Friday, May 1, 2009

More ideas on the albums

After class today, I was talking with Rachel, and she told me to blog about some interesting points I had made during our conversation.
In the entire N.W.A. album, I felt e most that the powerful and moving song for me was “Fuck the police.” I found it so because the police are supposed to be the good guys, the people you can trust. This song shows the not so glamorous side of the police force, very similarly to the Wire. It breaks that wide spread Idea that the cops are always right, and their actions always justified. The problem is how we get past all of this. After watching the Wire, and listening to N.W.A, when your house gets robbed, you still pick up the phone and call the police. Regardless of what they are doing, there is no way for us to live if we do not have faith that they will do the right thing. It is true that we have seen the dark side of the police force, but after all that we must return to the real world (our world) where we push aside that image and convince ourselves of their complete goodness.
In class, a topic we dwelt on was the authenticity of the image that N.W.A portrayed. Even though many of them were not hardcore gangsters, their songs made it seem that way. I first heard about the N.W.A. album about 2 years ago, I think when VH1 was doing the documentary about them. I was utterly convinced that these people were hard core gangsters. They were the real Avon Barksdale, killing and never looking back. I found it interesting that they were just using their imaginations. I never understood the similarities between the album and Lolita until I got this concept. Finding out that the N.W.A. was not a group of thugs did not make the album any less powerful for me; it just gave me a different way of looking at it. Compared to the Dylan album, I felt straight outta Compton was less layered, and the language although rough was easier to understand. I also felt N.W.A dealt with more simple emotions than the emotions Dylan focused on. While N.W.A focused on anger, Dylan focused on pride, individuality, and a sense of self. I think this might be a reason for the quality difference in their use of language. It seems that It would have been extremely difficult if N.W.A. tried to focus on an issue like the complexity of the human soul, and had to accomplish this with the same level of sophistication used in Straight outta Compton.

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