DISGRACELAND - N.W.A Pt. 2: Beatdowns, Band Beef, Death Row and LA on Fire

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

Part two of the N.W.A story finds the group dead center in America’s crosshairs, due in part to their own violent behavior, and at a crossroads creatively. Death Row’s Suge Knight, Public Enemy’s Chuck D., and a young hustler from the east coast all ride shotgun to Dre, E, Cube, Yella and Ren as the group finds itself having predicted yet another one of America’s darkest moments. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. This episode was originally published on September 26, 2019.   To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Visit ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com/merch⁠ to see the latest Disgraceland merch! Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan GroupSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. Story of NWA, the effect they had on hip-hop, popular culture, the mirror they held up to the city they came from, and their interpersonal dynamic is so complex that two episodes were needed to properly tell this story. If you're just getting hip to this now,

I suggest you hit pause and go back to Disgraceland, episode 37, part one of the NWA story, where we discuss the origins of NWA. and the gang reality and LAPD presence within their home city of Compton. In this episode, we get around to the darker, unfortunate behavior of some of the group's members, as well as the actions and attitudes that drove the band apart, a move for some of them that led to the creation of even more great music. That music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music.

That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Mellow Street Tango BK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to informer by snow. And why would I play you that specific slice of north of the border cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on April 29, 1992. And that was the day a Simby Valley jury returned a verdict of not guilty to four white police officers accused of assaulting a black motorist. In effect, bringing to life an explosion of violence that NWA had been predicting for years. On this episode, Street Tango,

Canadian cheese, the LA riots, and NWA. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgrace land. IceCute wanted to know where the fuck his contract was and where his money was.

NWA was selling a lot of records and it put Easy's label Ruthless records on the map. And now Ruthless's other acts were starting to sell records. And for Easy and Jerry Heller, NWA's manager and co-eastern, founder of ESEE's record label, the hard work seemed to be paying off. New cars, houses, and offices

for Ruthless. Easy had a contract with Jerry and with priority records who distributed, promoted, and partially funded the label. But where were the contracts for Cube and the rest of the group? Something wasn't right. Cube confronted Easy, who told him to fuck off and to go deal with Jerry. Jerry stalled Cube until he could stall no more and eventually tried getting Cube to sign a draconian contract, locking him under control of ruthless in perpetuity for a relatively speaking at the time measly sum of $75,000. To add insult to injury, Jerry insisted Cube signed the contract without even having a lawyer look at the deal.

Cube knew better and bounced. Fuck NWA and motherfucker Jerry Heller as well. As soon as he split from NWA, Ice Cube was East Coast bound. The new Def Jam Recordings offices in Manhattan were a step up in the label's original office and the NYU dorm room of its co-founder, Rick Rubin. But Cube wasn't impressed. In fact, he was pissed. The meeting was a bust.

The dude he'd come to meet was late. Cube waited just long enough to not be humiliated and split. On his way out, he bumped into Chuck D, public enemy's frontman, who Cube had immense respect for. P.E. had invited NWA to co-headline to bring the noise tour just a a few months before when Cube was a member. Chuck invited Cube to the studio that night to jump on a track P.E. was recording with Big Daddy Kane for the new album Fear of a Black Planet.

And Cube jumped at the offer. The session produced the incendiary public enemy track, Byrne, Hollywood Burn. And Cube's verse was on fire. Ice Cube was done being played by Jerry Heller, NWA, EZE, the LAPD, or anyone else who got in his way. The members of NWA were sure

Ice Cube would bomb as a solo artist without them, but Ice Cube had a different type of bomb in mind. Cube moved quick to recruit public enemies' DJ producer Hank Shockley and his bomb squad to produce his solo debut. And Cube was stoked, in his mind, Dre was a genius, but when it came to sampling, the bomb squad were next level. And they threw crates of albums at Cube and told them to get the fuck out of Manhattan and head to their studio in Hempstead to quote-unquote,

go find your album. And that's exactly what Cube did. He hunkered down and dug through those crates. It was prime funk, the hard stuff, slave, the Doddfather, James Brown, the Queen, Betty Davis, the Barcais, the last poet, Sly and the Family Stone, Cool and the gang, Confunction, and even Richard Pryor. But now, Ice Cube was down with PE, and the result was way beyond what EZE or Dr. Dre or Jerry Heller could have imagined. The record Cube emerged with to debut his solo career was a banger. The title, America's Most Wanted.

America spelled without a C and with 3Ks, of course. And America went crazy for the record. The album debuted at number 19 on the Billboard 200 chart. It went gold in just two weeks. It went platinum just two months later. And unlike straight out of Compton, critics by and large raved about the record. The Washington Post wrote, Ice Cube has now proven that he was NWA's crucial element. Not everyone thought so, however.

Dr. Dre was chief among those who thought Ice Cube's solo debut was not all that. In that same year in 1990, NWA released their first music without Ice Cube, an EP entitled 100 Miles and Running, complete with a diss aimed a cube. NWA took the feud off of wax and into the press when they dissed Cube in an interview with Dee Barnes, host of Fox televisions Pump It Up. A week later, Barnes was on the set of the film Boys in the Hood, the directorial debut of John Singleton, a former Arsenio Hall intern that Ice Cube met when NWA performed on the show.

When Singleton got his money together to make his movie, he bought the rights to the song title Boys in the Hood off of EasyE, paying him $50,000 to appropriate Easy's title for his film, a movie about the reality of growing up in South Central Los Angeles. Singleton took it one step further and cast Ice Cube in the role of Doe Boy. The director wanted all of NWA in the film, but Cube was the only one who recognized the power of the script in the film's potential.

The film is a staggering work that depicts the reality of South Central's gang culture as powerfully as anything on NWA's Straight Outta Compton and went on to garner two Academy Award nominations for Singleton and launched the careers of Cuba Gooding Jr. and Angela Bassett. Also cast in the film was Yo-Yo, Ice Cube's protege, a young female rapper who Cube was so impressed with, he named her the head of his record label. Dee Barnes was on the set to interview Yo-Yo, and while the cameras are running, Cube jumped into the frame and playfully ribbed NWA, firing back at their diss of him a week earlier.

To Cube, it was all in good fun. But when Dre saw the disc on TV a few days later, he lost his shit. He caught up with Barnes by chance at a record release party in Hollywood. Barnes was leaning up against the club's wall talking to Yo MTV Rapp's co-host Ed Lover, and Drey was drunk. He stepped to Barnes, who was scared, unsure of what was happening. The look in Drey's eyes, wild menace. Dre confronted her, inches from her face, big, intimidating,

and demanding to know why in the fuck she aired Cube's diss of NWA. When the club promoter saw what was going on and tried to intervene, Dre's bodyguard cracked him in the face with a sharp, closed, Fist. Barnes pleaded her case. I had nothing to do with how the segment was edited or what got aired, Cube was just playing. According to Barnes, Dre wasn't having it. He grabbed her by the front of the shirt with one hand. With the other, he grabbed her by the hair and ear and began slamming her face against the club's brick wall. Then he threw her to the ground, kick her in the ribs, and started stomping on her hands and fingers. Barnes on the floor could see the club's second

floor stairway a few feet away and knew that that was where this beating was going to end. with Dre propelling her beaten body down the stairs. And she managed to get to her feet and get the hell out of there and into the club's bathroom. When the dust settled and the news of the beating started to circulate, Dre told the hip-hop magazine the source that Barnes agreed not to press charges so long as Dre would produce a record of hers, and that he had told her to fuck off

and that that was what prompted her bringing him to court for the assault. The other members of NWA shook off the bad press that followed the incident. M.C. Wren said that Barnes, quote-unquote, deserved it. Easy said, quote, bitch had it coming. He grabbed the bitch by the little hair she had threw the bitch to the bathroom door, pow, he just started stomping on the bitch. And then Easy started giggling. The comments by the group and the action by Dre were as bad or worse than any of the misogynist lyrics on their albums. Dre made a bad situation even worse by telling Rolling Stone, quote, people talk all this shit, but you know, somebody fucks with me, I'm going to fuck with them. I just did it,

you know? thing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain't no big thing. I just threw her through a door. Dre pleaded no contest to De Barnes charges of battery and was fined $2,500 and given 240 hours of community service. Barnes brought a civil suit against Dre and settled out of court for an undisclosed six-figure amount. Dr. Dre has since apologized for this incident and others regarding his history of physical abuse towards women saying in part, I've done a lot of stupid shit in my life. A lot of things I wish I could go and take back. I watch my mother get abused, you know?

There's absolutely no excuse for it. Any man that puts his hands on a female is a fucking idiot. He's out of his fucking mind, and I was out of my fucking mind. At the time, I fucked up, I paid for it. I'm sorry for it. And what do I do to get rid of this dark cloud? I don't know what else to do. I'm learning.

I'm trying to become a better person, a better man. In the end, I've hurt people that I care about. And for that, I'm really sorry. When he made those statements, it was 2017. And Dr. Dre's violent past was safely a few decades in the rear view. But back in the early 1990s, where we left off, violence was just about to open the door to his insanely successful future as a solo artist. Before he even had a chance to respond to their questions,

three of them grabbed them by the arm, by the neck, by the wispy poof of partially bleached hair and started dragging him. Another pulled open the doors to the balcony, and the blasted California sunshine quickly overcame the hotel suites air conditioning. Before Vanilla Ice knew it, he'd been yanked out of the balcony, he was being lifted up. No, no, no, fuck this. I told you, I'll sign, I'll pay, I'll do whatever you want. No, please don't, don't! His frantic pleading went unanswered. The four men silently went about their business, hoisting him up over the balcony's guardrail,

two men apiece, double-teaming a leg and an ankle, and hanging Vanilla Ice over the edge. of the balcony, multiple stories above the sidewalk, above certain death unless the white boy with the number one record on the billboard charts, gave the South Central gangbangers what they wanted, a cut of his royalties. He swung there delicately. No more screaming, no more pleading, just fear. Shock. Silence as he stared down at death. The wind cut more clearly up here, he thought. He could hear it. It was the only thing he could hear. The sounds of the men, his tormentors, were momentarily blocked out, just the wind blowing delicately.

Then they started shaking him, and the reality of it hit him all over again. The faint taste of iron in his mouth from the busted capillaries in his lungs, a result of them working overtime, maxed out by the fear and adrenaline pumping through him. He was being hung out of a balcony of his swank Beverly Hills Hotel.

What the fuck? All right, I told you guys, I'll sign it, I'll sign. Don't draw me, don't fucking do it. I'll sign, I'll sign. Something must have sounded convincing in his voice because the four men pulled them back up onto the balcony, but they weren't through with him. They dragged him back into the hotel suite,

shut the sliding balcony doors behind him, blocking out the California sunshine. The lights had dimmed. The TV was off. There was a man, a big man, bigger than the two men who braced each of his arms, and bigger than the two other men who now stood in front of each of the suite's exits.

And somehow, this big man, clad entirely in blood red, sitting peacefully at the sweet small circular table, who said, nothing just shifted his cigar back and forth between his lips, from one side of his mouth to the other. Somehow, this very large, very quiet man was more intimidating than even the automatic weapons that the two men in the doorways now openly brandished. The men holding vanilla ice by the arms shoved him down into the chair opposite the big man. The big man said nothing, just slid the

papers across the table. Then he picked up the pen and slammed it down on top of the papers. His muscles and his face tightened. The corner of his right eyes squinted slightly. His broad chest began to slowly inflate. Everyone in the room could feel his anger. It was as real as the guns, those dudes were holding a few feet away. Vanilla Ice had never been more scared in his life, and that's saying something,

considering that seconds before this, he was being hung out over a hotel balcony. And the big man spoke, Your signature. Vanilla Ice snatched up the pen and signed his Christian name Robert Matthew Van Winkle to the paper, in effect signing over $4 million in royalties from his biggest hit, Ice Ice Baby, to the big man sitting across from him.

And with that, the big man had what he'd come for, a multimillion dollar score, some of which he'd kick back to the artist he'd rep, Chocolate Johnson, who claimed he'd help Vanilla Ice write the song, but was uncredited and uncompensated. Whatever the reason the big man now had what he coveted, much needed capital for his new record label, Death Row Records.

The label will be a new kind of label, a big label, an unconventional kind of label, a label that exclusively rep the reality on the streets that its artist came up on and all the violence that came with it. Unconventional, big, violent, just like its owner, just like Shug Night. Shug, now with Vanilla Ice's contract in his hands split, he had other business to attend to over in Hollywood. As far as talent went, Chocolate Johnson was cool and all, but he represented the past.

Shug's future lay in the young, talented hands of Dr. Dre, who a few weeks back had asked Shug, a friend of a friend from the neighborhood who had a reputation for getting things done to help him out. Similar to LAPD Chief Darrell Gates, Shug Knight deployed in any means-necessary methodology to his business dealings, and at the moment, that's exactly what Dr. Dre needed.

After Kube's departure from NWA and Ruthless Records, it became clear to Dre the easy and, and his manager Jerry Heller were screwing him financially as well. Dre wanted out of his contract, but Easy and Jerry weren't about to let their biggest talent walk out of the door. After all, he'd signed the contract. Shug was eager to help Dre out, and the plan was for the two of them to launch and co-own

along with a couple other partners' death row records. But none of that could happen until Dre was released from his contract with Ruthless. Easy and Jerry held firm. They wouldn't even sit down at the negotiating table with Dre. So Shug Knight, Blood Street Gang affiliate. Former defensive end for the Los Angeles Rams turned music industry mogul on the make went to work. He knew he needed to be cagey. Easy E.E.E.E.E. wasn't Vanilla Ice. Easy was OG. A hip-hop star, sure, but gangster to his core.

And Shug Knight knew. Easy E didn't give a... Easy got the call around Sundown. Dre wanted to meet up that night to work shit out once and for all. Easy agreed to meet Dre over at Galaxy, a studio Dre was working. out of in Hollywood. And Easy hit the elevator for the second floor. When the doors opened to the studio lobby, there was no Dr. Dre, just the former L.A. ran with Louisville Slugger in four of his thugs, brandishing lead pipes. Easy played it cool. Where's Dre at? Shug said nothing, just pulled a contract from his back pocket, unfolded it, and showed easy where to sign. Easy, still cool. And what the fuck is that? Shug finally spoke. It's a contract releasing

Dray from Ruthless and you're going to sign it. It was easy's turn not to speak. He held the silence and just stared at Shug and then let out a simple, huh? He was stalling. He knew he was outnumbered, but he didn't yet know what he was going to do. He wondered if he could yank the gait in his waistband out and get a shot off quick enough before Shug and his goon swarmed.

And Shug didn't take easy silence lightly. Time for Plan B. You see that white van parked out on the street on your way in here? We got Jerry Heller tied up in the back of that van with the car. gun to his head. And just in case you ain't the sentimental type, we got two bad motherfuckers perched outside your mama's house over on Muriel. That sealed it for easy. Jerry he could live without, maybe, but his mom, definitely not. He signed the papers. Shug split. Critics may have claimed that gangster rap was simply exploitative violent fantasy, but the reality EasyE spit out on record. The same

reality that he and Jerry Heller profited from was now coming back on them and completely fucking up their program. Once Shug freed Dre from Ruthless, he set about to get his hands on Dre's master recordings, showing up at Easy's house and demanding them. And soon after, Jerry found his home burglarized, tossed, and vandalized. Across the front of his expansive Calabasas' man someone had written in black marker, payback some motherfucker, Jerry. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Howard Stern did not shock easily. But Easy E was given at the old. Compton try. Stern, the controversial and highly rated syndicated New York radio host, was more amused with EasyE than he was shocked. The lifestyle easy lead fascinated Stern. You can hear it in his

voice if you listen to the recording. How many children you got, Eric? Five. You got five kids? Where's your wife? I'm not married? You're not married? The hell's going on here? Howard's sidekick, Robin Quivers, chimed in and asked, the same woman or different women? Different women? Easy replies. different women. Howard now seems shocked. He then asks, you wear condoms when you have sex? E, nah. Robin asks, you heard about AIDS? Easy. Yeah, but the people I mess with don't Robin butts in. How do you know? Easy tells her, because I would have had it myself,

they would have had it. Howard. Oh, man. Jerry Haller, NWA's manager and co-founder of EasyE's record label, Ruthless Records, was shaking his head as he listened back to the recording of the Stern show from earlier that week. He banged the stop button on the cassette player and then shot a look at Eric, as he called, across Easy's $8,600 Italian desk. Jerry was pissed.

Eric was nearly blowing it with his excess. And just when they were starting to make real money, not just walking around money either. Bank, $10 million a month. Routless records, through the popularity of NWA, had blown up. It was the hottest hip-hop label on the West Coast and the swank new offices Jerry and Easy

were now sitting and proved it. Jerry had his office. decked out and understated pastels with all the finest and trendiest accoutrement. An elegant type of class, it said, I've been in this business since Michael Jackson had his first nose and can afford to roll low-key, and go fuck yourself. Easy's office said the opposite. I've been in this business for a hot minute.

I'm black, I'm proud, and I got more talent and money than the white man in the office next to mine, and the whole goddamn world needs to know it. Now come on in, make yourself comfortable, and let's listen to some baby making music. And as such, his office was a Nouveau-Riche overstatement, designed by celebrity interior designer Frank Austin, plush black couch,

massive projection television, Lusite walls and state-of-the-art stereo system that blasted the latest Ruthless Records artist singles at maximum volume all day and night. Sometimes for the party he was throwing, sometimes to set the mood and to entertain one of his many female friends. He entertained so much, in fact,

that Jerry had to pay extra for increased cleaning services to remove the bodily fluids that were deposited about the office on a daily basis. But not today. Easy was pissed. He told Jerry he was going to kill the dude. Kill Shug Knight. He told Jerry Shug was too big a problem, too big a hassle, and that eventually Shug would kill the two of them.

As frightened of Shug as Jerry was, he was even more afraid of derailing the gravy train they had rolling through Ruthless every month. Shug might have been an intimidating pain in the ass, but it wasn't worth blowing 10 mil a month. month for. He talked easy out of murdering him and instead installed a $75,000 security system, and the two of them set about stashing a small arsenal of weapons in and around the office in their homes and then began taking different routes to and from work. And this business of the street was serious business. In business, for EasyE was not good. In business, for EasyE was not good.

In 1992, he didn't know it at the time, but he would soon learn what Cube and Dre learned before him, that his manager, Jerry Heller, was screwing him financially. He also didn't know that all the women he was messing with would put him in an early grave. Within three years' time, EZE would be dead from complications of the AIDS virus. But in 1992, Ice Cube was riding high. His first two records were both critical and commercial successes, and his acting career was just starting to get real. Dr. Dre was just getting started with a new protege named Snoop and about to put Death Row on the map

the same way he did with ruthless, but with less stomp, more groove, and of course, the ever-present reality of its surroundings. M.C. Wren joined the Nation of Islam and worked on his solo debut, and DJ Yella kept working on his production career. A lot had changed since their beginnings back on the streets of Compton, but the one thing that remained the same was the essence of the music they were all making. the music never departed from the reality around them. No matter how much success changed them, they were products of South Central, of Compton,

and the product they made and sold was the violent, tough street reality they were raised in, one in the same. Their careers may have changed, but the world certainly hadn't changed. The reality of the street followed them everywhere. It was ubiquitous, from the ever-present violence,

Cube spat in his lyrics on both coasts, to the menacing and unconventional business tactics of Shug Knight, to Dre's abusive and disgusting conflict resolution with Dee Barnes, and Easy and rends ridiculously insensitive remarks on the incident, and finally to Easy's deadly sickness. It was all a product of where they'd come from, and every single incident, an anecdote, had in one way or another been represented in their music previously. And in 1992, on the solo records Ice Cube and Dr. Dre were about to release, they both, with different styles, would continue to bring that self-central reality to

America. Dr. Dre's the Chronic and Ice Cubes the Predator both did for 1992 what NWA straight out of Compton did for 1988, held up a mirror to the world they lived in. Both records are incredible in different ways. The chronic smooth and slick, a party record, a new style, G-funk, one, two, three, and to the four. The Predator is as hard and mean as anything IceCube or NWA or any rap artist had released before. It stomps itself. to white America's pristine living room with its high pile shag and plastic covered furniture and lays waste to any pretense of racial equality in society. Again, hardcore reality rap. But unlike Ice Cube's rap's on Straight Outta Compton, his lyrics on The Predator,

released in November of 1992, they're less predictive and more, I Told You So. April 29th wasn't necessarily a good day for Ice Cube, but it was an important day, as it was for most residents of Compton and South Central Los Angeles. Reckoning time. Citizens glued themselves to their televisions in their homes, at their work, on barstools, in restaurants. The verdict was coming in any minute. The jury has reached a verdict on all counts except one. We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Warren's M. Powell, not guilty.

You the jury, find the defendant, Timothy E.1. You do the jury, not find the defendant, Theodore J. The jury, not guilty, not defendants, ACC, Coney, not guilty. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that these are verdicts. So say you once and say you all.

Yes. Not guilty. Unbelievable. The four cops accused of beating and using excessive force against Rodney King were acquitted on all but one charge brought against them,

despite the fact that these same cops were plainly seen beating on and using excessive force against Rodney King on televisions all over the world through the video recording George Holiday made and yet still no justice. People took to the streets almost immediately. Local news reporters descended. The sound of the sirens came from every direction.

Helicopters, news helicopters, not ghetto birds, chopping up smog above downtown L.A. and Crenshaw. People marching everywhere, hooting, hollering, chance of fuck the police. The boiling point was nearly reached. April 29th, springtime, what hot as a motherfucker. By the time the afternoon rolled around, an officer was attacked at Florence and Normandy in South Central.

Then another officer was struck down a block away at 71st, and Raymond. The police were outnumbered in the street. From Parker Center Police headquarters in downtown L.A., where a small army of uniformed officers were doing all they could to hold off an angry mob outside of the department. Chief Darrell Gates sent the message out to his officers in the street. But once LAPD cleared out of South Central, shit went off. Bricks bounced off of the police cruisers bailing out of the neighborhood.

The streets took on a weird, menacing block party type of vibe. And there was an anger, but there was release. It was almost celebratory. Residents had chased away Gates' boogeymen, the LAPD, whose harassment cell central residents had lived under their whole lives. But quickly, the mood darkened further. The violence was too real. White motorists commuting home from work through South Central

found themselves dodging bricks and baseball bats at intersections forced to blast through stop signs and red lights to safety and some weren't so lucky. Ian McCurry, an army vet who'd just been saved from homelessness by a friend who lived in Watts, was gunned down trying to stop looters from setting fire to a liquor store. Howard Epstein in L.A. from Northern California on business was shot in a Hyde Park drive-by.

And when a crowd surrounded his car and announced the dead driver was white, the mob cheered. The coming six days would see over 50 deaths, 25 black, 16 Latino, eight white, Asian, Indian, covering a wide array of hellish ends. Beatings, stabbings, fires, car crashes, hit and runs, and most of all, shootings, including 10 shootings by the police or National Guard. But today on April 29th, with the local live action news chopper broadcasts, casting from right overhead. The horror peaked in technicolor with an attack on one man.

A trucker, a driver for transit allied concrete. White dude with long heavy metal hair was pulled from his trailer at the corner of Florence and Normandy and thrown into the street. His name, Reginald Denny. Above Denny, a news helicopter was filming everything and broadcasting it live over Los Angeles televisions. Four black men swarmed Denny. One stepped on his neck.

Another kicked him in the stomach. stomach, a third held a five-pound oxygenator stolen from another truck nearby and slammed it down onto Denny's head. Denny staggered about on all fours as he was pulling himself up. Another man came up behind him and from two feet away slammed a brick down hard onto Denny's head. And Denny collapsed inches from the cab of his truck. The dude who threw the brick laughed at what he'd done, pointed at Denny and did a little victory dance and then posed above his bloody mangled head and flashed gang signs at the cameras in the helicopter above. After that, they lifted Denny's shirt,

pulled down his pants, and spray-painted his genitals black. And it didn't end there. Residents threw bottles at him, rifled through his pockets, kicked him in his head, hit him with a claw hammer. One dude pulled up on a motorcycle with a shotgun and attempted to blast Denny's fuel tank. He missed, and the shit shot drove off.

Remarkably, Reginald Denny was able to drag himself into his truck and drive away. His skull was fractured in 91 places. It was a brutal attack. Vicious and totally avoidable, but again, just like the Rodney King beating, the senseless violence of the L.A. riots in 1992 was not entirely unpreicted.

Straight out of Compton warned us. The music NWA created and threw into the face of mainstream America was a direct reflection of the reality the group was forced to live in and endure. Just as the violence South Central residents resorted, to and inflicted upon anybody who got in their way and wasn't the same color as them was a direct reflection of the reality they were forced to live in and endure under the discriminatory brutality of the LAPD. And right now, over on Los Fillas, on the part of the street that ran west towards

central L.A., just under Griffith Park, the LAPD were nowhere to be found, while a beat-up Honda Accord speeded toward the riots had a 60-mile-per-hour clip. Its driver had just been in the studio over an Atwater Village producing a record when the news of the riots came across the television. He grabbed his MC, ducked into his shipbox, and beelined it to get a first-hand glimpse of the chaos. He, along with his MC and the passenger seat, were giddy with excitement.

Fuck the police, echoing in their heads. Beats from their latest session blasting back at them through the teeny stock stereo speakers, this one trading on a zap sample from their self-titled 1980 debut. Damn, shit sounded dope. The MC in the passenger seat could see the story. smoke rising up from South Central. And as they got closer, he could start to smell it.

Punch it, motherfucker, punch it. Zaps, proto-G-funk, blasted back at them. The MC was so excited he was going to piss himself. He said, fuck it, and grabbed his 9mm from his waistband and started blasting shots out the window and into the sky as they zipped down Los Felas at breakneck speed. Now, the two of them could taste the adrenaline. By the time they made it to Crenshaw and down the 28th,

they'd hit gridlock. There were looters everywhere, broken storefront wind. windows, cars on fire, residents rolling down the street with shopping carts filled with stolen goods, cases of beer, bottles of wine and booze, diapers, clothes, food, whatever they could get their hands on. And the driver and the MC were halted in traffic, not going anywhere. Looters began to shout out the MC in the passenger seat as they moved by, shaking his hand through the passenger side window, bumping fists, exchanging words of encouragement, black power, revolution, words the MC was well-versed in, words he grew up with in his home,

whispered in his ear from his mama from as far back as he could remember. The excitement was almost too much for him. For the driver, his producer too, and they could see through the windshield about a half block away. Tempo Records, the store, it was on fire. But that wasn't stopping residents from rushing in and grabbing arms full of CDs and VHS tapes. Again, fuck this.

The MC and the driver bailed on the car, left it sitting on Crenshaw and B-lined straight for the record store. People did double takes as the MC passed by, and once inside tempo, they both started filling their arms as quickly as they could. And the smoke was intense, too intense. The MC bailed and made it out past the sidewalk and back to where they left the Hyundai, which, thankfully, nobody had yet set on fire. But by now, he had a small entourage of hip-hop fans

who recognized him in and outside of the looted record store that were gathered around him. Smoke from more cars and trucks that were set ablaze filled the air jockeying for position with the hovering news helicopters. The sound of sirens and alarms, residents yelling, screaming, jubilee and anger all at once. The squeaking grind of shopping carts on the concrete was ubiquitous. Shattered glass in the ever-present chant of fuck the police. All of it surrounding the MC and East Coast export. He took in the reality all around him as he looked up to the South Central sky and thought to himself,

Mother fucking Drey and Cube nailed this shit. Surrounded by the chaos of the L.A. riots, he then turned his attention. to the young hip-hop fans who were now surrounding him, holding out copies of his record that they just looted and were asking him to sign his autograph on. He swiped a pen from one of his fans, and on the cover of the CD, the fan held up, he signed his name, Tupac Shakur.

I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership.

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