Straight Outta Compton returns Dre to
THE FIRST two weeks of this month may as well be called “The Swan Song Tour of Dr. Dre”. His new movie, Straight Outta Compton, tells the story of how N.W.A (an abbreviation of Niggaz Wit Attitude) came to be, well, N.W.A. His album, Compton: A Soundtrack, which was inspired by the movie, came out on August 7.
In terms of publicity strategy, Straight Outta Compton has been given the deluxe big-budget whiz-flash-bang treatment.
Universal began drumming up anticipation by pushing the trailer during the NBA (National Basketball Association) play-offs. It then ratcheted up promotion so much that if you weren’t paying attention, it would have been easy to assume the movie opened in theatres last week, given the viral success of the Straight Outta meme, which bore Dre’s Beats logo. Talk about a slick bit of cross-promotional marketing.
Dre, 50, has said Compton is his “grand finale” and that may be a calculated decision.
In the social media age, it will only be more difficult for Dre to outrun the vio- lent misdeeds of his past, resurfaced by Gawker in a story headlined: “Remember When Dr. Dre Bashed a Female Journalist’s Face Against A Wall?” In it, writer Rich Juzwiak references a 1991 LA Times article in which Dee Barnes, the host of a popular Fox hip-hop show called Pump It Up, described the attack.
“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. 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.”
Dre finally addressed the allegations in an interview with Rolling Stone last Wednesday, perhaps sensing the culture was far less willing to look past the violent transgressions of abusers these days, especially when they’re black and male (see: Chris Brown, Ray Rice, Floyd Mayweather).
“I made some f***ing horrible mistakes in my life,” Dre said. “I was young, f***ing stupid. I would say all the allegations aren’t true, but some of them are. Those are some of the things 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.”
As the promotion for Straight Outta Compton has escalated, so too has the low drone of pieces shaming Dre for his previous violence against women.
It wasn’t just one incident with Barnes; his former girlfriend Michelle and the mother of his son, Marcel Young, claimed in a March interview with Power 105’s Breakfast Club that Dre gave her five black eyes and a cracked rib.
When an icon’s best days are behind him but his ugly acts are only now coming to the fore – as is the case with Hulk Hogan or Bill Cosby – the answer is to at least add an asterisk to his achievements when the option of retroactively removing him from public consciousness isn’t possible.
Dr. Dre may be many things, but he’s no dummy, and there’s good reason to believe he’s weighed whether or not he could be targeted for such a scrubbing.
Last week, he announced he was donating the royalties from the Compton album to finance a youth performing arts centre in Compton.
It would hardly come as a surprise to learn that, having surveyed the kleig lights trained on modern celebrity, Dre surmised they simply burnt too bright in comparison to the era when he enjoyed protection from scrutiny courtesy of gangsta rap’s scrappy outsider status.
Things were easier in the early 1990s, when public protests against rap and hip hop culture could be dismissed as the dis- satisfaction of sanctimonious, out-oftouch older people unwilling or unable to separate art criticism from respectability politicking.
In a strange and ironic turn, Ice Cube is now relying on said respectability politics to justify his own misogynistic ideas, which apparently haven’t evolved much.
“If you’re a bitch, you’re probably not going to like us,” Cube told Rolling Stone. “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 defence of these despicable females. Just like I shouldn’t be jumping to the defence of no punks or no cowards or no slimy son of a bitch, that’s men. I never understood why an upstanding lady would even think we’re talking about her.”
Looking back, Dre and N.W.A probably should have been paying the smug set for their part in cementing West Coast rap’s counter-culture cachet. In today’s world, advancing the laughable argument that rap is destroying the black community is largely the purview of right-wing commentators.
No one is collecting Dre’s Beats headphones just for the sake of streamrolling them in the street; for starters, it would be far too expensive a proposition when the