Somebody’s Gonna Pay Attention

In August 1989, Ice Cube described to Melody Maker the concept for NWA’s first music video, a video MTV had very publicly banned just months earlier. It was simple, he told the British magazine: it depicted a gang sweep. The video was a dramatization of the police raids that targeted young men like him and that had been, for years, commonplace in the black districts of South Los Angeles.¹ First employed by the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1980s, gang sweeps had become the centerpiece of Chief Daryl Gates’s “Operation Hammer,” an unprecedented show of force designed to