I was doing some research on how to respond to this story about Leimert Park, when I came upon a 1993 Rolling Stone cover story where Pulitzer Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold interviews Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg right after "The Chronic" hit the street.

Gold, one of the best Los Angeles writers - who may know this city better than Huell Howser (gasp), once ate his way down Pico Boulevard from Downton to the beach. Every Restaurant. He talked about it on This American Life last year.

Here's someone who knows the city and a year after the King riots ripped the city apart and made a mark on everyone's consciousness, Gold does a story about two rappers and where they lives and starts it this way:

"Leimert Park is the intellectual center of African American life in Los Angeles -- jazz clubs, coffeehouses, bookstores, art galleries, a theater in a fine old movie palace, the restaurants that draw people from all over town. Neatly suited Muslims stand on the street corners, offering newsletters and bean pies for sale. Reggae blasts on the record shops. Hip-hop blasts from the cars.

Here, in an Ozzie and Harriet-like Leimert Park neighborhood just a few blocks from the swank black-owned mansions of Windsor Hills, rap star Dr. Dre, wearing a black Ben Davis shirt, baggy pants and a marijuana-leaf baseball cap that advertises his best-selling album The Chronic, shrugs himself into the driver's seat of a black '64 Chevrolet Impala convertible and reaches under the dash. Suddenly, the parked car leans sharply to one side, the right body panel striking the asphalt with a violent thunk. Just as abruptly, it rights itself, and the front end of the car begins to hop up and down just as you've seen it do a thousand times on MTV."

He doesn't mention gang-infested streets, the fires of a riot, people cowering in fear. He painted the picture and then it does get more complicated. But he doesn't use the "still fresh scars" as a crutch.

Great story. You should read it. And here's the perfect ending.


It is suggested N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton is a pretty good album, too.

"To this day," Dre says, "I can't stand that album. I threw that thing together in six weeks so we could have something to sell out of the trunk."

Still, Straight Outta Compton codified the myth of the urban black gangsta and sold that myth to America.

"People are always telling me my records are violent," Dre says, "that they say bad things about women, but those are the topics they bring up themselves. This is the stuff they want to write about. They don't want to talk about the good shit because that doesn't interest them, and it's not going to interest their readers. A lot of the motherfuckers in the media are big hypocrites, you know what I'm saying? If I'm promoting violence, they're promoting it just as much as I am by focusing on it in the article. That really bugs me out -- you know, if it weren't going on, I couldn't talk about it. I mean, you will never hear me rapping about Martians coming down and killing motherfuckers, because it's not happening. And who came up with that term gangsta rap anyway?"

"Dre," I say. "You did."

"Oh, maybe so." Dre says. "Never mind, then."