Straight Outta Compton

When people hear the city of Compton they think of a lot of different things. Some think of Crime, poverty, police brutality, drug trafficking, racial problems, but some people think of it as home. For this project I am going to be using communication theories to analyze and look at a group of people who called Compton “home” and the everyday struggle that they were born into. The movie I will be analyzing is Straight Outta Compton. This is a movie about an early rap group from the city of Compton and how they did something nobody else had done at the time. The theory’s I will be using are muted group theory, social learning theory, standpoint theory, cognitive dissonance theory, cultural studies, and uses and gratification theory.

The movie starts by introducing the guys showing what they were like before they came to fame. First there is Easy E who is selling drugs and asking for his money. A guy pulls out a gun on him and Easy E threatens the guy’s mom to get him to give him the money. Then the cops show up with a battering ram to raid the drug house, but they had someone on the roof tops who watches out for cops all day and gives them a loud gang whistle, so they knew the cops were coming. The scene cuts out to Easy E escaping on roof tops. This is a good representation of the day to day life that they lived trying to make money. Before they came to fame, they made money by doing what they have learned from everybody around them their whole life and that is crime. This is social learning theory, Albert Bandura the man who made this theory said, “Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” The people that you are around the most impact you the most. For these boys who have grown up in Compton their whole life and only experienced drugs and running from the cops they are pretty good at it. It is hard for a boy born in Compton into a low-income family to live a life that is not filled with crime since that he will likely be around peers who are a part of it.

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Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press.