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.