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In 2000, Dynamite Hack, a white indie-rock band, covered NWA's "Boyz-N-The-Hood." Hack's cover complicates earlier assertions that rap songs cannot be covered, and it speaks to histories of white artist covers of black R&B groups in the 1950s, as well as 1970s punk covers and their parody of rock performance. Dynamite Hack's single and video juxtapose their white vocal style, and visual images of white economic privilege, with NWA's narrative of ghetto crime and survival. I argue that Dynamite Hack is careful not to parody hip hop, and that instead the group uses the gangsta imagery of NWA's lyrics to parody their own whiteness its distance from hip hop credibility.
I first listened to NWA when I was thirteen, growing up in South Central Kentucky, far from the South Central Los Angeles neighborhoods chronicled in the band's lyrics. NWA albums were passed around my junior high school dubbed on 99-cent cassettes, originating from a CD owned by somebody's older cousin. The sound quality was low, but this was the best way to get my hands on these rap releases. The record stores in town either carried an edited version in which "motherfuckin" became "crazy-lookin," or else they enforced an 18-and-over policy so strictly that I remember standing outside the mall, looking for someone old enough to buy me the uncensored version of Efil4Zaggin (read it backwards), NWA's third album.
Twelve years later, I heard Dynamite Hack's cover of NWA's song "Boyz-N-TheHood." I was teaching writing in a computer classroom at the University of Louisville, and a student found the song on Napster, the new high-tech version of the dubbed cassette passed in the hallway. In the late 1980s, NWA had created, or at least popularized, a new sound called gangsta rap, which would introduce small town kids like me to the realities of inner city street life. In 2000, Dynamite Hack, a white indierock band, covered NWA's first single, "Boyz-N-The-Hood," which Cheo Hodari Coker has called "a violent picture of life in South Central" (257). The cover has raised questions of authenticity, leading one reviewer to describe it as "[NWA member] Dr. Ore's mellow '90s vibe, as fabricated by emaciated college nerds reciting his gang-banging '80s words ..." (Eddy).
Dynamite Hack delivers NWA's lyrics,...