“Straight Outta Compton" received rave reviews, but some critics say the movie minimizes the misogyny and violence against women at the heart of N.W.A.’s music; The L.A. band Health continues to rise in the music scene, but is the band at its peak?; poet Claudia Rankine’s book on racism and prejudice gets adapted to the stage.
Is praise for 'Compton' and N.W.A. at the expense of black women?
“Straight Outta Compton” is a rags-to-riches story that depicts the founding members of the rap group N.W.A. as urban poets coming of age in South L.A. during the late 1980s and early '90s amidst gang violence, police brutality and riots.
The movie has received largely favorable reviews, but some critics say it dramatically minimizes and even celebrates the misogyny and violence against women at the heart of N.W.A’s music. Meanwhile, media attention on the issue has been minimal.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Ice Cube addressed the subject of their lyrics this way:
If you're a bitch, you're probably not going to like us," he says. "If you're a ho, you probably don't like us. If you're not a ho or a bitch, don't be jumping to the defense of these despicable females. Just like I shouldn't be jumping to the defense of no punks or no cowards or no slimy son of a bitches that's men. I never understood why an upstanding lady would even think we're talking about her.
In that same Rolling Stone interview, Dr. Dre addressed the 1991 incident when he assaulted TV host Dee Barnes, as well as recent charges of physical abuse by his '90s girlfriend Michel'le.
I made some f---ing horrible mistakes in my life. I was young, f---ing stupid. I would say all the allegations aren't true – some of them are. Those are some of the things that I would like to take back. It was really f---ed up. But I paid for those mistakes, and there's no way in hell that I will ever make another mistake like that again.
Barnes responded with an essay published by Gawker in which she reveals that "Straight Outta Compton" director F. Gary Gray was the cameraman for an interview she conducted that led to her being attacked by Dr. Dre.
Even before "Straight Outta Compton" hit theaters, Sikivu Hutchinson — a visiting scholar at USC’s Center for Feminist Research — wrote in The Huffington Post: "As gangsta rap pioneers and beneficiaries of the corporatization of rap/hip hop in the 1990s, N.W.A. played a key role in yoking rape culture and rap misogyny." Her essay is entitled “Straight Outta Rape Culture."
When she joined John Horn on The Frame, he began with a quote from her piece.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
You wrote: "The brutalized bodies of black women will be lost in the predictable stampede of media accolades," and that movie critics will "fail to highlight how the group's multi-million dollar empire was built on black women's backs." You wrote that before the movie opened. Did your prediction turn out to be true?
I have not seen any deep and abiding appraisal of the movie that really takes into consideration the message that N.W.A. perpetuated vis a vis the normalization of sexual violence in African-American communities inflicted upon the bodies of black women and how that has really driven — in large part — the success of their empire.
You haven't seen the film, but I will tell you it is of no surprise that there is no real conversation in the film itself about misogyny and about what the lyrics are saying about women. Do you think a movie could have been made that addressed that issue within the context of what Hollywood was trying to do?
I think it could've been made by an independent African American female filmmaker ... I don't see that happening within the typical Hollywood system.
Does it matter at all that the director of this film is a black man, or is it really about gender as opposed to race?
I think that there is an intersection at play here. Certainly the emphasis on the redemption of black masculinity is highlighted within this film, and films like it, in which young black men rise up from poverty, rise up from deprivation and achieve the American Dream. That is more or less the neo-liberal narrative of this type of film.
The black woman
To be a woman who loves hip hop at times is to be in love with your abuser. Because the music was and is that. And yet the culture is ours.
— Ava DuVernay (@AVAETC)
To be a woman who loves hip hop at times is to be in love with your abuser. Because the music was and is that. And yet the culture is ours.
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) August 16, 2015
She's talking about the paradox of being a young black woman in a very masculinist, misogynist culture in which our voices and our bodies are constantly being marginalized and made invisible, and again are being utilized for a multi-million dollar — if not a multi-billion dollar — industry which is propelled by corporations and propelled, in large part, by white suburban consumption. And many of the voices that we saw, rallying around this mythicized notion of N.W.A. and "Straight Outta Compton," were white mainstream voices.
But at the same time, the movie has done record-breaking business and it's not just all white men who are seeing it. It's a cosmopolitan crowd and it's a lot of black women who are going to see this film. Does it bother you that black women are attending this movie in the numbers that they are?
Yes it does. And I think that it reflects the degree to which black women are steeped within the culture of misogynist dehumanization. In many regards, this is simply a reflection of how the lives and the subjectivity of black women are constantly again being commodified and objectified at the expense of the narrative of black male redemption. So there are a lot of complexities at play in black women's consumption of this music in general and this movie in particular.
Poet Claudia Rankine named a MacArthur 'genius grant' honoree
UPDATE: The 2016 class of MacArthur Foundation Fellowship honorees has been announced. Among them was poet Claudia Rankine. We were fortunate to have had her on The Frame last year and so today we re-visited that interview. What follows is the original post and transcript.
Poet Claudia Rankine’s book “Citizen: An American Lyric” is a provocative meditation on race in America.
Through a series of vignettes, Rankine tells the stories of everyday racism that people of color face on a daily basis. The poems are largely based on actual incidents of passive bigotry and prejudice that Rankine and her friends have personally experienced.
"I think the life of all people of color is one where those stories are lived through and warehoused in the mind and in the body. So I don't think I was consciously, over the years, stacking them up until I started stacking them up," said Rankine on The Frame. "I began by asking friends to just share with me a moment when they were trying to get through some ordinary day and racism stepped in. Often people would say I don't remember, and then I would get a phone call a few days later saying there was this and there was this."
Rankine stopped by The Frame in August 2015 when the play adaptation of “Citizen: An American Lyric” was coming to the stage. She talked about collecting the stories in her book, how the shooting of black people by police has come to the fore in society thanks to cellphones, and the significance of the hooded sweatshirt in a post-Trayvon Martin era.
Interview Highlights:
In addition to being a poet, you're also a journalist and a political commentator. Since your book pulls from real life, is poetry the best description of your work?
I do think poetry describes my work in the sense that, for me, poetry is the one place that feelings have total legitimacy. So whether I'm writing for newspapers or magazines or for myself, I'm always interested in affect — I'm interested in the emotional realm of whatever it is I'm looking at. I think poetry holds that. That's where feelings rock. (Laughs)
Some of the incidents in your book include somebody trying to use a cell phone in front of a house and being mistaken for an intruder. It's often being mistaken for somebody or confused for somebody. Somebody showing up for a therapy session and being mistaken for an intruder. These are incidents that happened to friends of yours on a regular basis?
Nothing in the book was made up. Not a single thing. Since we're talking about language I'm going to say it's not mistaken, I'm going to say projected on. So that black people walking around and the white imagination is in play and we walk into a projection of white fantasies of what black bodies are doing. And then have to bear the brunt of that.
There's a line in the play, "Because white men can't police their imagination, black men are dying."
That line was supposed to be the beginning of a piece that I thought would be a longer piece. Everything I wrote just came back to the same line, and so eventually I just said, this is it. It's as simple as that. Sometimes people will say to me, well, some of the police that are killing black men are black, but I still think those black men are working under a white structure, a white imagination that they, themselves, want to fit into.
You were writing this book at the time that Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. Toward the end of the play there's a crawl of names: Michael Brown, Eric Garner. But it would be easy for this production to update that crawl with names like Sandra Brown. In terms of the topicality and timeliness of the production, how does it strike you that you can constantly update and expand the deaths that you are reporting.
I think it speaks to the fact that the books is untimely, it speaks to a continuum that's been going on for hundreds of years. I actually think that cell phones are what has brought the information to the forefront of our gaze as a society. Up until now these things were happening and everyone was moving along passively with the belief that there must have been more to it. That it couldn't be that the police were just gunning down unarmed black men. There must be something more complicated going on. Then we started seeing the footage and hearing the dialogue and understanding, no, this is how it's working. It's no different from the 1800s or the 1900s or Jim Crow, it's just a continuum.
Your poetry and the play suggest conversations that should have happened, but didn't. At what point do you hope your book of poetry and to a greater extent the play engages audiences in conversation about how they should react to what they're witnessing and reading on stage?
That's a great question, because, for me, I think the book is about intimacy and it's about the kind of intimacy that shuts down because of the unsaid. And often people, when they approach these racist moments, they don't know what the next thing to say is, or one can't engage it because it feels like it will be too big, it will be too volatile, it will be a place where you can't come back from. I'm hoping that the book and the play allows people to recognize these moments as moments that we all own. That they're not moments of private shame, they're moments of an American history. We can enter them, discuss them and move forward. As long as we keep acting like they're not happening, they'll keep happening.
HEALTH knows the rock star lifestyle doesn't last forever
The lifespan for a rock band is similar to an athlete’s — it's a young person’s game where most don’t last more than a decade. Health (often stylized HEALTH) has been a band for 10 years, and bassist John Famiglietti is fully aware of the game.
"You know, the last half of the rock documentary is really depressing," says Famiglietti. "It's always about the fall."
To know which half their rock documentary they're in now, we have to start at the beginning. Health started in 2005 and quickly got attention in the underground Los Angeles punk scene for their loud and aggressive music.
The band started with two guitars, bass and drums. They were in L.A. when there was a fertile noise scene growing.
"We didn't really want to do 30-minute free-noise performances," says singer and guitarist Jake Duzsik, "but we saw people doing these things that were incredibly powerfully loud and physical — the way you'd think of the first time you saw punk rock in the '70s — and we wanted to apply them to our first record."
A year after the band formed, it started selling out shows at an influential punk rock venue in downtown L.A. called the Smell.
"I think us selling out the Smell was probably one of our bigger moments," says Duzsik, "and it's like 200 people, but it was like, Oh my god!"
If you’ve ever been to the venue, you’d know why it’s called "The Smell." The venue was known for its avante-garde rock scene and DIY aesthetic, and people started taking notice. Around the time Health was selling out shows at the Smell, the venue was gaining national attention from the L.A. Times and Pitchfork. A new music scene in L.A. was born and Health was in the middle of it.
Jack Duzsik says:
"We'd been working on our band tirelessly so we were ready for it, but that is what allowed us to grab on to the first rung of the ladder and start getting booked at international festivals, and that changed the band."
Health went on to get national coverage of their own — being profiled by Vice, Billboard and the New Yorker — and the band was handpicked by Nine Inch Nails to go on tour with them in 2008.
To extend this hypothetical rock doc further — at this point, they’re just getting started. Health releases its second album “Get Color” to critical praise.
While playing a show in New York, Rockstar Games — the company behind the hugely successful "Grand Theft Auto" video game series — asked them to write the music for another massive gaming title: "Max Payne 3".
The action game is about a New York cop-turned-vigilante. A year after its 2012 release, "Max Payne 3" sold over 4 million copies.
"Doing that score was incredibly legitimizing and validating," says Famiglietti. "It changes how you think about yourself."
Duzsik says the band took inspiration on how the game company took time to make its product. This work ethic inspired Health to take its time with finishing the third full-length album, "Death Magic," which was released six years after its sophomore release, "Get Color".
But in that six years time, the band took a softer and more poppy side — especially with the song "L.A. Looks."
The song almost never made the final cut. "I was talking to my girlfriend and I was like, I don't know," says Duzsik. "In retrospect, nobody has brought up anything negative about it. But she was like, So let me get this straight. You have a song that people who don't like your band normally would like and you don't want that? And I was like, That's a very good point."
Health may be at an all-time high, but with every rock documentary, they’re very aware that a downfall is inevitable. So it's only logical to ask if their worried about what to do next:
"Even bands that are 15 to 20 times bigger than we are, you have to carefully manage and source your revenue to make it a life-long financial support structure," Duzsik says. "You're kind of freaking me out. I don't want to have to think about it too much right now. We just had a record come out, but if I project to me being 55 years old, am I still in a band? I don't think so, but I'd like to think that we would still be involved with making music."
Health will perform at FYF Fest this Sunday, Aug. 22.