The New York rappers were always rapping about fun things and happy things, being the dopest and the flyest," says Snoop Dogg, who was a high school student in Long Beach, California, in 1989 when N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton. "When N.W.A came out, they came with that real shit: 'Fuck tha Police,' 'Straight Outta Compton.' That real shit that niggas was experiencing, it was being brought to life through their music. We could see what they were saying because it was happening all around us."

N.W.A -- Niggaz With Attitude -- put Los Angeles on the hip-hop map by combining funk rhythms with staccato rhymes that condemned racist cops and offered a nihilistic chronicle of drug dealing, casual street violence and crack ho's. (One of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre's first local hits was "My Penis," a remake of Run-DMC's "My Adidas.") "We knew these tapes wouldn't get played on the radio, so we started doin' raps that we knew people in our neighborhood wanted to hear, that people in our neighborhood would like," says Cube, the group's original main lyricist. "If we couldn't be superstars around the world, we could be ghetto stars."

But N.W.A -- Cube, Dre, Eazy-E, M.C. Ren and Yella -- couldn't be kept in Compton for long. The album they recorded in six weeks with $8,000 sounded like nothing that had come before it. Dre's hard-funk grooves rolled underneath Cube's pissed-off, aggressive delivery and Eazy's strange, high-pitched wail: "Fuck the police/Coming straight from the underground/A young nigga got it bad 'cause I'm brown."

The FBI sent a letter to N.W.A's record company, Priority, six months after the album's release, accusing the label of selling a record that encouraged violence against law enforcement. But by that point, Straight Outta Compton was already on its way to becoming one of hip-hop's biggest hits. Despite limited radio play, Compton sold more than 1 million copies by the end of 1989 -- and eighty percent of the sales came from suburbs.

"The danger that N.W.A spoke about was fascinating," says Chuck D of Public Enemy. It was also, says Cube, a way to educate the masses and open up hip-hop to new ideas. "When you come from South Central L.A., you feel like you have no voice -- nobody really cares what you got to say," says Cube. "N.W.A opened the door for artists to not censor themselves and not hold back and be what they really want to be in their heart."