The Brief

Unlike its New York origin story, no one can really say exactly when hip-hop hit the West Coast. But when it did, Alonzo Williams was there.

Known as the “godfather” of West Coast hip-hop, Williams has been working in the music industry here for more than 40 years. He’s been a DJ, music producer, former club owner, and member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru with Dr. Dre, DJ Yella and artists like Michel'le.

His studio in Gardena is where West Coast hip-hop history was made.

An award for NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" album hangs in Alonzo Williams' studio.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Alonzo "Lonzo" Williams, the Godfather of West Coast Hip-Hop, in his home studio.

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“This house is like the Motown House of West Coast hip-hop,” Williams says, recalling the first moments he recorded with collaborators. “It could be haunted with music.”

This is where Williams made the first Wreckin’ Cru record, the electro-funk group credited for pioneering West Coast hip-hop. He also recorded and produced hits for Dr. Dre and other hip-hop legends like Ice Cube and Eazy-E here.

“I wasn't trying to be the godfather,” Williams says, “I just was doing me.”

The studio’s musical history goes way back to when before hip-hop existed. Before Williams, it was previously owned by Johnny Otis — a singer, composer and record producer known as the “godfather” of rhythm and blues in the late '40s and '50s. Jazz icon Etta James, a mutual friend who lived right next door, also recorded much of her generation-defining music right there.

Disco and funk set the scene

It all started with disco.

“In the beginning it was all about partying,” Williams says. “It was all about dancing, it was all about having a good time.”

He recalls growing up in Compton and falling in love with the dance and club scene through his high school dances. “We didn’t have a lot of the luxuries kids have today, but it was a much better time,” he recalls.

Influenced by the disco groove, he later became a local DJ known as Disco Lonzo.

At the same time, the musical variety show Soul Train was blowing up in L.A., which featured Black musicians and dancers from L.A. (It first began to broadcast from Chicago, then moved here in 1971 when it was syndicated.)

“The show really made an opportunity for not only Black artists to get their music out, but for a presentation of Black dance and expression that the world had really never seen,” says historian of Black culture and museum curator Tyree Boyd-Pates.

“This is what I grew up on,” Wiliams says. “It was just an all around good time.”

Alonzo "Lonzo" Williams, the Godfather of West Coast Hip-Hop, in his home studio.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Alonzo "Lonzo" Williams, the Godfather of West Coast Hip-Hop, in his home studio.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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But disco — known to be popular among queer, Latino and Black communities — died down toward the late '70s, due, many will argue today, to nationwide racism and homophobia.

The end was most visible in 1979, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park’s “Disco Demolition” night. That night, in a baseball promotion gone wrong, a popular DJ well known for being an anti-disco “discophobe” blew up disco records at a scheduled White Sox game. Hordes of people showed up, chaos ensued and the White Sox had to forfeit the game. Historical observers of that night are split about what exactly went down — some still view it a badly mishandled attempt to get people to the game while others saw it as a symbolic rejection of the genre and its supposed representation of queer culture.

But soon, a new kind of sound began to take the L.A. club scene by storm: funk music. Bands like KC and the Sunshine Band, The Sugarhill Gang and Brass Construction became the soundtrack at the hottest nightclubs.

Williams, who had recently opened the nightclub Eve After Dark in Compton, says funk, more so than disco, was truly the sound of L.A.’s Black community. “It was the sound of the young urban Blacks of the 70s,” Williams says. “Disco was cool, but it wasn't ours.”

Funk became the foundation for what would become the West Coast sound of a brand new genre that was, like disco, all about rhythm and movement.

“Funk is very repetitive,” Williams says. “It does the same thing every four bars for the most part, like James Brown is the master of repetition … He takes you high and brings you back down for the same 16 bars.”

Along with the advent of mechanical drum machines, funk’s repetition paved the way for the idea of sampling, reusing a portion of a song under a hip-hop beat, and ultimately, the West Coast hip-hop sound: “It became the basis of hip hop,” Williams says. “You could sit there and tap and make drum sounds. You can get a keyboard and sample, you could do almost anything.”

World Class Wreckin’ Cru

Playing around with funk samples, drum beats and flows in Williams’ studio soon became The World Class Wreckin' Cru — the first West Coast hip-hop group to be signed by a major label in 1983. Williams formed the group and brought in Dr. Dre, DJ Yella and Michel’le.

“We just took the elements that we'd already had, and basically rap was nothing but poetry to a beat,” he says.

Members of the World Class Wreckin' Cru — Alonzo Williams is at far right.

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Considered the first West Coast hip-hop group, but technically “electro-funk,” Wreckin’ Cru was the first group on the coast to rap over a sampled beat, to create what is now the distinctive West Coast sound. Williams says these specific ingredients — the rapping, the sampling, the drum machines — opened the door for many Black people with a story to tell to express themselves with music.

“Growing up in Compton, I always wanted to be a Temptation,” Williams recalls, laughing. “I knew I couldn’t sing, but I could write.”

Roots in revolution 

Beyond the influences of disco and funk, Williams emphasizes the true origins of hip-hop go back far before the inception of those genres. It’s all about storytelling, he says.

Black Americans have used spoken word over music to tell stories from their community for centuries. Tracing it back to the 1800s, Williams refers to the songs enslaved Black people would sing in the fields on the plantations as a tool to both process and communicate their experiences.

“All those stories of people's lives that were put to music,” he says. “Hip-hop is just another vehicle used to tell the stories of our community.”

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“Hip-hop, especially in the West Coast, is rooted in revolution,” Boyd-Pates says, nodding to the influence of poetry and spoken word among L.A.’s Black population during the 1965 Watts Rebellion.

Groups like the Last Poets in New York and the Watts Prophets in L.A. rose out of the Civil Rights movement to fuse the sounds of jazz and funk and spoken word to chronicle Black life in America, Boyd-Pates says. A 1965 radio broadcast by the Afro-American Association featured Black voices set to a beat, documenting the Watts Rebellion. It was titled: The Uncensored Version of The Los Angeles Riots.

“You’re gunna hear an analysis of Los Angeles that you won’t hear on the news,” one of the speakers says. “Los Angeles, it’s not a riot, it’s a war.”

“They used their poems and their words accompanied with sound to serve as a clarion call to Black conditioning here, particularly in South Los Angeles,” Boyd-Pates says of the artists of that time.

That gave rise to what came to define hip-hop and rap in its early days — the work of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and NWA and albums like Straight Outta Compton. “It gave the whole world, especially through gangsta rap of the 1990s, a journalistic view of what it meant to be Black in L.A.,” Boyd-Pates says. “And you had movies like Boyz n the Hood that paralleled that same experience.”

Enter: Gangsta rap

This West Coast hip-hop renaissance lasted a few years, giving rise to regional giants like Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Ice-T and Snoop Dogg — “it was the golden age of hip-hop,” Williams says. “We were partying on the weekend and in the studio during the week.”

But then — much due to crack cocaine and other drugs hitting the streets on L.A. — the texture of the scene drastically changed.

Eazy-E photographed on Feb. 12, 1989.

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“It was basically overnight,” Williams explains. “Suddenly everyone was a gangster, and you could hear it in the music.”

Lyrically, as the music shifted from love, romance and dance to a much more explicit tone of gun violence, drugs and sex, so did the energy at the clubs and in the streets, Williams says. This was the era that belonged to NWA, Tupac, Too Short; East Coast v. West Coast beef hit a high point (though many say this was purposely stoked by the media).

“Gangster rap killed electro funk,” Williams says, “The dance floor was no longer an option.”

Though this was a troubling time for the hip-hop scene in general — that included the shooting murders of hip-hop legends Tupac and Biggie Smalls — gangster rap was an influential musical element to the development of not just the genre, but hip-hop’s service for the journalism and preservation of Black culture in America.

Ice Cube performs with N.W.A. at Anaheim's Celebrity Theater on March 27, 1989.

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“The music industry changed after Dr. Dre dropped The Chronic,” says Boyd-Pates. “The industry was never the same and gangsta rap was ushering in Death Row Records, Snoop Doggy Dogg and naturally Tupac who took it to heights the world had never seen … and all of that has ties to L.A.’s culture at large, especially Black culture.”

West Coast hip-hop forever 

Today’s L.A. legends like Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle, Tyler the Creator, Inglewood Sir, each carry forth the elements of this West Coast sound. You can hear its collective history — the disco, the funk, soul, gospel, and gangster rap — in music today.

Hip-hop may have started in New York years before it really reached L.A., and the East Coast sound may have reigned in the beginning. But the hip-hop sound established here was its own. It made an impression and it persisted, Williams notes.

“One thing about L.A. that made L.A. so great in so many ways is that it was spread out,” says Williams. “L.A. County is huge and everyone wanted their own recognition so when Compton made its stamp on hip-hop, Long Beach had to follow, Pomona had to follow, Inglewood followed and it created a competition but helped anchor the West.”

“Then Northern California did their thing,” Williams adds, “and just between California alone you gotta a whole lotta hip-hop. And most of it sounds totally different. That is the beauty of the West Coast.”

For Tré Willingham, pursuing a doctorate degree at UC Irvine has felt isolating at times. Often the only Black student in his science classes, he recalls being the last one to be chosen when activities required a lab partner. He also has never had a Black professor.

“It’s very disheartening to never see anyone that looks like you,” said Willingham, who studies applied physics. “It makes it hard to believe that you can get there, and especially get there and actually be yourself.”

For Willingham and students like him, the state-funded Cal-Bridge program is helping them pursue their dreams of landing a doctorate in the sciences and joining the next generation of STEM professors. The program provides financial support, research opportunities and diverse mentors of similar backgrounds.

Such mentors make “it much easier to start to navigate these spaces and also believe that you can get to the other end,” Willingham said.

Cal-Bridge was founded in 2014 to help undergraduates at Cal State campuses pursue a doctorate in STEM in partnership with the University of California, helping to close the diversity gap in science fields. About 70% of the program’s 406 students have been admitted to doctorate programs. Three quarters of the program’s students are of color, almost half are women, and nearly two-thirds are first generation.

Studies have noted that the climate of STEM higher education programs is often unwelcoming for some minority populations. Women make up over half of the undergraduate student population at Cal State campuses, yet account for only 36% of the system’s STEM students. At UC campuses, only 24% of STEM undergraduates are Latino or Hispanic, 4% are African American and 1% are American Indian.

From Cal-Bridge’s first cohort of five undergraduate students, the program has grown to support about 60 each year. It has expanded from astronomy and physics to now include computer science and math. Students in the program can receive stipends, tuition assistance, mentorship and professional development.

But the journey to diversifying the STEM teaching field is very long.

So far, 15 Cal-Bridge participants have earned a doctorate. It takes students about eight years after joining Cal-Bridge, usually done during their junior year, to complete a doctorate — two years as an undergraduate and six years to complete their doctorate education.

“It’s only been 12 years since we started, so only this small group is getting their Ph.D. right now,” said Dr. Alexander Rudolph, Cal-Bridge’s executive director and founder. “But eventually we expect there to be more like 30 to 40 to 50 a year getting their Ph.Ds.”

The state Legislature has given $14 million over recent years to the program, which also has a sliver left over from an older National Science Foundation grant.

The program might also get a helpful boost in the Legislature as California pushes back against federal efforts targeting university equity initiatives.

Democratic Assemblymember David Alvarez of Chula Vista introduced Assembly Bill 2660 in April to codify Cal-Bridge as a coordinated partnership between community colleges, Cal State universities and University of California campuses. Rudolph hopes that will help secure annual or multi-year funding for Cal-Bridge in lieu of making requests each year.

Alvarez told CalMatters that as the federal administration cut back on student loans and grants for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, California should do more to support its students.

“The lack of representation from first-generation students in the Ph.D. level of education speaks for itself,” said Alvarez. “We need to do something in California to demonstrate that we still believe that we have strength in diversity of our Ph.Ds, of our academia, and this (Assembly bill) is one way to try.”

Financial assistance allows students to prioritize academics 

Willingham, the UC Irvine student, hadn’t considered pursuing a doctorate earlier in his life. Now 31, the first-generation scholar is pursuing his doctorate with the goal of one day becoming a professor.

“No one around me was a doctor of anything,” said Willingham about his family and friends growing up.

Willingham grew up in Littleton, Colorado where he attended Columbine High School. After high school, his father, who had served in the Air Force, and Willingham moved to Atlanta. In 2017, he moved to California where he began his higher education journey. He is now the father of two children, ages 12 and two, balancing family time with his studies.

Today, Willingham’s research focuses on creating new quantum materials and exploring how they could be used in future sensors and electronic devices.

Cal-Bridge has four programs: undergraduate, summer research, doctoral and postdoctoral. The undergraduate program is open to STEM students at Cal State campuses and community college students who plan to transfer to a Cal State. It receives up to 100 applications per year; about 60 students were accepted this past year.

Willingham attended El Camino College and Compton College simultaneously to finish his associate degree quickly, then joined Cal-Bridge’s undergraduate program after transferring to Cal Poly Pomona. There, the program gave him $10,000 during each of his junior and senior years, which helped him get a car to commute to school from Los Angeles and stay focused by working fewer hours as a tutor.

“I was able to just sort of focus my attention a little better, not having to always think about how I’m going to pay the next bill,” said Willingham.

Later in Cal-Bridge’s doctoral program, Willingham received $40,000 in financial support for his first year of graduate school at UC Irvine. He used $16,000 to pay his tuition and the rest for living expenses.

Mentorship helps students find their place in STEM 

It took Dr. Katy Rodriguez Wimberly, a Cal-Bridge alum, 13 years to become a research faculty member. She is now an astrophysics assistant professor at Cal State San Bernardino.

Wimberly researches near-field cosmology, studying neighboring galaxies that may be some of the first ever formed.

“It’s almost like galactic archaeology, like I’m looking at these little almost-fossil galaxies to learn more about the early universe and where everything came from,” said Wimberly.

She is also now the director of mentorship for Cal-Bridge. During her junior year as an undergraduate, she joined Cal-Bridge’s first cohort, helping her imagine what being an astronomer would be like.

The mentors and the program’s monthly workshops showed her that while she didn’t see many Latina women like her teaching STEM on her campus, she could do it. When she was an undergraduate at Cal State Long Beach, she said, there were only two women professors from about 20 faculty in her department, and none of them Black or Latino.

Cal-Bridge provided Latino mentors she wasn’t finding anywhere else.

“It wasn’t like they were teaching me in a classroom, but they did kind of provide that cultural and kind of identity support,” said Wimberly.

Wimberly had applied to 11 doctorate programs as a senior undergraduate and was denied by all of them. Next, she applied and was accepted to Cal State Long Beach to pursue a master’s in physics. There, she raised her GPA, reapplied to doctorate programs and was accepted to UC Irvine. She graduated in 2021 with her doctorate in physics.

At UC Irvine, Wimberly created a peer mentorship program for Cal-Bridge students as a way for alumni and graduate students of the program to support the undergraduate students. Mentors and mentees meet in small groups once a month, as well as have one-on-one meetings.

“I structured it in a way to be more like, this is just your older cousin that’s telling you how to get through things,” Wimberly said.

After she finished her doctorate, she had a three-year, full-time fellowship with the National Science Foundation. She served at UC Riverside with her former mentor, Laura Sales, an astronomer from Argentina and associate professor at the university.

Learning from Sales made her feel more comfortable embracing her identity as a Latina. Sales taught her that she didn’t have to be an expert in all areas of astronomy, but that she would work alongside experts in different areas.

Now as a professor herself for the last three years at Cal State San Bernardino, Wimberly offers the same mentorship to her students. Anytime she sees a Latina student who doesn’t have support from someone with a similar background, she tries to provide that support.

“Just because I know it can be so difficult,” said Wimberly.

Claire Rogers, a student at UC Irvine pursuing a doctorate in physics, knew she wanted to attend graduate school, but she didn’t realize how isolating the experience would be as the only woman in the room. She is a Cal-Bridge doctorate scholar researching observational astrophysics, looking for planets outside of the solar system to determine if there is life on those planets. She also focuses on how stellar astrophysics affects measurements when looking for planets.

Rogers was an undergraduate at Cal Poly Humboldt and joined Cal-Bridge during the first year the program expanded to her campus.

“Cal-Bridge was really helpful for providing a network of students at the same phase of their career at different CSU campuses but still working towards similar goals,” said Rogers.

She said that since the department on her campus was small, Cal-Bridge allowed her to connect with students at other campuses who were in similar positions.

The program provided her two mentors, a professor at her campus and a professor at UC Berkeley. The program also offered her guidance in applying for graduate school.

“I’m sure it made a huge difference in my grad school essays, getting that feedback,” Rogers said.

Rogers participated in an undergraduate summer research program at the University of Wyoming through Cal-Bridge, where she dabbled in astrophysics research for the first time. Cal-Bridge’s summer program is open to community college and Cal State undergraduate students and allows students to participate in research projects at partner institutions. Out of around 200 applications, only 50 to 60 students get accepted to the summer program.

“I really like spending time at a telescope … and dealing with all of the problems that come up when you are running a telescope overnight,” she said.

She was usually the only woman in her undergraduate classes, and in graduate school there were only three women in her cohort of 22 students.

“I got very accustomed to being the only woman in a room,” said Rogers.

She mentioned feeling isolated during her first year at UC Irvine, noticing that her classmates rarely showed up when she organized study groups and that the men in her lab would change the conversation when she entered the room.

“I had a really hard time my first year with reconciling that I felt very unwelcome,” said Rogers.

She eventually found a support network outside of her original cohort, getting closer to other doctoral scholars in Cal-Bridge and having monthly movie nights together.

“Cal-Bridge has made a huge difference to my career and my, sort of, finding my space in this field,” said Rogers.

Rogers hopes to one day become a professor and be able to teach while continuing her research in observational astrophysics.

“When I was new to physics it made a big difference for me to have women professors,” said Rogers. “I think it’s important for future students to also have that resource and that support, and I would like to be able to provide that.”

Brittany Oceguera is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

California scored another win against the Trump administration in their battle over how to address the homelessness crisis here and nationwide.

A federal judge this week shot down the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2025 attempt to divert money away from permanent housing and instead fund temporary shelters and programs that require sobriety. But the judge stopped short of banning the Trump administration from making such changes in the future.

“The federal court’s decision to reject the Trump-Vance Administration’s attempt to disrupt essential housing services for people experiencing homelessness, including families, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities, is both appropriate and just,” Renee Willis, chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote in a news release.

In November, the Department of Housing and Urban Development said jurisdictions applying for about $4 billion in federal Continuum of Care funding can’t spend more than 30% of it on permanent housing — a move that would result in a significant cut to the type of long-term housing that for years has been a cornerstone of the fight against homelessness.

Last year, California communities spent about 90% their share of that money on permanent housing.

A group of states, including California quickly sued. San Francisco, Santa Clara County and a group of national homelessness nonprofits filed a separate lawsuit. In December, a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked the changes. In February, Congress ordered HUD to renew grants from 2025 under the old rules.

This week, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy partially granted the plaintiffs’ request for summary judgement in both cases. She ruled that the federal agency did not try to foresee the harm its “breakneck” transition away from the country’s longstanding “housing first” model – which prioritizes getting people into housing without first forcing them to seek treatment – would have on the country’s homeless individuals.

“Overall, the actions undertaken by HUD in attempting to hastily eliminate its housing first approach serve as the hallmark of unreasoned decision making,” McElroy wrote.

HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The ruling wraps up both cases, unless the Trump administration decides to appeal.

But the fight isn’t over. The Trump administration tried again last month, moving to shift 2026 federal funding away from permanent housing and the housing first framework. Housing advocates tried to challenge that latest shift in the prior lawsuit. The judge rejected that attempt, but welcomed the plaintiffs to file a new lawsuit.

The housing advocates said they are weighing their next steps.

Topline:

Where the greatest risks are: Areas around downtown Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley, and northern Orange County may see hazardous air on the evening of July 4 due to particle pollution from fireworks, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Riverside County and San Bernardino could see hazardous air the next day as the particles from fireworks move east and combine with the region’s elevated levels of air pollution.

Other risks: The Inland Empire and most of Los Angeles and Orange counties — that is, nearly all of SoCal — may see unhealthy air at times throughout the weekend, as they do every year.

Why it’s unhealthy: Exposure to particle pollution can cause chronic coughs in healthy people and flare-ups of symptoms for people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to the American Lung Association. If you’re in an area where people set off personal fireworks, the organization said those can be even more dangerous, since they’re closer to the ground and the air we breathe.

What to do: Stay inside if you can, and avoid physical activity outside. Unlike the recent fire at the Lineage Logistics warehouse in Boyle Heights, air quality officials say running air conditioners in your home will help, as will air purifiers, though they recommend against turning on fans that bring in outside air.

Other issues: Visibility in Orange County and the Inland Empire may be low Saturday night due to a soupy blend of high humidity and particle pollution.

How long the advisory lasts: It’s in place from 5 p.m. July 4 until 3 p.m. July 5.

The U.S. telecasts of this summer's World Cup games are drawing a record number of viewers. Fox Sports, which broadcasts the games in English, reports an average of 5 million viewers per match across 72 group stage matches. And Telemundo says nearly half of all World Cup viewers in the country are watching its Spanish language coverage.

Wednesday night, fans celebrated as the U.S. men's national soccer team knocked out Bosnia Herzegovina's team two-nil during the latest round of the Copa Mundial, as it's known in Spanish.

At Café Brasil in Culver City, California, Giselle Rosas and her mother Graciela Reyes, who were both born in Mexico, cheered for the U.S. team, along with Telemundo's famously exuberant announcer Andrés Cantor.

"That's the best part for everybody," Reyes said, imitating Cantor's long "Goooooool" calls.

Rosas noted the growing popularity of soccer in the U.S. "thanks to immigrants," and she said it's more fun to watch the World Cup in Spanish.

"A million percent. We like the excitement," said Rosas, "the feeling, the sentiment, the ambience, it's a night and day difference."

Giselle Rosas and her mother Graciela Reyes cheered for the U.S. men's national soccer team on Wednesday at Cafe Brasil in Culver City.

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That kind of passion, to date, has translated to an average of 4.6 million World Cup viewers of Spanish-language sportscasts on Telemundo and Peacock streaming services per match, according to NBCUniversal.

"This is the most watched World Cup ever in Spanish language in this country. The numbers are just mind blowing, really," says Miguel Lorenzo, a senior vice president at Telemundo Deportes.

"Basically, half of the country of the United States is watching the World Cup in Spanish on Telemundo. But we also know that only 20% of the U.S. population is Hispanic," says Lorenzo. "We're seeing audiences that are bilingual, that are Spanish dominant, that speak English enjoying World Cup coverage."

According to Nielsen ratings, 20% of Telemundo's World Cup viewers speak English as their primary language. And overall, Lorenzo says the viewership on its telecasts has increased by 122% since the 2022 World Cup Games.

He says excitement has been highest for the winning matches by Mexico and the U.S., and the network's social media platforms have surpassed a record-breaking one billion views.

"I can't tell you how many comments I've seen where people are saying, 'I don't speak a lick of Spanish, but I want to watch it on Telemundo because it just sounds more exciting. And maybe by the end of the World Cup, I'll learn Spanish,'" Lorenzo says. "Joy and excitement and drama: it's language agnostic, it's universal."

Unlike Fox, which runs commercials during hydration breaks for the players, Telemundo keeps its cameras on the field. That's something very much appreciated by fans like comedian Trevor Noah.

"We're seeing the players on the pitch discussing what's happening. You see which coach is more stressed…This is part of the game," Noah said during one of the World Cup parties he hosts on his YouTube channel. "When you cut to ads, you lose the stress, you lose the joy, the anticipation. So shout out again, Telemundo: Really, really amazing coverage."
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