You know that montage in Straight Outta Compton where they’re pressing copies of “Boyz In The Hood” en masse and Eazy-E is just moving boxes of the single to his car? He was taking them to places like Cycadelic Records. It was a wise business decision that unwittingly made Kim one of the first distributors of a burgeoning musical subgenre that would quickly take over the world. Kim didn’t know or care much about rap, but he ended up selling it anyway on the recommendation of a local wholesaler. One such peddler was Wan Joo Kim, a North Korean immigrant who opened Cycadelic Records at the Compton Fashion Center in 1985. “Low profit margins made store rack space too valuable to waste on unknown artists,” he explained of the big chains.Įnterprising vendors with money on their mind sold what more mainstream retailers wouldn’t touch. McDermott credits this to mom and pop shops filling a void left by the vertical integration of the music industry, which only made and promoted well-tested music they knew would make them money. Dre’s hour long mixtapes (embedded below for your listening pleasure) - could only be found at swap meets in south central Los Angeles. Before they were sold at your local record shop, the first gangsta rap albums - and its predecessors, like Dr. Yano was a big deal in the pre-NWA era of west coast rap mostly because he was one of the only people actually selling rap records in southern California at the time. “He has stuff so new it doesn’t even exist yet (not officially), stuff with no labels, no packaging, just the stamp of the new.” “He has stuff nobody else has, stuff nobody else has ever heard of,” music journalist Terry McDermott wrote of the record store owner in his 2002 Los Angeles Times Magazine cover story on the history of NWA’s early beginnings. Yano, a former school teacher, specialized in selling the hottest hip-hop and underground records. That conversation really did happen, but it took place over the phone and it was orchestrated by Steve Yano, the proprietor of a record shop at the Roadium Swap Meet, in Torrance, California, that was converted into an open air flea market/bazaar. Dre, then a broke AF DJ with World Class Wreckin’ Cru, approached Eazy-E, a local drug dealer looking to go clean so as to avoid being murdered or imprisoned, at a club and begged him to start a record label. In the spirit of honoring this landmark as it properly deserves, here’s a breakdown of why exactly the Compton Fashion Center is so important, its connection to the aforementioned artists, and why its loss should be, and is, deeply felt.Īccording to the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, NWA formed because Dr. It was also a hotbed for west coast rap, one with ties to three artists that defined the genre for their respective eras: NWA, Tupac, and Kendrick Lamar. It was a public space where hundreds of vendors - mostly people of color - made a living selling an assortment of goods until its closure in 2015. Officially known as the Compton Fashion Center, the swap meet was a former Sears store that was converted into an indoor flea market by a Korean immigrant in 1983. So, in an effort to right this wrong, I’d like to submit one specific hip hop landmark for your consideration: The Compton swap meet in Compton, California. Not only has hip hop dominated our culture for the last three decades, but its subgenres, which are very much shaped by their geography, lend themselves to this type of commemoration. It’s kind of bonkers if you think about it. For whatever reason - cough, racism - we don’t give the same geographical consideration to rap as we do to other genres (country has the Grand Ole Opry Tejano has the Day’s Inn motel room in Corpus Christi, Texas, where Selena was fatally shot). Or you could go stateside and roll with Graceland, the compound in Memphis, Tennessee that Elvis Presley built with the money made ripping off black artists or the dairy farm in upstate New York that held the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969, a music festival that defined a generation thanks to performances by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, and The Band.īut if I were to ask you to do the same for hip hop, would you be able to? You could go with the street crossing in front of London’s Abbey Road studios, made famous by the cover of The Beatles’ 1969 record, Abbey Road. After all, there are plenty to choose from. If I were to ask you to name a rock and roll historical landmark, chances are that you would have absolutely no problem answering that question.
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