In south central Los Angeles, Ice Cube, chief rapper with NWA, is handing out a few tips on how to get the best out of the neighbourhood. It is a hot weekday morning but the porches of the wooden bungalows that line the street are empty and the air is strangely quiet.

"If you sat on this porch at night and just listened real hard," admonishes Ice Cube, "you'd hear nothing but gunfire. I've heard it so much in my neighbourhood that I can't hear it no more. At night, you'll see the helicopter flying around here with the spotlight on, looking for somebody. If you hear a car with a beatbox booming at night, you know they're out looking for somebody. As long as you can't see where they're coming from, gunshots aren't scary. Now, if you see the fire from the gun, then you run …"

Parts of south central, like Compton and Watts, are unknown territory to the vast majority of the city's white population, and are consequently the subject of lurid fantasies. Ice Cube and the four other members of NWA, or Niggaz with Attitude, work hard to fuel many of those fantasies by taking rap's hardline boasts to new extremes of violence and profanity.

"I'm the motherfucker that you read about / Takin' a life or two / That's what the hell I do / If you don't like the way I'm living, fuck you!" boasts Ice Cube on Gangsta Gangsta from NWA's new album, Straight Outta Compton.

Such sentiments have not exactly endeared NWA to the powers that be. When, in early August, the band appeared at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, the local police showed up in strength and eventually stormed the stage to prevent NWA from performing their most popular song, Fuck Tha Police. The band was escorted to their hotel by more officers, one of whom reportedly said, "We just wanted to show the kids that you can't say 'Fuck the police' in Detroit." NWA took the next flight back to Los Angeles.

If rap originated in the Bronx and in Brooklyn before spreading through the New York suburbs, NWA and peers like Ice-T and Tone-Loc have lately shifted its centre of gravity to the west coast and put Compton and Los Angeles on the rap map. In the process, they have uncovered the life of the city's gangs, the Bloods and the Crips.

"Whenever the media shows California," says the 20-year-old Ice Cube, "all they picture is beaches and pretty girls; they never go to our neighbourhood. People here don't look poor because they get what they want. It's how they get it that means it just ain't safe."

The 1986 success of the Beastie Boys, Run DMC and LL Cool J brought rap nearer to the American mainstream, but it was the twice-daily television show, Yo! MTV Raps, that gave rap a national forum, expanding its sales and white audience.

NWA have sold a million copies of Straight Outta Compton since February by embracing the language and thoughts of LA's street gangs. Even the sympathetic producers of Yo! MTV Raps balk at NWA's stance and have banned their Straight Outta Compton video, even though all the profanity has been removed. The video portrays one of the Los Angeles Police Department's notorious "gang sweeps", in which the police descend on a neighbourhood and throw all their "suspects" into paddy wagons. NWA, who are among the arrested, give a thoroughly convincing portrayal of unbridled machismo. "I think it's a marvellous record," says one of the record's two producers, Peter Dougherty, but he warns, "NWA aren't saying the violence is terrible. They're saying, 'We're terrible – we kick ass.' If someone looks at you funny, shoot 'em, that's the vibe," says Dougherty.

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Ice Cube arrives at his publicist's wooden-frame house in south central looking quite unmoved by the stir NWA has caused. The group's founder, Eazy-E (whose real name is Eric Wright), production specialists Dr Dre (Andre Young) and Yella (Antoine Carraby), and the other main rapper, MC Ren (Lorenzo Patterson), all still live in Compton.

Ice Cube, however, has moved to Los Angeles and drives around in a jeep, carrying a beeper and a car phone. Like the rest of NWA, he dresses in the mostly black merchandise of the city's football and ice hockey teams, the Raiders and the Kings. All five are high school graduates and Ice Cube, real name Osea Jackson, has already graduated in architectural draughtsmanship from a technical college in Phoenix, Arizona.

"You can't rap forever," he shrugs. "If it ends tomorrow, I still gotta do something to survive."

Survival is a major issue in Los Angeles black communities. A black male teenager is twice as likely to be unemployed as his white equivalent and six times more likely to be murdered, and there have been nearly 3,000 gang-related killings and 15,000 woundings since 1980. A city like Compton with just over 100,000 predominantly black and Hispanic residents seems like a sleepy, characterless suburb by day; there are even a few half-hearted attempts at gentrification. But at police headquarters, a world-weary black cop explains that there were nearly 80 homicides in Compton last year. "We've had 51 this year and it's only August."

Widely criticised for their refusals to condemn gang violence or drug abuse, Ice Cube insists that NWA tell it like it is. "The parents, the police and the people of the local community are scared of what we say. We use the same kind of language as the kids use every day. In the black community, the ministers and teachers don't deny that the problems we rap about exist, but they'd rather sweep it under the rug. Maybe that's why we sell so many records, because the people in the community all tell the kids what to do, the police are watching them 24-seven [24 hours a day, seven days a week], so when they party, they don't want to hear, 'Don't do this and don't do that.' Our raps are documentary. We don't take sides."

Ice Cube sounds reasonable, sitting in south central in his shorts, sipping Kool Aid and keeping an eye on his jeep out in the drive. Yet his "documentary" approach is hardly dispassionate when on record he raps about blasting away other "niggers" with a menacing sense of release. I ask him if his "gangsta" raps are an act and he looks positively offended.

"I'm a little calmer now, because I'm making the records, but I used to do some crazy stuff. I don't have to be out there robbing cars and stuff now, but that's the way I used to be. The rap is how I feel. If somebody's out there, breaking into my car, I'm going to shoot them and probably wouldn't think nothing of it. It's Vietnam here; nobody knew where nothing was coming from there, and it's the same way down here with the gangs and crack. You gotta be true to yourself in this city: you in your car, me in my car."

Ice Cube no longer breaks into cars and steals radios because he can now afford to buy his own. Most of his schoolmates have not been as fortunate. "The people I went to school with are some of the worst people I know. They dropped out of school in the eighth or ninth grade, can't read too good, can't get a job, their girl had a baby; these kinds of problems stack up, but you've got to survive, so the best thing they can do is steal, sell dope and dodge the police. That's what they're out there doing. These are my friends – I've been knowing them since elementary – grown up with them, hung out with them, then had to go my own way for the simple fact that I was sick of getting shot at all the time by cars just driving by from another gang for something they thought we done or for some rival stuff that happened years ago that we don't even know about.

"Those guys still hang out and I still pull up, and then I'm on my way. I don't tell them, 'Yo, don't do this or don't do that,' because I know everybody can't rap. They telling me, 'You living it, you been on the road, you doing videos, how you going to tell me how to get my money, how to live?' If I can't tell my friends, 'Don't do drugs and stuff,' how am I going to tell somebody I don't know?"





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While groups like Public Enemy offer a political overview of black street life, with frontman Chuck D arguing that "the only way for equality in America is for black people to be treated superior", Ice Cube insists that NWA simply thrust their listeners into the middle of the street and leave them to fend for themselves. Yet amid the boasting and raucous comedy, there are implicit politics in NWA's raps, notably in Fuck Tha Police, where Ice Cube denounces cop harassment and picks out black cops who come on extra strong to impress their white partners.

"I'm black, male and young so what's happening to me is likely to be happening to NWA's audience. Some police overuse their authority, they judge you on what you wear instead of how you are. They stereotype you; make you get out your car, get you face down on the ground and then start questioning you. If I was white and in another neighbourhood, they would not do that. Because I have a beeper, they accuse me of selling drugs every time they stop me. A beeper only costs $19 a month but, in the black community, they figure the only blacks with beepers must be drug dealers. I still get pulled over a lot. When they find I'm in NWA they sit me down, talk to me, telling me their views. I say, 'Yo, man, it's a free country, come up with a song that says 'Fuck NWA' but don't give me a ticket, let me go!'"

Ice Cube's raps are attempts to make him invulnerable because vulnerability can only threaten his chances of survival. Crack has changed the black streets of Los Angeles beyond recognition, and the NWA rap Dopeman is a stark portrait of the kind of behaviour crack induces.

"You see a lot of people lose their houses because of crack. Your next-door neighbour who's been living there 20 years gets hooked up on crack, and you watch him slowly but surely lose everything. You see them walking around like zombies and you see kids of 14 and 15 driving a Mercedes and living it up. If somebody starts messing with crack, I say get 'em away from me because you can't trust them. If somebody's on crack, if they want to waste their life, that's up to them as long as they stay away from me. It's the same attitude as the record: if you want to do this, then it's on you, but you got to know the consequences. If you want to be a thief, then you got to know what jail is like."

This ruthless survivalist ethic explains why women only appear as "bitches" in NWA raps: "bitches" who are only interested in a man's money. Sex implies vulnerability, and Ice Cube will have no truck with that. "You're only vulnerable if you let yourself be, and I wouldn't let myself be vulnerable to anything. If I found someone that's cool, I'd love them the way they are, but if they happen to change, I'd get rid of them in a second. I wouldn't lose no sleep over any person other than my own family."

Despite all his talk of shooting and the gunfire that drops in and out of the tracks on NWA's LP, Ice Cube insists that Straight Outta Compton is no more likely to produce violence than a Rambo movie. Yet when he describes the shotgun he has at home or relates how anyone in his community can get hold of an Uzi AK-47 with $150 and a few hours' wait, it is hard not to take NWA's raps rather more seriously than outlaw myths.

Like hard rockers Guns N' Roses or such emerging standup comedians as Andrew "Dice" Clay and Sam Kinison, NWA make no attempt to blunt or transcend the savagery of their milieu or to change it. In fact, they appear to revel in it. "Welcome to the jungle!" shriek Guns N' Roses, while Clay and Kinison's work has been labelled the "comedy of hate" because they indulge the fears and hatred of their audience with foul-mouthed gags and sexist, racist slurs.

All these artists are making entertainment shocking again by redrawing the generation gap at the point where liberalism is most vulnerable – free speech. As the Live Aid era of entertainers pride themselves on their social consciences and their good works, so the new voices of youth appear to delight in their extreme callousness. These performers say the unsayable, mixing the selfishness of Reagan's social philosophy with snubs at the post-60s liberal platitudes of their parents.

NWA have no pretensions about the purpose of their music, however.

"We're not making records for the fun of it. We're in it to make money," Eazy-E has said. He owns their record company, Ruthless, which was supposedly founded on the money Eazy-E saved from his days as a drug dealer. "It was getting too dangerous so I decided to look for something legal to do with the money I had made."

Eazy-E and the other members of NWA work on all Ruthless releases that include gold and platinum albums by NWA, Eazy-E, JJ Fad and BOC. Their veteran associate Jerry Heller, who has worked with Elton John and Pink Floyd, reckons Eazy-E could well make Ruthless the next Motown, and talks expansively of $75m worth of sales next year. NWA may be the ultimate "hard" rap act, but Ruthless has made them all extremely financially comfortable in under a year.

Like most small rap labels, Ruthless is distributed via a major label that merely presses and sells the records. While many rap artists like LL Cool J have adapted their style in order to cross over to mainstream radio, NWA sell their records by word of mouth. Ice Cube insists, "There's a lot of people who're scared to come in an area like this, but they want to know what's going on so they buy the record and they feel like they know what's expected of them if they come in here."

According to Ice Cube, 30-40% of NWA's live audience and record buyers are white. Their fans include a majority of kids who identify with the music and its cocky alienation, and a smattering of preppie types in buttoned-down shirts, out for an evening's slumming. To white fans, NWA are exotic. While few will travel to Compton or south central, the heavily codified world NWA describe and the sheer power of their music represent a powerful alternative to traditional rock'n'roll. Hollywood now has several clubs like Ice-T's Under the Bush where a mixed crowd dances to hip-hop grooves or can listen to a white noise band in the basement. The desire for extreme music unites all kinds of heterogeneous groups, while rap is giving black music its largest white following since the soul heyday of the 60s.

Ice Cube has little interest in joining the ranks of the upwardly mobile, though. NWA do not want to escape their local neighbourhoods.

"I want to stay right on the streets," explains Ice Cube. "I'm not into gold ropes that are bigger than my neck and all that stuff. Gold is a showoff thing, to show you've made it. I'll wear small bracelets, but the kids are going to relate to you more if you've got on a T-shirt just like they do. I'm still the same person, I still dress the same way. If I can live here, I can deal with the hostility, I can deal with the police. It's not so much that we're proud of Compton, it's just where we're from. I don't want to move out, to be honest, because I don't want to lose touch. It's just a way of life and I pretty much know how to manoeuvre myself here."

© Mark Cooper, 1989