Mark of tha gangsta

THE JHERI CURL is long gone, and the scowl, well, Ice Cube still has that, but he uses it selectively now. It was 20 years ago this month that the group N.W.A -- with Cube as its most vital lyricist -- released the shocking "Straight Outta Compton." They called their music "reality rap," but everyone else just called it gangsta, and music history was made.

On a recent morning, in a hushed Burbank music studio, Cube sat down in a solitary corner with a Sharpie in his hand and a pile of posters showing his famous scowl. Over and over, without even looking down, the man born O'Shea Jackson signed his more famous name. "I can't tell you," he said, "how many times I signed that name in my life. . . ." The rapper and actor will have a new album in stores on Tuesday and a new film in theaters three days after that, but most of the posters in front of him were from years ago. He had just come back from a European tour, and the loudest cheers were for his oldest, angriest anthems. It was 20 years ago this month that the N.W.A album "Straight Outta Compton" changed the course of American music, and somehow 21st century kids in Amsterdam and Leipzig are bellowing along to its vintage black rage and uniquely Southern California sound.

"They know every word," Cube said with a bewildered sort of pride. "That music is still echoing, which nobody could have predicted. That's what I'm proudest of, the impact that we had. N.W.A changed the rules."

Hip-hop came from the clubs and sidewalks of New York City as a party music made with turntables and rhymes by performers who usually couldn't afford music instruments. It was party music, but then it came west and got a beat-down by a swaggering collective that called itself N.W.A. Run-DMC gave rap its commercial shape and Public Enemy provided the politics, but it was N.W.A that took the genre to the dangerous side of the street.

There was that one song in particular, that one with a three-word title: The first word began with the letter F and the other two were "Tha Police." It was a sonic Molotov cocktail. There were protests and outrage, and, not surprisingly, police officers refused to provide security for their concert tours. It's hard for music fans today, who are accustomed to gangsta rappers as corporate pitchmen on television, to understand how jolting it was when N.W.A hit the scene. An assistant director of the FBI famously sent a letter to Ruthless Records, the label for N.W.A, in 1989, excoriating the music and its message. If you want to read it, it's on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.