Kevin D. Kinsey

The group NWA emerges from the streets of Compton, California in the mid-1980s and revolutionizes pop culture with their music and tales about life in the hood.  This film is coming soon to a theater near you.  “Compton hasn’t changed,” Ice Cube says of the L.A. suburb where he got his start. “It’s wack. It’s pretty much the same thing as it’s always been, and that’s fucked up really…. You don’t know what’s going to happen from day to day, and it can go from cool, quiet and fun to somebody’s shot, arrested, murdered or whatever. You can die for no reason.”

Growing up in that environment inspired the rapper – along with luminaries Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren and DJ Yella – to form N.W.A., the controversy-welcoming group responsible for popularizing gangster rap with songs like “Fuck tha Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta.” This summer, he’s bringing the group’s story to the big screen as one of the producers of  “Straight Outta Compton”, a biopic that covers group’s formation in the mid Eighties through Eazy-E’s death of AIDS in 1995 — what Ice Cube calls the end of an era.

N.W.A