32 years after its release, streams of N.W.A's 'Fuck tha Police' are surging once again during the nation’s George Floyd protests. “A lot of people would be happy that they song gets streamed,” says MC Ren, “but it’s unfortunate”
Streams of “Fuck tha Police” surged in late 2014 and early 2015 — according to Alpha Data, the analytics provider that powers the charts — as people protested and mourned the deaths of many unarmed black men who died from the actions of policemen, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and Freddie Gray, in Baltimore.
“It seemed like all throughout junior high school, high school, [police] would just fuck with you for no reason,” Ren says. “It was like, if you black, you young, you in the hood, you in the ghettos of America, you just get fucked with. What you hear on the record is all the frustration, all the times getting harassed, getting pulled over for no reason at all, getting disrespected, having them try to disrespect your parents all because of your skin color.
“We would go to the studio, Dre would put the beat on, and Cube would go in the corner and I would go in the corner and we would just write our shit,” Ren remembers. “When we was doing ‘Fuck tha Police,’ we didn’t know it would be as big as it was. We knew we wasn’t getting airplay.”to Priority Records complaining about the song. “Law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to the protection of our citizens,” it read, “and recording such as the one from N.W.
Despite the controversy, N.W.A usually kept the song out of their set lists when they performed live. The moviedepicts one of the rare times the group played it, in Detroit in 1989, when authorities there specifically told them not to. “The police chased us down and threw us in a little room and we sat there for an hour,” the D.O.C. recalls. “And then they come ask everybody for autographs. I think everybody but Cube obliged. He was the only guy that said, ‘Fuck y’all.
“There ain’t no right,” he says. “Today, you could have all the money in the world, [but] to the police, if they pull you over, you just a nigga. So you don’t have no rights. Like KRS-One once said,This problem is not gonna go away until people realize how big a problem it is and how the problem got created. A lot of people don’t want to talk about it. But hopefully with all this protests worldwide, it will make people want to talk more. Because if they don’t, it’s gonna be a bigger problem.
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