Misogyny of gangsta rap is glossed over

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Music biopics are big business this year, raking it in at the box office and sending old albums back into the top 10.


Straight Outta Compton has been a surprise blockbuster, spearheading N.W.A. albums to even greater chart heights than when they were first released more than 28 years ago.

Hip hop fans, young and old, are revisiting the seminal Los Angeles rap collective’s output, blasting out Express Yourself and Straight Outta Compton — away from the delicate sensibilities of the littlies, of course.

But will they press skip when N.W.A.’s Greatest Hits tracklist hits A Bitch Iz A Bitch or Just Don’t Bite It?

While Express Yourself is N.W.A.’s benign pop hit, missing most of the profanity and violent language which made the group’s reputation, the historic revisionism offered by the film seems to have glossed over the not-so-casual misogyny of gangsta rap.

 
N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton 20th Anniversary Edition. (Pic: Supplied) 
   

The film largely casts women as topless groupies indulging in hotel room orgies, with the exception of Eazy E’s wife and one of the film’s producers Tomica Woods-Wright, who would eventually inherit Ruthless Records.

She is portrayed as the very smart woman beside her man.

While the film centred on the institutionalised racism, drugs and gang culture of the 1980s which defined areas like Compton, with rap offering the disenfranchised a legitimate avenue out of the hood, hip hop’s rapsheet of violence against women, in life and music, was erased.

Watch the scene where Eazy-E is told he has AIDs and not long to live. After protesting his heterosexuality, he loses it when the doctor points out the disease can be contracted via unprotected sex.

This was 1995, not 1985 so the safe sex message had been broadcast loud and clear for a decade, yet this hip hop superstar thought himself — and the many women he had sex with — to be invincible.

Dr Dre and Ice Cube were also producers of the film. So it was no surprise that Dre’s history of abuse of women was completely absent from Straight Outta Compton.


Dr. Dre’s history of abuse of women was erased from the film. (Pic: Mike Coppola/Getty Images) 
   

Some of his victims, including rapper Dee Barnes and singer Michelle Toussaint, have told their stories about being beaten by the multi-millionaire hitmaker and entrepreneur in the wake of the film’s omission.

And Dre made a public apology last month which Barnes welcomed.

But sexism formed a cornerstone of N.W.A.’s brand and its influence stretches across the decades as their successors continue to refer to women in their lyrics as b**ches or whores. The language hasn’t changed.

“So what about the b**ch who got shot? F … her! You think I give a damn about a b**ch? I ain’t a sucker!”, Eazy-E raps on Straight Outta Compton.

Hip hop is proudly held up as a musical document of the lives of its artists and so it appears the members of N.W.A. consider women to be either gold diggers or sex toys.

I remember cringing every time I heard the Straight Outta Compton record when it first came out. And that hasn’t changed either.

Kathy McCabe is News Corp’s National Music Writer.