style, brought it out to L.A. and then obviously enjoyed much more success than our boys from Baltimore ever did.  But one thing that Poison never managed to copy was Kix’s ability to write and record an album that had more than 2 good songs on it, which brings us to “Blow My Fuse”.

You are probably familiar with one track on this one, “Don’t Close Your Eyes”, an anti-suicide ballad that managed to reach #11 on the Billboard charts.  It’s the requisite power-ballad of the album.  But holy shit, they manage to craft a slow song that does not include thinly veiled metaphors for boning, in 1988 nonetheless!  They should probably get a medal for that alone.  Don’t worry though, the rest of the songs are all pretty much thinly veiled metaphors for boning.  Actually, even saying “thinly veiled” might be a stretch…

The album starts off with “Red Lite, Green Lite, TNT”, a straightforward up-tempo rocker.  What a perfect way to start out the 3 hours of cardio you need to do to work off that six pack of High Life tallboys you drank last night!

OK, now that we’re warmed up a bit it’s time to crank up the incline on that treadmill. For my money the album really starts out with track #2, “Get It While It’s Hot”.  This song in particular highlights just what it is that makes Kix kick ass.  It’s called a CHORUS, kids, and I’m not talking about that stompbox that your mom bought you. 

“No Ring Around Rosie” might just be the dirtiest song on the album.  It’s amazing just how dirty Kix can be without using any actual profanity.  AC/DC taught them well, and Kix takes it to the next level.

 After that they wisely take it down a notch with “Don’t Close Your Eyes” and then go into “She Dropped Me The Bomb”, which picks up the pace again in a nice poppy way. 

Then they get back to the business with “Cold Blood”.  Holy shit, THAT is how you write a goddamn chorus!  More people should follow Brett Michael's lead and try to copy this, maybe there would be some better songs on the radio.

The album continues with the songs "Piece of the Pie" and "Boomerang", which are probably the weakest on the album, but still quite enjoyable. The title track “Blow My Fuse” goes a bit slower and sleazier, good stuff because by now you've been doing that goddamn cardio for a while, are starting to get sweaty and ready to start winding down or moving to the weights or something.  

But before you're done you gotta give it one last run, so they pick up the pace yet again for the last number "Dirty Boys".  That one isn't quite so memorable, but hey, still an excellent way to close the album on an up note.  

What really makes “Blow My Fuse” stand out from the rest of the hair / pop / glam / metal / rock pack of the era is the consistency of the songwriting and pace of the album as a whole.  They do a great job of keeping momentum and there is enough variety between songs to get you through the entire album without getting bored. Certainly not every track is as good as the high points of "Cold Blood" or "Get It While It's Hot", but all are respectable and enjoyable to listen to.  

While certainly not the first band to mix some solid rock n’ roll with a little bit of blues and pop, they know how to do it right.  You can tell that Kix paid attention when they were paying their dues as a cover band. They realized what made the songs by rock bands like AC/DC classics and they applied it to their own work.  Sure, they pretty much stick to the formula that was established years and years prior, but they were wise enough to do it right.  Rather than one good single and 7 filler tracks, they really made an album that would stand up as a whole.  

Songs about Native Americans in 80's rock

Bono and the Boss weren't the only rock stars speaking out on social issues of the 80's.  Sure, you know about Live Aid, but Hear N' Aid definately had more mulletude and spandex.  Plus Ronnie James Dio was always way cooler than Bob Geldof.

One theme that appeared many times (at least on the tapes I had) was the plight of the Native American.  Lets take a look at some of these songs of the era that introduced listeners to U.S. history in a way that a text book never could.  After all, everyone knows that history is much more awesome with double bass, shredding guitar solos, spandex and Aqua-Net.

Iron Maiden - Run to the Hills

Easily the most well known of the songs we'll be looking at today, Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills" is still a staple of their live show today.  Lyrically, it is written from the perspective of both the invading white men as well as the Natives and alternates between the two.  It uses this to illustrate the cowardly and inhumane treatment from the invaders.  The British metal bohemoths are the masters of the galloping rhythm, which definately helps audibly illustrate the clashing horseback battles between the invaders and native soldiers.  The video itself is made to be more humorous than you might expect given the lyrics and subject...   But that was probably a wise move as if they were to take a more dramatic approach it could have easily backfired.  Plus, they probably had to stick with stock footage in between the performance shots in order to keep the budget down. 

Europe - Cherokee

 Swedish rockers Europe had some pretty awesome subjects on their 1987 album "The Final Countdown".  The opening title track was about rockets and space and shit, plus later they dive into "Ninja" (try to guess what that one is about) and of course "Cherokee".  As discussed in my review of Wings of Tomorrow, deep and articulate lyrics are not one of Europe's many strengths. "Cherokee" is no exception, but they do go into a bit more detail than Iron Maiden did.  The song talks about the white men invading to search for gold, and then forcing the tribe on the Trail of Tears.  Even in a watered down elementary school textbook, even a youngster like me could tell this was obviously one of the most awful and shameful events of American history...  I don't think this song quite had the emotional impact of even those textbooks.  I still wouldn't call the song itself horrible, but the video.... yeah, that is horrible.

Anthrax - Indians

Now that we've looked at two songs and videos written by European bands, let's see how an American band stands up.  Anthrax seemed to be taking on more and more social problems in their songs on Among the Living (in between songs about Stephen King books and comics).  It's worth noting that lead singer Joey Belladonna is also of Native descent.  Unlike the first two songs we looked at, I don't believe that this one was released as a single.  Even if it was, it's not like Anthrax was getting a lot of radio or video play back then...  What I do remember is that at the time I listened to it, Among the Living was the heaviest and fastest shit I had ever heard.  "Indians" is definately the heaviest of the songs we're looking at today.  Rather than just looking at the past, the lyrics are more focused on the treatment of modern Natives with lines such as "Original American / Turned into a second class citizen".  While not considered a classic like "Run to the Hills", this song talks about racism and lack of equal treatment in the world of today, rather than just look back at what happened centuries ago.

White Lion - Cherokee

For the last song today we'll look at one from White Lion.  The original version was on their little known debut "Fight to Survive" but the acoustic version is cooler. Color me surprised, but somehow Danish singer Mike Tramp came up with some articulate, perhaps even poetic lyrics!  While not exactly breaking new thematic ground, Tramp actually uses the images of smoke, lightning, flame, blood and the moon to actually add some emotion to the song.  Wow!  This song does focus on past injustices rather than the modern day treatment of Natives.  But at least it isn't painfully ignorant, and you can tell that Tramp was trying to not just talk about the past but to try to describe the world in a way that a Native might.  It comes off as much more effective than just reading a couple paragraphs in history book, making it rhyme and calling it good.

----------------

So what have we learned today?  Perhaps, good intentions aside, some metallers of the 80's might have done better to stick to the subjects they knew rather than try to take on one of the most painful subjects in American history. Particularly in the lyrics, they can come of as a bit simplistic or even juvenile.  I don't think that they could be considered particularly offensive, in that their intent was certainly not to glorify racism or inequal treatment. 

It seems like back in the day everyone wanted to at least have one song that they could point to and say "See, we're about more than just partying and girls!"   In the 80's that the Native American's plight was given a lot more attention in the media than it is today. You certainly don't see this many songs written on the subject anymore... most likely because it just isn't given the media attention that it once did.  As a whole, with a few exceptions,  I think most mainstream artists these days will just keep their mouths shut rather than risk offending anyone or being misinterpreted. Not to say that these songs would have been controversial when they were released... I think these would have been more the modern equivelent of writing a song about an oil spill or animal abuse.  Sure, it's an issue that is in the news, people are concerned with, and it may even have political connotations, but you stand very little risk of saying anything that anyone would disagree with.