I’m continuing Will & Kevin’s Rap Critique Challenge with N.W.A.’s song, Straight Outta Compton.

Let’s just go straight to the video:

This video starts with a text introduction giving us background on what “Compton” is — it’s a city that’s allegedly at the center of gang activity, and thus gets sweeped by police officers quite often. We can probably already guess what this rap song is about.

Before we start with the actual song, it should be noted that this song is quite famous — It’s Wikipedia article credits the song, stating that:

Straight Outta Compton redefined the direction of hip hop, which resulted in lyricism concerning the gangsta lifestyle becoming the driving force with sales figures. It also helped to shift the power to the West Coast from the East Coast, which had enjoyed a period of prominence in hip hop for most of the 1980s.

We then have a siren blaring while people march. Just a few seconds later, someone starts rapping at us. Unlike Lil’ Wayne, this rapper is actually comprehensible and makes an attempt to rhyme. Sure quite a few of his rhymes are the same word with the same word, and sure he’s talking about “Niggaz with Attitudes”, but this is rap. Let’s give him a break.

We then see scenes of gang activity — guns, looking cool, lurking — alternated with police activity — which coincidentally also involves guns, looking cool, and lurking. The only real difference is that the police show off their cars while the gang-members do not. The gang members show off their posse instead. A posse that, I might add, includes quite a few too many white guys to be considered “Niggaz with Attitudes”.

This continues along with a map of where Compton is and more scenes of guns, looking cool, and lurking. There is then a small pause in the background beat while the main rappers exchange “What up”‘s. The lurking and car scenes are then intensified, but the main song remains the same. The swear word density is also about 8 swear words out of every 36 regular words, which means 22% of the words in the songs are swears.

Compton is not a family-friendly area.

The scene then breaks out into various cop-gang chases and guns pointed at people while still rapping about gang members beating up black people. …Except they’re not referred to as “black people” in the song, sadly.

2 minutes and 50 seconds in presents us with the world’s most stereotypical police officer mustache, so now it’s quite possible to say this song sticks to every stereotype in the book.

Overall, the song doesn’t vary that much, and starts to get boring after it passes the three minute mark. The initial words and beat were clear and weren’t that bad — they were much better than Lil Wayne’s, for example — but it didn’t quite have the same variety as Forever. And like Forever, the beats kind of overstayed their welcome and the entire song could have had a minute trimmed out and no one would have noticed (or cared).

The fact that it’s 4 minutes instead of 6 minutes and is less boring than Forever, and the fact that it pulls off sirens without being obnoxious about it, makes the song a B+. My overall opinion is that the song is “meets expectations”.

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