There’s no place more infamous in rap than Compton, California.
Sitting just south of downtown Los Angeles,
it’s one of the oldest hoods in the county
and has just under a hundred thousand residents.
In the 1950s, middle-class black families
headed to Compton from the rural south to search for better opportunities.
It was a good place for many people for a while,
but after years of tax manipulation, poor leadership,
and police brutality, Compton turned into one of the most dangerous cities in America.
Throughout the sixties and seventies,
poverty and unemployment were at record highs in Compton,
leading to a rise in crime and the appearance of street gangs.
They were mostly unorganized
and didn’t seem to have too much direction in what they wanted.
Mostly, they were violent.
The first official gang to appear were the cripps,
showing up in 1969 in central LA.
In the beginning, the gang was meant to be a political group
that would combat violence on the streets,
and they modeled themselves after the Black Panthers.
Eventually, though, they turned into what they were trying to fight,
a violent street gang.
As the Crips spread through Compton,
another gang formed in response
– the bloods.
There were fewer bloods than cripps,
but the bloods were more violent and more dangerous.
By the time the eighties rolled around,
the two gangs were dealing crack and other drugs
and looking to expand their territories,
spreading throughout the nation.
The two gangs have sets all over the country now.
The Bloods have around twenty thousand members,
while the cripps have about 35,000.
Gangs and rap have come hand in hand since the 80s,
with Compton being headquarters for the West Coast gangster rap scene.
One of the earliest and most successful gangster rap pioneers
were the members of the hip hop group NWA.
They set up shop in 1987
and didn’t hold back the realism in their lyrics.
They rapped about drugs, crime, and sex.
They hated on police and the government,
and they talked about racism in the neighborhood.
The music was political,
but it was also graphic and in-your-face.
Though the group was set up to specifically address gang issues,
the only member of the group who was actually affiliated with a gang was Eazy-E.
Dr. Dre and Ice Cube were never actually official members,
despite the rumors.
After a traumatic childhood filled with violence and death,
a teenaged Eazy-E started selling weed for some extra money.
And because he was out dealing on the street,
he wanted to keep everything on the up and up with the gang that ran his hood,
so he joined up with the Kelly Park Compton cripps.
It was a new set,
formed mostly to fill the need for cocaine during the crack epidemic of the 80s.
It was a lucrative business,
and by the time he was 22,
he allegedly had nearly a quarter of a million dollars saved up.
When his cousin was killed in a gang-related shooting,
he decided it was no longer worth the risk,
took his money and turned to music with NWA.
A lot of rappers from the city mimic the gangsta rap style without actually being in gangs,
but there are more than a few legit gang members that are splitting time between the studio and the street.
One of the most successful Compton gang rappers to come out in the last twenty years is The Game.
He came to fame with his 2004 hit “How We Do,”
which featured 50 Cent and was produced by Dr. Dre.
His mainstream hits brought West Coast gangsta rap to the front of the hip hop scene,
and he was put into the rap group G-Unit by Dre himself.
Like many of his fellow rappers from Compton,
The Game was already tied up with some gang affiliations.
He was born and raised in the cripp-controlled neighborhood of Santana Blocc.
His parents were hardcore cripps,
repping their neighborhood set,
but the Game’s older half-brother
had chosen to link up with the Cedar Block Piru bloods.
The rapper calls his family dysfunctional,
thanks to the opposing loyalties under the one roof.
Despite that, The Game did what any kid would do and avoided anything his parents were doing.
This means that instead of joining up with the cripps that ran his block,
he followed his older brother’s footsteps and started hanging out with the bloods.
When he was twenty-two or twenty-three,
the rapper ended up getting shot by a rival gang member.
While he was in the hospital recovering,
he started listening to all the hip hop albums he could get his hands on.
At this point, music was the thing keeping him going,
and gang violence was the only thing holding him back.
So he made a turn in his life,
respecting the OG gangster rappers and using their influence
while starting to distance himself from the gang activities he used to participate in.
When he began to make it big in the industry,
Snoop Dogg kind of took him under his wing,
despite the fact that Snoop is a notorious cripp
and Game was a blood.
He realized that “Real n****** separated themselves from the confinement of what LA gang bangin was at the time,
which was far away from its origin of peaceful protective groups formed in the 1960s.”
In fact, in 2016,
he came out with Snoop Dogg in front of a crowd of hundreds of people at a South Los Angeles community center
to talk about how change is needed in the community and culture of Compton
and all over the US.
The event, called the “Time to Unite:
United Hoods + Gang Nation,”
was arranged as a sort of town hall meeting.
In an Instagram post just before the meeting began,
The Game invited everyone out with a call to “all cripps, bloods, ese’s, and all other gang members,
major figures and gang leaders from every hood in our city as well as the surrounding cities to our meeting.”
He said it would be a “much-needed conversation”
regarding the wellbeing of the city.
He posted on Instagram:
“Because the sad truth that no one wants to face is,
before we can get our lives to matter to anyone else…
we have to show that our lives matter to US!”
To get people to change, he reminded them that
“your life should mean more to you.
Your life should mean more to you than what you’re showing.”
Also at the event was Tony Muhammad,
a Nation of Islam minister.
At the gathering, he urged locals to start working together.
He said, “ Come on, black community,
it’s time for us to stand up and unite.”
After the death of Nipsey Hussle in March 2019,
Game took to posting a picture of the deceased rapper every day,
carrying on Nipsey’s message of unity and non-violence.
In one post he says:
“Circling back around to where I started,
I was just saying how dope it was to be able to break the color lines to which we were loyal,
to show the world that a cripp and blood could tour the world together,
create a friendship and bond that would serve as an example for the next generation
of young African American kids growing up in the same darkness.”
Along with The Game,
rapper Roddy Ricch also decided to move away from his gang ties
once he realized it wasn’t helping him any.
Though Roddy was born nearly twenty years after The Game,
he still had the same kind of experience as a fellow Compton native.
The streets were overrun by gangs,
and his very Christian mother did her best to keep him away from the violence and crime.
He spent the summers with family in Louisiana and Atlanta,
but most of his time was spent in Compton,
so he got locked up in that life pretty early on.
He kept getting into trouble and bringing trouble home with him
so Roddy found himself on the streets full-time at age fifteen
when his mom kicked him out.
With no other option for protection or a place to sleep,
he joined up with the Park Village Compton cripps.
This African-American/Samoan set
controls a large area on the west side of Compton
and is named for the local housing projects in the middle of the area.
A couple of their major rivals are the Santana Blocc Compton cripps,
the set that The Game’s parents belonged to,
and the Cedar Block Pirus,
the set the Game was a part of.
Roddy was only 18 when a potential gun case shook him up enough
to leave the gang stuff behind and focus on his music.
After sitting in jail for a week,
he realized that this might be spending the last of his teen years behind bars
and saw that as a complete waste.
When he got out on bail,
he focused on his music and making money on his own terms.
Now he’s got several award nominations and wins
and a huge Billboard hit with “The Box.”
Unlike The Game, he hasn’t come out as much to speak against gangs and street violence,
but he’s showing fans and haters by example
that he doesn’t need the gang stuff in his life.
Rapper YG, on the other hand,
is pretty open and vocal about his life on the streets before he made it big in hip hop.
The 30-year-old was born in Compton in 1990,
at the height of some massive tensions.
He was only a couple of years old when the Rodney King riots ravaged the city,
killing 63 people over 6 days.
During the chaos, the bloods and cripps called a ceasefire and set up a truce.
Gang violence plummeted for the rest of the decade,
but by the early 2000s, it was starting to rise again,
and YG had no choice but to join up,
choosing the Tree Top Piru bloods.
Compared to Roddy Ricch and The Game,
YG didn’t jump into the music as much to get away from the gang life.
Instead, even while he was writing, recording, and releasing songs,
he was mostly focused on repping the bloods.
He says, “Even when I got signed,
I was still hanging out, gangbanging in Compton,
going to jail.”
It wasn’t for a few more years that he finally let some of that go
and put his focus on the music.
Well, that’s all for today!
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