Book Review: Ben Westhoff - Original Gangstas

The very day I finished this book, I read that Death Row Records had just been sold to Hasbro. Technically, Hasbro bought the parent Entertainment One megacorp that counted Death Row as part of its portfolio, but it's fun to imagine telling Suge Knight 20 years ago that his record label that produced some of the all-time hip hop classics would one day be owned by a toy company. Whether hip hop will eventually loom the largest in historical memory depends on how exactly the demographics of musical canonization shake out in the future, but even though hip hop didn't come from the West Coast, it's that sound that will be the main argument that the genre deserves as much respect as any other style of 20th century music. Westhoff is a bona fide superfan of the genre - a white guy from the Midwest, naturally, that often-derided but crucial fan constituency - who made it his mission to show how exactly LA's music scene went from living in the shadow of New York to setting the standard for what hip hop should sound like, and even more crucially what it should mean to the audience. He succeeds wonderfully, and even though everyone involved in that scene is now hawking endorsements for a living (Snoop being the ultimate example of the transformation from wanted criminal to universally beloved pitchman), Westhoff shows how they became megastars by translating frustration, rage, and rebellion into art.

Westhoff mostly focuses on N.W.A. personnel (Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DOC), along with Snoop, Tupac, and some East Coast figures (Biggie, Puff Daddy) who moved between the two coasts, and he provides lots of context behind the albums, so it vastly improves on entertainment products like 2015's Straight Outta Compton by connecting more dots and providing more answers (though the real best exploration of hip hop remains Fear of a Black Hat). As charming as it might be for some to see bits of trivia like the "Bye, Felicia!" scene, most of the real story of every musical group is in the business negotiations with lawyers, labels, distributors, and every other necessary parasite. Artists make music for fun and personal fulfillment, but you can't make more than an album or two without getting paid, and so the tension between the art and the commerce sides of the music industry is overlaid on all of the other well-known drugs/crime/violence issues that plagued the West Coast scene. This means the book overlaps more with 2017's The Defiant Ones, which focuses on Dre and producer Jimmy Iovine. Iovine in particular was crucial to the band's success, as shown for example by his marketing strategy for The Chronic's first single "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang":

"We can't get it played on the radio," Jimmy Iovine said the radio guys told him.
"It's 'Satisfaction,'" he retorted.
"Radio doesn't think so. They think it's a bunch of black guys cursing who want to kill everybody."
Iovine decided to create a minute-long commercial, consisting of nothing but the song. "Don't say who it is, and buy it on fifty stations, drive time. I want the program directors to hear it in their cars."

There are many interesting counterfactuals that Westhoff proposes:

Daily Beast writer Rich Goldstein pointed out that 1988 was a huge year for record sales, led by George Michael's Faith and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, each of which sold over ten million copies. In those pre-internet days, there weren't very many places to hear about new music, and not many places to buy it. All of N.W.A's publicity was great, but that didn't matter if you couldn't actually consume their songs. "Had Straight Outta Compton been played on MTV, listened to on the radio, and been available for purchase in big-box retailers like Walmart, there is a good chance it would have eclipsed the Dirty Dancing soundtrack," Goldstein theorized.

And the saddest parts of the book are of course the discussions of the tragically brief and violent lives of many incredibly talented people, most notably Biggie and Tupac. All of the surviving members of N.W.A. lament how short their collaborative period was before it fell apart, and one can only imagine the works that they and the rest could have created if they hadn't hated each other:

Tupac claimed to have directly influenced Biggie's style. "I used to tell the nigga, 'If you want to make your money you have to rap for the bitches. Do not rap for the niggas,'" he said. "The bitches will buy your records, and the niggas want what the bitches want." As proof that Biggie had heeded his advice, Tupac cited the difference between the aggressive "Party and Bullshit" and softer Ready to Die hits tracks "Big Poppa," which appealed more to the ladies. Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind / And ask what your interests are, who you be with?

But as unfortunately truncated as many of their careers were, their surviving works are legendary, and books like Westhoff's are a testament to how brightly stars can shine in such a brief period.