Niggaz With Attitude, right? The name of that group itself sets the tone, literally and metaphorically: they’re about colour. In hip hop, there is no other act, and there won’t be, with a name so charged with political and social meaning. They were about blacks versus cops, poor blacks versus rich whites. This is 80s LA after all, a hotbed of burgeoning integration with all them warts. What other colour could NWA have worn other than black? Some sort of kismet that, for a bit over the decade, that NWA’s LA football team was the black and silver’d Raiders.
Ice Cube directed the ESPN 30 for 30 film Straight Outta LA. He argues that there’s a pretty strong relationship between the rise of Gangsta rap and the LA Raiders. At the time, the Raiders were the most feared team in the league. NWA, at one point, was the most feared entity in pop culture. Yet, as dangerous as the members of NWA appeared, Straight Outta LA wants us to believe that the Raiders had some even harder motherfuckers. A few of them were as bad off the field as they were on: offensive lineman Bob Brown was said to not have met a drug he didn’t like and others even brought guns to practice and fired off. Super-villains, these guys were. Darth Vader, but actually scary.
If these Raiders created the silver-and-black mystique, NWA, with their Raiders caps and Starter jackets, blew it up. (The film tells the story of the group going to the Raiders front office and asking for gear to wear on tour.) Sure, there’s that 1983 Super Bowl trophy and dudes were arguably bigger than Magic and Showtime, bigger than Axel Foley. Nothing though compared to NWA at their peak: banned by MTV; on the FBI’s get list; etc. Inner-city LA youth were buying Raiders gear not because of the Raiders but because of the Attitude. The black was an alternative to Crip-blue and Blood-red. Black was neutrality while still, with the startling darkness and pillaging image, being tied to gang culture. If NWA, on one hand, is responsible for the merchandise craze, on the other, they have to take some responsibility for the violence that eventually accompanied the craze. People were getting shot for jackets.
Colour ties the Raiders and NWA. Makes for a good footnote, but is a bit light to support an entire movie. Cube seems to overplay the tie and just extrapolates a whole bunch of relationships from that. The connection, for example, between the viciousness of the Raiders and the tone of NWA doesn’t really come through as it could have. He interviews a bunch of Raiders from that era yet none of these calm, well-spoken 50-somethings seem to have a nasty bone in their bodies. Howie Long and Marcus Allen are the most exemplary and famous (they both, after all, appeared on the cover of GQ). The thing most noticeable about them is how easily they smile. Ice Cube is an unabashed Raiders fan and there are segments of him and Snoop tossing the ball around at LA Memorial while reminiscing about watching the team as kids. I don’t doubt that Ice Cube wanted to incorporate the Raiders into his musical aesthetic. But in this film it’s a stretch that it was anything more than just logo and color, that it was spirit and attitude. The impression I got was of Ice Cube’s Raiders geekery. He’s a fan and he’s making a fan-film. The Raiders story, then, gets short-changed. Cube goes easy on them. Al Davis, the architect of those Raiders teams gets a lot of air time but Cube doesn’t get the goods. He lets Davis off the hook. On the famous Al Davis v. Marcus Allen feud, Davis gets away with saying, “I’m not saying anything on that but it goes deeper than anyone knows.” Allen doesn’t get grilled either. Neither does Cube go beyond the Davis-as-iconoclast explanation for the Raiders move back to Oakland or the move he planned to take the team to the LA suburb of Irwindale.
Were he a bit more objective, Cube wouldn’t have sold the NWA story so short, too. He describes NWA as a group of young, music-loving locals. He describes teaming up with Dr. Dre and performing together, rapper and DJ, when they were 14. Ice Cube’s story of NWA is just too quaint. Yes, in some sense they were artists, reality rappers as Ice-T says, microscoping an ignored subculture. They were, however, also multi-platinum selling artists who handled automatic rifles during TV interviews. They were clashing personalities who eventually went harder at each other than they did at the cops. Here’s Eazy-E on “It’s On”: “Back in 86 you wore pumps and mascara / Down did the motherfuckin wreckin crew bid / But once a bitch always a bitch”. These guys were outlaws but the shit they did only gets glossed over with screen captions.
Ice-T, like always it seems, comes off as the most thoughtful player in the game – that gravel-hard drawl doesn’t hurt either. “Gangsta rap is rock and roll,” he says, “without that edge rap is pop and Britney Spears can do that.” Both the Raiders and NWA were rock and roll. Too bad Cube didn’t make a rock and roll movie. As per usual these days, insead of Boyz N the Hood Ice Cube, we get Are We There Yet? Ice Cube.
