Straight Outta Compton: It’s Not the Whole Story
If recent box office results have proved anything, it’s that ‘gangsta-rap’ still makes money.  
Albeit, less in the traditional method of selling albums, like it did in its own day. Instead, gangsta-rap, a subgenre of music from the late 80’s and early 90’s,has earned approximately $138 million at the multiplex, thanks to the four week-long dominance of F. Gary Gray’s “Straight Outta Compton,” a drama chronicling the true story of the infamous rap group, NWA.
With lyrics often portraying drugs, gangs, violence, and misogyny in a positive light, gangsta-rap can appear as a strange anomaly, both to the older generation of baby boomers and younger millennials.
Chants like “F*** the Police” – characteristic of NWA – were seen as dangerous to the older generation; gangsta-rap was a disease corrupting the white suburban youth of the time and destroying the conservative, law-and-order values of middle America.
Dr. Stephen Finley, LSU professor of religious studies and African-American studies, teaches a class on hip-hop, culture, and religion, and noted how politicians of the day spoke about the subgenre and hip-hop as a whole.
“…A politician blaming hip-hop for a lot of social problems. Well, ‘hip-hop’ is only code for ‘black’…For him black people and black youth culture was a problem. I understood perfectly what he was saying, and my students did as well,” Finley said.
In reality, this decrying of gangsta-rap was related to outside prejudices and exploiting the problems of the subgenre for the sake of blanketing the entire genre of rap and black culture as a whole as one of violence, gangs, and drugs.
By turning gangsta-rap into a microcosm of blackness, the larger culture ignored the real complexity and social consciousness that had been coming out of the African-American community for some time.
“The woman who put [the first mainstream hip-hop] record out in 1979 actually did it for religious reasons. She said that she was led by the Holy Spirit to do it, and a lot of people don’t know that,” Finley said.
With the millennial generation being known for its tolerance and feminism almost becoming a cliche in media, gangsta-rap and its objectification of women might seem offensive to the younger generation as well. And Dr. Finley made no attempt to evade some of these issues:
“To be sure, much of the subject matter of gangsta-rap is misogynistic and violent.”
But the problems millennials might have with gangsta-rap might be more related to the preceding generation’s prejudices than the actual lyrics of rappers like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre.
“Research has shown that millennials are actually no less racist than previous generations,” Finley said.
The research he refers to is the General Social Survey conducted by NORC in 2010, 2012, and 2014. In this survey, millennials answered questions such as “are blacks lazier than whites?” in similar fashion to members of Generation X and the Baby Boomers. Statistically, America’s “tolerant” generation is no better than its fathers.
(The Washington Post reported a comprehensive analysis earlier this year, which can be found here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/07/white-millennials-are-just-about-as-racist-as-their-parents/)
Evidenced by this research, Millennials might judge the genre of rap in the same way their fathers did in the same way they judge African-American ability to work — by judging a small piece as representative of the whole.
Dr. Finley always referred back to the fact that gangsta-rap was only one small piece in the larger machine of rap culture. Even younger generations should be slow to generalize and judge hip-hop on the basis of one part alone. When asked about the new generation of diverse popular rappers — the unique craft of Kanye West, the spiritual exhortation of Kendrick Lamar, and the white progressivism of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis — Dr. Finley was quick to point out that that diversity is nothing new. It has been a part of rap and hip-hop since the beginning, and even during the gangsta-rap phase of the 90’s.
“That kind of diversity has always existed within hip-hop. What we have is a confluence of a tensions, given to certain kinds of rap, that make it seem like these less socially responsible forms of rap in particular are bigger and more significant,” Finley said.
With a sequel to “Straight Outta Compton” allegedly in the works and interest in hip-hop remaining high, perhaps this “confluence of tensions” should be unraveled in order to provide a more holistic history of rap and tell the story of a diversity that has been there from the beginning.