Listen Right Now to Women With Attitude (WWA), a Fire New Rap Supergroup
Entertainment
Old school West Coast rap fans who are also feminists are having a rough month, not that it’s ever been a comfortable position to occupy: Straight Outta Compton, the NWA biopic which drops today, whitewashes the misogyny that comprised a good amount of the seminal rap group’s music and does nothing to mention Dr. Dre’s violence against women at the time; Ice Cube is still differentiating between “respectable” women and women he believes to be “bitches” and “hoes”; Dre released a mostly sub-par album in Compton that also features a skit entertaining the sound of a woman being murdered amid her own screams; Compton director F. Gary Gray, when asked to address some of these issues, dismissed and essentially hung up on The Cut’s Allison P. Davis. It’s all very dumb!
(Secondarily: a cavalcade of very wack people on Twitter are making endless “Straight Outta…” jokes that defang the intent of the original “Straight Outta Compton” and also provoke an ever-increasing cringe of contact-embarrassment in my entire being.)