“We aren’t pro-violence, our music reflects the reality we live in,” the actor portraying O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson says in one scene to a journalist in the recently released film Straight Outta Compton. He continues, “I thought we were here to talk about Rodney King...you can’t treat people like that and not expect them to rise up.”
Racist police terror, from the everyday harassment of the Black youth living in South Central Los Angeles to the 1992 rebellions against the savage police beating of Rodney King, frame the rap group NWA utilized to make their music. Straight Outta Compton follows the rise of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E. It is a piece of capitalist garbage that dodges every opportunity to confront racism, even though racism pervades almost every scene of the film. Which makes sense, because the present-day multi-millionaire capitalists Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy’s widow were all producers of this movie, and owe their vast fortunes to being part of the very dictatorship of capitalism their music pretends to rebel against.
Fightback Takes Back Seat
 NWA’s biggest hit and anthem of the Rodney King anti-racist rebellion, “F*** tha Police,” and the fight against racism that followed are still relevant today. It is Black youth that have been rebelling and taking the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, New York and Los Angeles. Instead of focusing on racism and the politics of living under every day police terror that fired NWA, however, the film focuses instead their personal struggles to become business owners. The racism that the film shows influencing them, and the heroism of the Black youth who fought back, take a back seat to the business aspirations of the young trio. Eazy-E sheds tears of disgust when the police who beat King are all acquitted from the living room of his mansion, while Dre rides through South Central in the middle of the rebellion in his new Mercedes.     
NWA’s gangsta rap has its roots in the rise of gang and drug activity in South Central LA during the 70s and 80s. Ice Cube had it right when he described the gritty realities their music responds to. Art, in the form of paintings, literature or rap, is communication, and the artists’ starting points are the social and cultural environments they live in and the language they use to describe them. In the late 1980s, the art that NWA pioneered emerged from LA gang culture. LA gang culture began as a response to the crisis in political leadership that followed the anti-racist rebellions and strike waves of the 1960s and 70s. Where was the political leadership of the next generation of Black youth suppose to come from?
The vacuum in political leadership would spawn the rise of gangs, especially the the Crips and the Bloods, moniker adopted by Black soldiers serving in Vietnam. These were originally street clubs of Black youth that lived under mass unemployment, racial segregation and poverty after many of the old LA Automotive industry shut down and left the city (GM, Ford, Chrysler, Firestone and Goodyear) leaving the city with empty fields and broken down businesses, if there were any. The two would become the biggest gangs to run the streets of LA and later branch out across the country.
Ten years after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, workers lives were worse off, especially when the gang rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods hit a new high when crack cocaine hit LA in ‘81, spawned by the CIA, as a part of the Iran-Contra Affair. The best this movie did to address the capitalist sources of drugs and weapons is one passing comment by Ice Cube’s character. In a television interview, Cube wonders out loud how, if AK-47s are made in Russia, cocaine from Colombia, and nobody he knows of in the community has a passport, then who was “really” bringing them in. The movie abruptly cut to the next scene.
Rampant Sexism
With a few scenes portraying the capitalist media’s racist hostility to rap music, and period news clips attacking “gangsta rap” and denigrating the form as something less than “art,” the movie doesn’t explore what NWA’s members describe as “reality rap.” Capitalism creates the racist reality that fuels their art, ignored by the movie, as well as the rampant sexism the main characters were infected by, perpetrated, and symbolized. Eazy-E was well known for having multiple relationships and unprotected sex, which led to his death from HIV. His dying message was “If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.” There is no mention of the increasing numbers of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, mass incarceration and substance abuse that continues to plague the Black community. Eazy’s past as a drug dealer is glamorized, while saying nothing about the rise of homeless workers, rise of substance abuse and the closure of mental institutions that happened during the Reagan era.
Another important part of “reality” left out in the movie is Dr. Dre’s history of violence towards women. His ex-girlfriend (and the mother of his children), Michel’le  and the journalist, Dee Barnes, have publicly spoken out about Dre’s history of assaulting women. While occurring during the events of the film, it was never mentioned.  The real-life Dr. Dre even went as far as putting out an apologetic statement: “I apologize to the women I’ve hurt...I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all our lives.”  This was a statement that was backed up by Apple, who paid Dre $3.2 billion for the Beats headphones and streaming-music companies he co-founded, and currently employs him.  While his albums and films receive maximum publicity, his long history of sexist violence against women are swept under the rug, and his sexist portrayals of women in his “reality” music are ignored, as long as his products rake in profits.
NWA’s fame was created by major ruling-class institutions: record labels, distribution networks, MTV, radio stations and more. While the film isn’t shy about showing the record labels’ exploitation of NWA by manipulating the members into bad contracts and the millions made marketing their image for profit, NWA wasn’t spreading revolutionary ideas.  They were spewing false consciousness about “making it” — becoming bosses and running their own empires.
In the end, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube become mirror capitalist reflections in the image of the very system that still condemns South Central to mass unemployment, poverty, and drugs. Women play no role in the film, except as sex objects for the main characters. We can’t turn a blind eye when the media impacts our culture and feeds only lies to our working class brothers and sisters! The dehumanization and sexist portrayal of women in this film reveals their justification for sexist violence against them, which is conveniently brushed over or ignored entirely. Straight Outta Compton is nothing but well-marketed garbage straight out of capitalism. It is a betrayal of the masses of workers and youth they dare to claim to still represent.  
PLP’s answer is fight back to abolish racism, sexism, nationalism, and our solution is a communist revolution. Along the way we will create our own culture, culture that reflects, is written by, and is about the heroes of rebellions like in LA in 1992 or in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore today. Our anthems will be composed by and for the masses of refugees stuffing into leaky boats and braving barbed wire to reach the safety of other lands. The communist culture we create celebrates our class, rebellion and communist revolution, and celebrates collectivity in its creation and participation. Most importantly, communist culture has no tolerance for pretenders and class enemies like Dr. Dre or Ice Cube.