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.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

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

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

“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.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

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

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

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.

(

Courtesy of Alonzo Williams.

)

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.”

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

“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.

(

Steve Grayson

/

LA Public Library/Herald Examiner

)

“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.

(

Grayson Steve

/

LA Public Library/Herald Examiner Collection

)

“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.”

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is warning the public of a potential measles exposure from someone who traveled through Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles earlier this month.

What happened

The unvaccinated passenger arrived at Union Station on Saturday, Sept. 12, by Amtrak train just after 7 a.m. and departed about four hours later on an Amtrak Thruway bus bound for Bakersfield.

People at Union Station during the exposure window of 8 a.m. to noon may be at risk of contracting measles seven to 21 days after exposure. The last day to monitor for symptoms is Oct. 3.

State health officials say the passenger was traveling on buses and trains through L.A. and at least five other California counties before leaving the state.

"This case, along with previous measles outbreaks in California this year, serve as reminders of the importance of vaccination against measles," said Dr. Rita Nguyen, assistant state public health officer. "Measles is one of the most contagious infections that can lead to severe lifelong consequences, including permanent brain damage, and can also be fatal, especially for children."

What to watch for

Symptoms of measles include fever, red, watery eyes, and a rash that usually develops several days after other symptoms and typically starts on the face.

As of Sept. 14, a total of 59 measles cases have been reported in California this year. In most cases, patients were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status.

Imagine a sprawling network of roomy bike lanes, generously landscaped to calm relentless traffic. Think Amsterdam with newer buildings and fewer waterways. That’s been Long Beach’s goal anyway.

Instead of wide post-war boulevards, roads would become slower and leaner, transforming Long Beach into a top-five global cycling city, said former city traffic engineer Paul Van Dyk. “Some of that is tongue-in-cheek, but if you shoot for the moon you land in the stars.”

Long Beach has been working toward this vision since it adopted its bicycle master plan 25 years ago, now with mounting urgency as auto-related fatalities rise. The biggest project so far – the Studebaker Road Transformation Project – is bringing this vision to the doorstep of Studebaker Road residents.

It has drawn mixed reviews.

'The intent of the design is malicious'

“The intent of the design is malicious — it’s immoral,” said Joey Schilling, who drives the road six days a week and wrote a social media post criticizing the project that drew almost 1,000 comments. ”It’s people who do not use the road trying to tell other people how to use the road.”

Amid red cones and barriers, a woman and her dogs navigate the construction zones at Studebaker Road and Willow Street in Long Beach on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova.The $65 million project runs over five miles from Second Street all the way up to Carson Street. It includes bike lanes, greenways and stonescape with fiber-optic cable running underneath. It is crucial to the city’s long-term plan of knitting together 300 miles of bikeways by 2040 to bring bicycle culture to Long Beach, as well as create safer streets.

The massive project funded from 13 federal, state and local agencies, gives a glimpse of what’s to come for Long Beach thoroughfares. The Clark Avenue work is in progress. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue “backbone” plans are on deck. Now Studebaker Road, the biggest, longest and most expensive, is well underway, spending the most dollars and, arguably, drawing the most resident anger.

Schilling, who lives near Studebaker Road actually does ride his bike to work in Seal Beach and said he is OK with bike lanes in general. However, he says the project is not practical in a community where he says most drive to work. “It’s not a reasonable solution. It’s not even for the greater good, that would be to appease the 95 percent who use their cars. The cost and the benefit do not match up. The cost is too high, the benefit too low.”

Wider lanes, sturdier medians

The Studebaker project features raised bus stops and wider bike lanes than have been seen previously. No more flimsy bollards separating bikes from cars, said Van Dyk, the city traffic engineer who helped usher in the bikeway and traffic-calming street plan before he went on to consult on other urban bike projects.

The green bollards seen on Bellflower Boulevard and Studebaker before the redo often get hit by cars and can resemble thick blades of stomped grass. “People do not like the way they look, and I agree with their frustrations,” said Van Dyk. “That’s why we moved towards those concrete medians.“ He said planners “learned a lot of lessons along the way.”

Studebaker will feature roomier bike lanes – 9 feet wide compared with the old 6-foot-across version. Wider lanes will allow riders to travel two abreast for a better ride, Van Dyk said. It also makes them easier to clean. Debris-filled lanes are a sore spot with bikers.

The old bike lane sweeper the city used to clean narrow paths was notoriously difficult to move and use. (Fourth District Councilmember Daryl Supernaw joked that sightings of the small sweepers were less frequent than Bigfoot.) But a regular street sweeper can get into the broader lanes where it can’t on Broadway and Bellflower south of Atherton. (They actually set a street sweeper in a bike lane before planning and pouring the concrete to make sure it would fit.) Still, protected bike lanes are harder to clean than lanes merely separated by paint and “swept” by passing cars.

David Raslevich, a 41-year-old cyclist who frequently rides on the new lanes on Clark, said he has noticed branches, leaves and other debris. “I feel safer riding with the traffic, because they (cars) move debris out of the way for you.”

Buses stop in traffic, not turnouts

One new component of Studebaker and the other newer lanes are raised bus stops. The new stops designed to accommodate bikes and buses are about five inches off the ground and separated from the road by a curb. Buses will stop in the No. 2 lane, halting traffic behind them, and pick up passengers, instead of easing out of a bus turnout.

Van Dyk said that change evolved from talks with Long Beach Transit, which revealed that buses would sometimes get hit when pulling into traffic. Planners reasoned it’s better to have cars waiting for a bus to pick up passengers instead of forcing a bus waiting to pull into the No. 2 lane.

“It’s math my second grader can do: What’s better, 40 people on a bus wait or four people in cars,” Van Dyke said. “Which is the greatest cost to society? The bus is going to be more efficient.” He also contends the new system is safe; there is less ambiguity as a bus will slow down in front of a car, so the car would be more likely to stop instead of zipping around a protruding bus bumper.

It is too early to know how this plan will play out – the new bus lane curbs on Clark show missing chunks already from drivers that likely didn’t see them. Raslevich said he has seen cars turn into the curb by the raised bus stop. “They don’t know that there’s an island there, so they’re hitting that island, pretty much daily.”

Councilman Supernaw, whose district encompasses the $65 million project, had reservations about the price tag before ultimately supporting it.

'All anyone asked for is a repave'

“All anyone asked for is a repave, to get rid of potholes and have a smooth surface to drive on,” Supernaw said. “Should we just forgo the bike lanes and do a straight repave? The answer was no, we wanna use the grant money for the bike lanes.”

The city saw it as a grander vision, weaving together a puzzle of state and federal grants along with $8.5 million in local sales tax money for new transit stops, sidewalks and curb ramps that improve how all people can move through the city.

“It’s not just ‘I wanna ride a bike for fun.’ People need it to get to work,” said Jocelin Padilla, a spokesperson for the city’s Public Works Department.

'Communication via spraypaint'

A series of community meetings were held in 2024, drawing limited feedback. But when residents later saw painted pavement markings showing the planned curbs and bike lines, “they got involved in a big way,” Supernaw said.

“We call this communication via spraypaint,” said Supernaw. “Constituents see lines marked out and contact the council office.”

Aside from the cost and the bus islands, some residents are frustrated by the execution. Leslie Goldman, who lives near Studebaker and Stearns, said large piles of dirt – at times higher than cars – have blocked residents from crossing the street or seeing oncoming traffic. Some concerns were addressed, including a bus shelter that was added due to feedback from residents.

“We’re not saying we don’t want construction done ever, that’s life in the big city,” she said. But Goldman contends the “assembly line” construction approach, as opposed to the work done in shorter phases, is leading to more “noise, vibration, dust, traffic, blind spots, trash, roadblocks, … All at sporadic intervals unknown to residents. It’s not just an inconvenience, it’s a hardship.”

A 'once-in-a-generation' timeline

Padilla of Public Works acknowledged the hardship, but said the benefits would outweigh the short-term pain. She said doing the work in shorter segments would increase costs and project timelines – not a good thing when it needs to be finished by the Olympics. “This is a once-in-a-generation project,” she said.

Not all residents are wary. “Studebaker is gonna be awesome when it’s done,” said Dan Olsen, who lives near Studebaker and Atherton. “It’s new, it’s fresh, the neighborhood is going to benefit. It’s been a total pothole disaster for so long. … Even though there are catches and hooks, it’s still worth it.”

Long Beach still isn't Amsterdam

Long Beach is not yet Amsterdam; it’s still a patchwork of protected lanes and unprotected ones of varying degrees of newness. But Studebaker should be done in 2027. Pacific Avenue and Orange Avenue are next. The bike lanes and streets won’t uniformly connect, but there will be more of them – Artesia Boulevard to service Jordan High, Clark Avenue near Long Beach City College and now Studebaker. “Long Beach’s cycling network is reaching critical mass,” Van Dyk said.

Van Dyk and other bike proponents say it’s a long game. Amsterdam itself was car-dominated until the 1970s when the Stop de Kindermoord movement was launched in response to the high number of child deaths. “It’s a generational effort; it took multiple generations to give us the infrastructure we have today,” he said.

Will any of this make the streets safer?

Will they help make transportation safer for cars and bikes? The city racked up 53 traffic deaths in 2025, the highest in a decade, and 32 bike/pedestrian and e-scooter deaths. This year has seen 36 traffic deaths through mid-September. The city is also trying other tools; speed cameras are being installed, and tickets will go out this fall.

It’s not yet any safer to ride through Long Beach than it was 10 years ago, “but it’s not safer to do anything in Long Beach,” said Kurt Canfield, a cyclist and organizer for Car Lite Long Beach, a bike advocacy organization. He often rides the Broadway bike path, which he considers a success despite debris in the lane and other issues.

“They wanna bike, they wanna walk, people are driving 300 horsepower crossovers. We’re in conflict for the same space,” he said. “But this infrastructure gives us the ability to be safer.”

A grand piano, hauled in on a Ford F-350, will make its way next weekend to Griffith Park.

Then, right below the Hollywood sign, the flatbed will unfold into a stage for a recital by pianist Hunter Noack, who has played everywhere from Yosemite Valley to Joshua Tree National Park.

His Sept. 26 and 27 performances are all part of In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild, organized in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. (The show is sold out, but you can sign up for the waitlist.)

For a decade, Noack has hauled his Steinway — the same model used at Carnegie Hall — through rough terrain to perform in unusual places: 370 concerts and counting.

The piano has survived fire, wind and 112-degree heat

"We've had the piano lid be ripped off by the wind. We've had the piano trailer tires catch fire on Highway 1. We've almost driven off the side of Mount Bachelor. We've played in 112-degree heat and negative 2 degrees in the winter," Noack said. And the piano has come out unscathed, including after it was towed down the washboard gravel along Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho — the only thing that happened was that it went out of tune.

How the show actually works

Among the pieces on the program at Griffith Park is "Nature Boy," the song Eden Ahbez wrote while living outdoors under the first L of the Hollywood sign. The song was later made famous by Nat King Cole.

Audiences at the Griffith Park show will be provided with wireless headphones for concert-hall quality sound, he said. "Some people just set up their picnic chairs or blankets right near the stage. Other people lay down," Noack said. "When there's so much else that's happening visually ... the music kind of automatically becomes a soundtrack, and we all get to experience that together."

The philosophy behind the series' name

The series is named after "In a Landscape," a piece by John Cage, who believed any sound could be music — even "somebody crinkling on a bag of chips," Noack said.

During his first show in 2016 at the Columbia River Gorge, Noack was midway through a soft Schumann piece about a delicate flower when 40 Harley-Davidsons on a memorial ride rolled up and circled the piano.

Rather than pack it in, he answered with Frederic Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues," a piece built to mimic the aggressive clatter of a cotton mill. "It was a conversation between the piano and these roaring Harleys," he said.

California saw the largest share of immigration arrests of people from Asian countries during the first 18 months of President Trump’s second term, a new tracker shows.

More than 25% of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took place in California, home to the country's largest Asian population, followed by Texas and New York.

The findings come from the new Asian and Pacific Islander ICE Tracker launched by Stop AAPI Hate.

These communities are often missing from the national debate over immigration enforcement, said Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate during a briefing on the tracker.

“Asian and Pacific Islander communities deserve better than to be an afterthought in this crisis," Choi said. With the tracker, "we are aiming to ensure we cannot be ignored any longer."

The data shows that ICE actions targeting Asian immigrants rose much faster than enforcement against groups overall between January 2025 and August 2026.

Arrests were up 436% compared to a similar time period during the Biden administration; detentions up by 512%; deportations up by more than 1,100%.

The number of arrests peaked this past July with 1,950 recorded nationwide.

In California, there have been more than 5,300 arrests of Asian immigrants and more than 11,400 detention stints, which includes separate stays at different facilities during a single detention.

As for deportations, they were not broken down by state.

The largest numbers involved people from India and China, the countries of origin for the largest Asian immigrant populations in the U.S.

Stephanie Chan, Stop AAPI Hate’s director of data and research, noted that a rise in anti-Indian rhetoric centered on H1-B visa holders and truck drivers.

"You see a lot of elected officials saying things like, 'Indians are coming to take the jobs,'" Chan said.

Researchers also found that people from smaller communities — such as those from Laos and Uzbekistan — were arrested at rates far disproportionate to their share of the Asian noncitizen population.

The tracker draws from ICE records obtained through public-records requests by the Deportation Data Project at UCLA and UC Berkeley.

Leaders at Stop AAPI Hate said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is not only harming the people being swept up by ICE. Chan said the group’s annual survey of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders found more than half have felt the effects.

“That includes things like fearing that their status will be questioned,” Chan said. “That they will be arrested, detained, or deported.”

Choi drew parallels with how Asian Americans were scapegoated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who joined the briefing on the tracker, said the findings felt "very personal" because of the state’s large share of arrests.

A member of the Republican-led congressional China Committee focused on U.S. competition with the Chinese government, Khanna predicted Democrats would win the mid-terms and shift the tone of that panel.

"It's going to be much more about a celebration of Asian Americans — and documenting that — than the demonization of other countries," Khanna said.