Left out of Compton

There's showbiz for you. One moment, you're a threat to the status quo, with the President worrying over your lyrics. The next, you've been assimilated into a Hollywood biopic.

So it is that NWA, who once threatened revolution in the streets find themselves atop the multiplexes. It shouldn't be much of a surprise - after all, we're several years past the time Eazy-E took lunch with President Bush at a Republican fundraiser:

The good people of Compton, though, won't be able to see their neighbourhood's moment in the sun - Compton doesn't have a cinema.

Although that's not quite as isolating as Digital Spy tries to make it sound. Because...

Dr Dre and Ice Cube fans will have to journey 4 miles east to Paramount's Bianchi Stadium theatre to witness their city depicted on-screen.

A four mile trip to the cinema isn't exactly onerous, is it? People in the suburbs of Brighton have to travel further than that to get to the pictures, and nobody's suggesting Straight Outta Withdean is going to get green lit soon.

More worryingly is the excising of Dre's treatment of women. Dre beat Dee Barnes, and she wonders why this isn't mentioned in the biopic:

That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”

But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.

Hollywood likes its gritty stories. But just not with too much reality. After all, you don't want your heroes to be unrelatable, right?

The Kurtis Blow story can only be months away

As the cinema demonstrates its usual "if people liked that, let's make a thousand versions of that sort of thing" mentality, the NWA story moves into preproduction.

They're calling it Straight Outta Compton, which gives you the idea of how much thought is going into this. No time to think; let's try and catch the BIG coat-tails...

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Perhaps surprisingly, the Financial Times marks the 20th birthday - today - of Gangsta rap:

Opening with the ominous words, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge”, the album that started it all had an instant impact when it came out two decades ago.

“Oh my God, did it ever, man,” remembers Tim Westwood, the veteran British rap DJ and not a man prone to understatement. “We used to play those records hard on the radio and the parties, just crazy ... It revolutionised the game.”