On September 9, 1989, Express Yourself, the first UK single from Los Angeles hip-hop group N.W.A., debuted at number 50 on the national singles' chart. Based around a sample of funk/soul act Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's 1970 single of the same name, with its upbeat, radio-friendly bounce, and rapper Dr. Dre's empowering, positivity-fuelled lyrics encouraging listeners to live their most true, authentic lives ("Don't be a sequel"), to a casual listener on BBC Radio 1, the song wouldn't have sounded entirely out of place on De La Soul's 3 Feet High And Rising album, which had gatecrashed the UK Top 10 earlier in the year.
In reality, the single was Straight Outta Compton's own Trojan Horse, an offering whose appealing surface aesthetics gave no indication of the violent, chaotic forces that would be unleashed from within. For from the moment it opened with the sombre proclamation "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge", Straight Outta Compton was a hip-hop album like nothing which came before it, an unflinching, unfiltered and uncompromising account of day-to-day survival in South Central Los Angeles, in which life was cheap, violence was endemic, women were "bitches", and the only good cop was a dead cop.
In July 1989, less than one year after it first hit the streets, N.W.A.'s debut set was certified platinum for one million sales in America, the first 'gangsta rap' album to achieve that distinction. That term didn't actually exist before Straight Outta Compton - N.W.A. themselves shunned the tag, and used the term 'reality rap' to describe their sound - but came into being as a direct consequence of the album's third track, Gangsta Gangsta, which found Ice Cube, MC Ren and Eazy-E bragging about their amoral lifestyles and aptitude for violence. "Takin' a life or two, that's what the hell I do," Ice Cube spat on verse one. "You don't like how I'm livin', well fuck you. This is a gang, and I'm in it. My man Dre'll fuck you up in a minute." To white, middle class music journalists reviewing the record from media offices in New York and London, N.W.A.'s lurid "street knowledge" was a pose - "This regressive nonsense will be passed off as social commentary by thrill-seekers all across the free world" sniffed the UK's permanently buttoned-up Q magazine in a disparaging review - but the brutality chronicled on Straight Outta Compton was all too real to the band members: around the time the album received its RIAA classification, while N.W.A. were on tour across America, Dr. Dre's half-brother Tyree was beaten to death in the neighbourhood.
