Word: efil4zaggin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doesn't give an inch. A couple of the new songs, such as Real Niggaz Don't Die and Appetite for Destruction, can really stir things up: their fury is incendiary. Everything good about N.W.A. -- and a lot that isn't -- is straight street: smarts, attitude, language, beat. Efil4zaggin is a rap mural of ghetto life, spray-painted with blood. It is for hard-case rappers, and it is no sell-out. N.W.A. got to the No. 1 spot by bearing down just as hard as it always has: its first album, Straight Outta Compton, which has sold 2 million...
...street-seasoned bloods won't be disappointed by Efil4zaggin, they may be surprised by the company they're keeping. A major, and perhaps deciding, factor in the album's startling success is the appeal it has for another crucial segment of the record-buying public: white middle-class teenage males. "T.B.W.A.s, that's who's buying N.W.A.'s album," says Joel Abramson, manager of a Tower Records branch in Woodland Hills, Calif. "Teenage boys with attitude." Woodland Hills is an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, 75 miles northwest of Compton, the black community where N.W.A. still hangs out. "These boys...
They've got lots of company all across the country. At Tower stores nationwide, Efil4zaggin was the No. 2 seller for the week ending June 10; at Central South Music Sales, a Nashville-based distributorship, it was No. 1 for roughly the same period. Tom Myers of the Camelot Music shop in Springfield, Mo. -- whose patrons tend to be suburban kids rather than ghetto gang members -- says the similarly fast sales in his store "are very uncanny for a rap title...
...what? The fact is, Efil4zaggin is an entire open season for negative stereotyping. That's the classic rap posture, black male division, of course: turning the comic-book white fantasy of the black male as a murderous sexual stud into a hyperbolic reality. Rappers like N.W.A. and Public Enemy want to scare the living hell out of white America -- and sell it a whole mess of records -- by making its worst racial nightmares come true...
N.W.A. has serious stuff to say, but they are stifled by their ravening sexism. No excuse cuts it, no rationalization holds. Until that attitude changes, "the world's most dangerous group," as it bills itself on Efil4zaggin, will be a threat above all to itself...