Tight Sainthood

Straight Outta Compton

Yeah, they had nothing but contempt for soft middle-class intellectuals like me, but after not having heard it for nearly a decade, listening to it still electrifies everything it touches in me, still drives the thoughts along in uneasy rhythmic lurches.

(In the early 90's I covered the Peoples Park riots in Berkeley as a freelance photographer; late on the night of the worst of it all we'd been coralled into a small quietly seething crowd on Bancroft up near College, fenced in by lines of out-of-town police just itching to beat up the Berkeley students and punks pressed together in the heat. Suddenly someone started looping "Fuck Tha Police" loud as hell from a speaker propped up in an upper-storey window overlooking the crowd; suddenly the night had clarity and focus. A loud voice from somewhere in the police ruck shouted "Get that fucking thing turned off!", and within a minute or so a news cameraman had been dragged from the lines, clubbed, arrested, and hustled away out of sight. Over it all the loop just got louder).

Posted by Jimmy Little @ 08:57; permalink