Can the NWA movie ever live up to the hype?

The problem with the self-styled World’s Most Dangerous Group was first addressed in what can be considered the original NWA film. Though not officially endorsed by the platinum-selling godfathers of gangsta rap, Chris Rock’s 1993 Spinal Tap-style hip hop mockumentary, CB4, parodies the hardcore rappers, drawing heavily on NWA for inspiration.

Rock himself even commented on the surreal life-imitating-art-imitating-life nature of witnessing the various members of NWA, already embittered, arriving separately at the CB4 premier.

CB4 sees the Everyone Hates Chris star cast as Albert, a nerdy teen who, fearing his background was not edgy enough, facilitates his dreams of rap super stardom by stealing the identity of an incarcerated drug dealer. Albert – or MC Gusto as he becomes – effectively spoofs the majority of NWA. Despite hailing from tough, inner-city neighbourhoods, most of the group were never really involved in the kind of lifestyles they regularly committed to record. Lifestyles that, judging by the trailer, are yet again to be rehashed and re-glamorised.

Rock’s parody does not end with mere gangsta posturing. There’s the political objection to CB4’s lyrics, mirroring the outrage caused in white America to NWA’s records, and later Ice T’s heavy metal project Body Count’s song Cop Killer. There’s also the group’s eventual implosion, the fallout of which led to years of recriminations that were only finally resolved around Eazy-E’s deathbed.

It’s not that the NWA story is unremarkable. A warning letter from the FBI over incitement to harm police officers. The ensuing war with law enforcement that Fuck The Police triggered – the authorities refusing to provide security for NWA concerts as a result. The backdrop of the war on drugs – a war waged against LA’s poorest, usually minority, residents . Eazy-E’s death from AIDs. The man cast as a greedy, Machiavellian manager, Jerry Heller (played by Paul Giamatti). Suge Knight’s involvement that saw Jerry Heller and Eazy fearing for their lives. No, NWA’s legacy is furtive ground for a biopic.

Yet while critics may argue over what that legacy amounts to exactly, the story of NWA is really the story of two incredibly successful men. Men who, no matter what their intentions as disaffected youths, eventually became subsumed by the very system they supposedly came to tear down.

Straight Outta Compton’s Red Band trailer highlights the gulf between who NWA were when they put all that “anger and frustration in the music,” music that was “like our weapon,” and the men they eventually became.

We see Cube and Dre rolling through their old Compton neighbourhood in a Bentley claiming “this is where it all started.” Yet as the voice over announces “welcome to Compton,” it’s clear that this could be directed as much to the rappers themselves as the audience. They seem displaced. As if the only way to make Cube and Dre seem at home in modern day Compton is a Hollywood makeover.

What we get is a slick, heavily-choreographed sequence shot in black and white, featuring a cavalcade of stunt bikes, various West Coast rappers and some regular Compton residents. This is not the Compton that Cube and Dre left. Nor is it an exact reflection of modern Compton. It is, just like the NWA movie will be and gangsta rap itself is, a sanitised, Hollywood version of a portion of black life, pre-packaged and designed for mass consumption by largely white audiences.

Rap music may have given a voice to the voiceless but it commercialised their struggle, diluted it and ultimately proved a distraction, removing the focus away from an institutionally racist police force, police brutality, routine prejudice and social injustice and turning it into a debate about foul language and the dangers of gangsta rap lyrics to white suburban kids. In an era when our dialogue should be focused on the dangers of police bullets to black kids, it would be a shame if the discourse was hijacked once again.

If NWA were true revolutionaries, then by their own admission, they failed. Ice Cube’s pronouncement that “the same thing that we was going through in the 80s with the police, people going through now” tells us that perhaps the only people who truly benefited from NWA’s crusade to change the world were the surviving members fortunate enough to capitalise on their fame and assimilate into the same mainstream society that continues to turn a blind eye to the very things that made them so angry to begin with.

With a drive-by shooting reported last year across the road from the set and Suge Knight alleged to have run over two men connected with the film, killing one, it remains to be seen whether, like CB4, life or art proves the most unsettling.

I think I might even skip this one and wait for the Aja Brown biopic.