The bad blood between Cube and his former group members grew over the next year, as they traded insults on tracks-first, Cube was referred to as “Benedict Arnold” on N.W.A.’s first Cube-less release, the 100 Miles and Runnin’ EP. It’s not over yet.Īnd what did Barnes do to have it coming? She interviewed Ice Cube, who had left the group in December 1989 because of a dispute over royalties. Tried to play us.Tried to play us in front of millions of people. See you ‘round, buddy boy.What did she do? Try to make us look stupid. The host of that show, there’s something that she know that she did, and got beat down, and I hope it happen again. Besides, it ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.Īs this story was circulating, MTV News ran footage reportedly filmed in March of 1991, in which Ren discussed the incident: Ain’t nothing you can do now by talking about it. People talk all this shit, but you know, somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. Ren says, “she deserved it – bitch deserved it.” Eazy agrees: “Yeah, bitch had it coming.” He also printed quotes from N.W.A.’s MC Ren and Eazy E regarding the incident: To Barnes’s account, Light added that Dre attempted to throw her down stairs and failed. Journalist Alan Light devoted many words to the incident in his profile, “ N.W.A.: Beating Up the Charts,” which ran in the August 8, 1991, issue of Rolling Stone. In the interview, Barnes pointed out that she is 5’3” and that Dre is 6’2” (around the web, his height is printed as 6’1”). I ran into the women’s bathroom to hide, but he burst through the door and started bashing me in the back of the head. He picked me up by my hair and my ear and smashed my face and body into the wall.Next thing I know, I’m down on the ground and he’s kicking me in the ribs and stamping on my fingers. The paper ran a follow-up a few weeks later, on July 23 that included Barnes’s description of the attack: Dre brutally beat up Dee Barnes, the host of a well-known Fox show about hip-hop called Pump It Up!įrom what I can tell, the Los Angeles Times ran the first major-outlet story on the incident on June 28, 1991. On January 27, 1991, during what many reports say was a record-release party for the feminist-bent rap duo Bytches With Problems (BWP) at Hollywood’s Po Na Na Souk club, Dr. It may be too ugly for Hollywood, but it’s as real as any reality in N.W.A.’s rap music. In doing this, Straight Outta Compton glosses over a defining moment in N.W.A.’s legacy that I think warrants reexamination. It keeps the narrative clean and straightforward, and it keeps the indefensible unmentioned. Tabling the misogyny makes liking the men behind the group much less complicated. I suspect that much of N.W.A.’s anti-woman rhetoric, and the ensuing, widespread criticism of it, is suppressed in the film to keep its heroes looking like heroes. While audiences are left with a clear understanding of the social conditions that would drive young black men in South Central Los Angeles to write and perform “Fuck tha Police,” we have no concept of what propelled Ice Cube to write “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” or just how much of the pornographically demeaning second half of N.W.A.’s 1991 album, Niggaz4Life, fit the group’s “reality rap” ethos. Though they were relatively low in number, the group’s female collaborators are nowhere to be found in Compton singer Michel’le is mentioned twice in passing and rapper Yo Yo isn’t acknowledged at all. They are mothers, wives, girlfriends, and sex objects at parties (the colorism in last year’s casting call for female extras is palpable in the movie). that is kinder and gentler than any previous existing conception of the group.īut in order to do that, Andrea Berloff and John Herman’s script omits any explicit discussion of N.W.A.’s open misogyny in their music and lives, while implicitly condoning it by keeping female characters on the outskirts of the story in small roles that service the film’s central men. Dre had a hand in producing, exists partly to humanize. The movie, which surviving group members Ice Cube and Dr. In Compton, you’re given a sense of how creative energy and oppressive persecution by authorities helped foster a brotherhood in this group of young, black men. It’s also a refreshing counter narrative for a group of guys who were mostly vilified by the mainstream media during their short stint as the most notorious rap act in the country. The movie is a well-acted, energetic neo-blaxploitation throwback that I suspect will be a hit. biopic Straight Outta Compton, which hits theaters in two weeks, you’d leave the theater none the wiser. If you hadn’t heard about the incident going into F. Dre” Young attacked hip-hop journalist Denise “Dee” Barnes in a nightclub. In January of 1991, producer/rapper and then-N.W.A.
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