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Dr. Dre Beat Up Women but ‘Straight Outta Compton’ Won’t Show You That

Dr. Dre ridin’ high. Figuratively, maybe literally. Dre’s got Straight Outta Compton out now. His new record, Compton, has earned awesome reviews. Beats by Dre made him a billionaire. Life is so good that it seems so long ago he slammed a woman’s face against a wall for disrespecting him. Oh, and that time he broke his girlfriend’s nose so bad she needed surgery.

Back in 1991, Rolling Stone profiled Dre and N.W.A. for the article, “N.W.A.: Beating Up the Charts“. How very appropriate. It starts out summarizing their rise to fame but then chronicles their misogynistic and violent ways.

…the Fox TV rap video show Pump It Up ran a segment on N.W.A. in which it crosscut between members of the group dissing their former partner Ice Cube and a previous interview with Cube in which he bad-mouthed them. The members of N.W.A. decided that the clip made them look bad. On January 27th, Dre ran into Pump It Up host Dee Barnes at a record-release party in L.A.

According to a statement issued by Barnes, Dre picked her up and “began slamming her face and the right side of her body repeatedly against a wall near the stairway” as his bodyguard held off the crowd. After Dre tried to throw her down the stairs and failed, he began kicking her in the ribs and hands. She escaped and ran into the women’s restroom. Dre followed her and “grabbed her from behind by the hair and proceeded to punch her in the back of the head.” Finally, Dre and his bodyguard ran from the building.

Yea, because that’s exactly how you solve problems. To members of N.W.A., including Eazy-E and MC Ren, it was totally justified.

Far from denying the attack, the members of N.W.A. insist that, as Ren says, “she deserved it – bitch deserved it.” Eazy agrees: “Yeah, bitch had it coming.”

“Coming like a motherfucker,” Ren continues, “she shouldn’t have done that.” Barnes says that she was against running the piece in the first place, but Ren disagrees. “She’s lying,” he says. “She had something to do with it. She sure was in that scene with [Ice Cube].”

#BlackLivesMatter. Just not back then. Dre shrugged it off:

“People talk all this s**t, but you know, somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna f**k with them. I just did it, you know. Ain’t nothing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.”

Now, he hangs with Tim Cook and Jimmy Iovine. Gangsta.

Barnes, 23 at the time, sued Dre and the other guys from N.W.A. for $22.7 million. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. Talking about her lawsuit, Barnes said:

“My lawsuit is not just about one five-foot three-inch woman getting slapped around by a six-foot two-inch guy,” said Barnes. “It’s about how N.W.A rages violence against women in general. Millions of little boys listen to this crap–and they’re going to grow up thinking it’s all right to abuse women.”

Did anything change? No. Barnes dissed Dre, so she got beat. What did Dre’s ex-girlfriend, Michel’le, do to deserve her beating?

Michel’le and Dre dated from 1990 to 1996. A couple of years ago, Michel’le went on the R&B Divas LA reunion special and talked about the early incarnation of Beats by Dre. Unfortunately, these weren’t headphones Dre had in mind.

Wendy Williams interviews the cast and asked if anyone had plastic surgery. Michel’le admits she did, and it was thanks to Dre.

Michel’le: One of my boyfriends hit me and crooked it [her nose], so I had to try and straighten it and it took years because it cost a lot of money.

…my father had never told me he loved me until just the last three years, so I think I had to go back and figure that out. It’s in my book but getting beat was love to me. Believe it or not when I got with Suge he really didn’t beat me. I asked him, ‘Why aren’t you beating me? You don’t like me?’ I asked him that.

Well if it isn’t Suge, then the fingers are pointing at you Dr. Dre.

He knows it. It was very public. It was very, very public so that wasn’t a secret. I did five videos and we had to cover three black eyes. It seemed like the day before a video, I would get a black eye and we had to cover it.

Dre went on to record The Chronic, introduce Eminem to the world and design crappy headphones. Even now on his new album, Compton, Dre lets Eminem rap the lines:

Ain’t no one safe from, non-believers there ain’t none/I even make the bitches I rape come.

I can imagine Dre bobbing his head while Eminem raps those lines.

So does Straight Outta Compton talk about the Dee Barnes incident? Or any of their misogynistic ways? Ha. Right. Not with Dre and Ice Cube as producers. What is this, a church confession? Nah, it’s about showing the struggle of black men in the face of adversity, overcoming and succeeding. No one’s gonna watch a scene with Dee Barnes’ face busted up and Dre stomping her out.

This Dee Barnes beating? Merely a ‘side story’ according to director F. Gary Gray.

“We had to focus on the story that was pertinent to our main characters…

The original editor’s cut was three hours and 30 minutes long, so we couldn’t get everything in the movie. We had to make sure we served the narrative; the narrative was about N.W.A. It wasn’t about side stories.”

Oh, side stories, like how Dr. Dre punches women in the face and N.W.A. raps about fucking bitches. Well, what do you expect from F. Gary Gray. Gray’s longtime buddies with Dre and Ice Cube. Gray directed Ice Cube in Friday, and directed music videos for both Cube and Dre. You think he’s gonna bite the hand that feeds him? Not when his last movie came out six years ago. The guy needs to eat, ya know.

Even people you think would oppose Dre and N.W.A.’s misogynistic ways, really don’t seem to care. People like Oprah Winfrey.

Winfrey nearly busts a nut, calling the movie, “powerful”. Not once, but twice. And what happens when Gina McCauley, who runs the site whataboutourdaughters.com, calls her out on the misogyny in N.W.A.’s music? It’s like Oprah didn’t even hear a word. She ignores the question and remarks how ‘eye-opening’ the movie was.

So strange to hear Winfrey gush over the movie. She must not know N.W.A.’s history. Also, Winfrey endured constant sexual molestation during her teens. Sooo, maybe she’d be against this? Nope. She’s so in love with the movie, she probably wants to hand out DVDs when they come out. “And you get a copy, and you get a copy.”

Straight Outta Compton will hit #1 this weekend and everyone’s gonna ride N.W.A.’s nut sack. Universal Studios wanted a Disney ‘overcome the odds’ type story, so they left out parts of N.W.A.’s history that would’ve painted their heroes quite differently. And even the parts they did leave in turn out to be lies.

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