How Krs One Sound Of Da Police Acapella Group Rocked the Mic with No Beats

It's Gonna Be a BloodbathA frenzied array of soul guitar licks and drum breaks, the mise en scene of 'Fuck The Police' is of courtroom testimonies making up its three verses, each sung by one of the group's then three main MCs. Sandwiched by an earworm chorus, each verse follows the pattern laid out by Ice Cube's opening gambit. Claims of injustice and brutality ("They have the authority to kill a minority... Thinking every nigga sellin' narcotics") sit alongside braggadocio fantasies of violent revenge ("Beat a police out of shape and when I'm done bring the yellow tape").

Krs One Sound Of Da Police Acapella Group

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So rather than refute the popular equation of Blackness with criminality N.W.A. redeploy it as parody, as more discerning critics have noted. Hyperbolic masculinity contests police who appear as dangerous but bumbling and effeminate clowns. Spectacular and visceral fun is had in replying to police brutality with an imagined violence of epic proportions; a theatre also performed in the contemporaneous video to 'Straight Outta Compton' which stages Eazy-E's rescue of the rest of the group from custody.

Off the pigs?While the single for 'Fuck The Police' was sufficiently popular (it charted at #37) for the group's label, Ruthless Records, to receive notice from the FBI, N.W.A. were by no means the only group of the period to address police violence and the militarist tactics widely imported from the Vietnam war and Latin American counter-insurgency operations.

But who protects me from you?We might take the L.A. riots as marking something of a historical shift in anti-police rap. Set against the background of proliferating 'three strikes' laws and Bill Clinton's massive cuts to social welfare, groups of the period tended to adopt particular sets of ingredients supplied by N.W.A.: one part claim of racist injustice - often borrowing BDP's refrain of "who protects me from you?" - one part revenge fantasy.

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