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It's 20 years since LA's Niggaz With Attitude tasered the world with their fiercely uncompromising debut platter Straight Outta Compton. West Coast gangsta rap--make that hip hop, period--was never the same again. In a 1991 piece for Playboy, Rolling Stone/Creem veteran John Mendlessohn cast a cynical eye over NWA; the piece was not published until its appearance in the The Sound and the Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader (2003). Here is an excerpt. --Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director

Half a decade before, Hollywood had been a long drive, an absolutely endless bus ride, and a world away. But with Reaganomics having wiped out all the youth programs, what better shot at getting out of Compton did a motherfu**er have than cutting a rap record and hoping that it made him the new LL Cool J?

And so, hearing the ads on KDAY, they swarmed by the carload to a little record pressing plant on Santa Monica Blvd. where, if he liked a fellow's tape, the old white dude proprietor, Don MacMillan, would press 500 12-inch singles for him for only $600. MacMillan would send a couple hundred to his distributors, whose salespeople would take them into stores and radio stations nationwide, and the kid would get $200 or $300 to take back to his neighborhood.

Compared to the South Central Los Angeles environs of his old record company, in which he'd become accustomed to witnessing shootouts on the way to work, his new stomping grounds impressed Don MacMillan as relatively tranquil, its gay teenage runaway hustlers and Hispanic gangs notwithstanding. But to the kids from Compton, the squalid sector of Hollywood in which Macola Records was based must have looked like Shangri-La. In the decades since George Bush lived there briefly as a fresh-out-of-Yale oil-bit salesman in the late '40s, Compton had turned into a war zone. Not an inch of its 10 square miles wasn't claimed by at least one of its 40 street gangs; locals observed with a strange sort of pride that if you started running east on Rosecrans from Central, you could get gatted on--shot at--by seven different gangs by the time you reached Atlantic Boulevard less than two miles away. If you reached it.

At the high schools, 300-pound football players allowed skinny freshmen gang members to humiliate them at will, for to fight back would be to dodge bullets on the way home from practice in the afternoon. And that chirping sound wasn't crickets, but the beepers that summoned kids from class to close drug deals. By day, children were cut down by errant Crips, Bloods, and Pirus bullets on their schools’ front lawns. And at night, the city really got dangerous, as the crackheads who’d been sold macadamia nuts rolled in Anbesol flew into rages and reached for their own gats.

Don McMillan was struck by how a lot of the kids who hung out in the lobby of his pressing plant seemed slightly in awe of little Eric Wright, who called himself Eazy-E. Maybe it was that he was so bright. Or maybe it was the breadth of his ambition. As a product of Compton’s infamous public school system, he had absolutely no idea where anything was--where San Francisco was, or Seattle--but he still openly aspired to presiding over his own recording empire.

Back in the 'hood, though, Eazy inspired considerably less admiration than in Macola’s lobby. While it was known that he'd use his fists if he had to, it was equally well known that his girlfriend Joyce kept him on a very short leash, and wasn't averse to walloping him upside the head with a GI Joe lunchbox if, for instance, he neglected to beep her for too long at a stretch.

It was even more widely known that the reason he seemed always to have money in his socks was that he was a dope man. While a lot of Comptonites viewed drugs in general as a blight, who could come down that hard on an individual kid who retailed a little chronic or stress or even yay-o to make a buck or two? How else was a teenage father supposed to be able to give his girlfriend money to buy his babies food or get decent speakers in his lowered Chevy, by working at motherfu**ing McDonald's? And if he didn’t sell the sh*t, somebody else surely would. And wasn’t it a whole lot better than killing for money, as some boys in the 'hood were known to?

Rock's Backpages, the online library of rock journalism, is at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers and from the most legendary rock publications of the last 40 years.