“Streets Is Talkin’”: Music as Real and Imagined Musical Space through Three Generations of Compton Musicians

Abstract

In the American imagination, the word “Compton” conjures up images of gang violence and failed governance, much of it based on what is arguably the city’s most significant cultural export: music. The success of West Coast gangsta rap group N.W.A. in the late 1980s brought the embattled Los Angeles suburb into the national spotlight, and the success of the genre persisted through the mid-1990s. In 2015, the biopic about the group, Straight Outta Compton, revived and cemented their particular moment in the city in popular culture. Defined by a hardcore approach with ties to gang culture, gangsta rap spoke to the reality of Black men in Los Angeles. N.W.A. and their hometown fans insisted that the music was simply an entertaining way of speaking the truth. The city’s struggles with poverty, crime, and public health access are very real, but the version of Compton portrayed in the media and popular culture obscures the city’s dynamism. Even though the city’s demographics have shifted significantly, it remains a vibrant part of Southern California’s fertile crescent of Black musical creativity. So, what is the difference between the imagined Compton that the world has come to understand and real the Compton as experienced by the artists that have lived in it?

This thesis will contextualize these separate realities of Compton by relating the city’s physical space, its conceived space bounded by policies and human interventions, and its lived space (or the real-and-imagined space), which can be understood by the music that it has inspired. My approach will expand on and connect sociohistorical and musicological narratives to include the effects of urban geography and space that structured the region and notions of space and place. Compton’s legacy as a White suburb with racial housing covenants and the war on drugs in the 1980s both provided political and boundaries to the space, and when considered against the physical space of the city, a new understanding of the lived experience emerges.

Beginning with an introduction to the city’s physical and conceptual development, the opening chapter will reveal its place in the popular imagination and the ways that various musical and cultural artifacts have upheld Compton as a metonym for Black struggle and urban blight. Chapters 2 through 4 will focus on the lived histories of three musicians who represent distinct generations and realities of Compton through their work: bluesman Keb’ Mo’, rapper Kendrick Lamar, and lo-fi artist and producer Steve Lacy. Within this framework, I will reconcile the various notions that have emerged about the city and begin to understand the “real” lived space of Compton through its music, and hopefully, lay the groundwork for musically centered research in similar underserved and marginalized communities.