N.W.A.
N.W.A. (an abbreviation for Niggaz Wit Attitudes) was an American hip hop group from Los Angeles, California. Active from 1986 to 1991, the rap group endured controversy owing to their music’s explicit lyrics, which many viewed as being disrespectful to women, as well as to its glorification of drugs and crime. In spite of this, the group has sold over 10 million units in the United States alone. Drawing on their own experiences of racism and excessive policing, the group made inherently political music. NWA’s second album Niggaz4Life would be the first hardcore rap album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 sales charts. Rolling Stone ranked N.W.A number 83 on their list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”. In 2016, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (More from Wikipedia)
According to Wikipedia, this was the first prominent hip hop song to have social commentary; “The Message” led directly to the “gangsta rap” era with groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. but was enormously influential in its own right.
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Snoop Dogg (originally Snoop Doggy Dogg) was discovered in 1992 by one of the bandmembers in N.W.A., Dr. Dre; he has been seemingly omnipresent in the entertainment scene ever since. Snoop became known for his nearly unintelligible, mumbled speeches at music awards shows and other such, often featuring his own vocabulary, such as “fo shizzle”.
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Will Smith parlayed their hit song into a stint on a sitcom called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and later became one of the biggest movie stars of our time following roles in summer blockbusters like Independence Day (1996) and Men in Black (1997). He is not the only hip hop star to move to the small and/or big screen. Ice Cube, one of the founders of gangsta rap in his group N.W.A., has starred in numerous films in a variety of genres, such as All About the Benjamins, Barbershop, and XXX: State of the Union. Ice-T – whose debut album Rhyme Pays (1987) was “the first hip hop album to carry an explicit content sticker” (according to Wikipedia) – is well-known for his prominent role in the long-running television series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
(September 2016)
