"Straight Outta Compton" is released

Why it matters

The title track of Straight Outta Compton is the album's opening track, and it is one of the great album-opening tracks in rap. Dr. Dre and DJ Yella built the beat around a stuttering Wilson Pickett sample. Ice Cube opens the song with the line "Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube" and announces the entire conceit of NWA in eight words. What the song does, structurally, is map the city by introducing each member of the group by name and origin. Cube goes first. Then MC Ren. Then Eazy-E. Dre is on the beat, Yella is on the cuts. The whole roster gets named, in order, in the first four minutes of the album, before the rest of the record gets started. The Library of Congress added the song to the National Recording Registry in 2017. They were correct to. You can put the song on, walk into any room in any city in America, and people will know what record it is in the first three seconds. The bass tells you. The Cube line tells you.