WC’s Westside Reconnection

A dozen years ago, West Coast rap—back then they called it gangsta—was an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, the force behind Time-Warner’s multi-million-dollar divestment of Interscope Records and a motive for reassessing the First Amendment. This week, it’s a $30 ticket for Dub-C’s concert at the Vault 350. That’s show biz!

Of course, it always was. Transmogrifying the terror of semiautomatic gunfire through recording-studio synthesizers was just the drumroll and fanfare of choice for a particular era of selling the cultural apocalypse. Today we get the same irresistibly doomed feeling by watching TMZ.

That’s not to say that gangsta rap wasn’t real—or isn’t still. The Long Beach and Compton neighborhoods that inspired the exaggerated stories of sex and violence that were rhymed to the pumped-up and laid-back beats of funk-and-soul oldies are as filled with danger and empty of opportunity now as they ever were. As churning with creativity, too. But our short attention spans snapped and we moved on, which in the bigger picture is probably a truer harbinger of an eventual apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Dub-C is still at it, refusing to be as bygone as his musical era. What else is a guy with his initials going to do?  He was born William Calhoun in 1970, and when West Coast hip-hop began to swell in the late ’80s, WC became both code word and gang sign—for his career, a region’s music and a supercrew, Westside Connection, that he eventually formed with Ice Cube and Mack 10. From here, that looks like destiny.

Dub-C dropped his most recent solo album, Guilty by Affiliation, last summer on Ice Cube’s independent Lench Mob label. Cube’s in most of the choruses—as well as hovering ominously on the cover—while Snoop Dogg shows up on one track and The Game on another. But the impact has fallen far short of Bow Down, the Westside Connection’s multi-platinum debut, which entered Billboard’s big chart at No. 2 in November of 1996—and his work with WC and the MAAD Circle before that. It’s even a measurable fall from 2002, when Dub-C’s last effort, Ghetto Heisman, at least got a major-label release on Island Def Jam.

But that’s not to say that Dub-C isn’t as good as—or maybe even better than—he ever was, not to mention putting in the work to keep it realer than was ever necessary when the reality of West Coast hip-hop was undeniably, and seemingly effortlessly, confirmed every day on the airwaves and sales charts.

Like every musical style that preceded it, classic West Coast hip-hop has become, well, classic. Whatever it has lost in freshness is beginning to be replaced by the richness of a certain sentimentality. Now we call it gangsta with something like the affection we feel when we recall the Rat Pack. Who woulda thought that Dre and Snoop and Warren and Nate might someday be our Frank and Sammy and Dino and Joey? Dub-C’s braided beard has become a reassuring personal trademark rather than an intimidating horror mask. His skip-and-slide Crip walk is its own every-bit-as-magical version of Michael Jackson’s signature lunar skid. And speaking of Jackson, Dub-C sounds almost like a had-it-up-to-here grandpa when he disses the King of Pop to build himself up on the hard-core fairy tale “Jack & the Beanstalk,” claiming, “I’m harder than Michael Jackson’s dick in a daycare.” Not nice.

“I’m nuthin’ nice, like Fantasia with no makeup on,” Dub-C confirms on another track, the piano-fueled “Paranoid,” taking a swipe at the American Idol starlet. “On the mic, I’m an ugly-ass sight.”

Of course, he always was. It’s just that now, with all those years as perspective, we can better appreciate the beauty in that.

CLUB U-WYLD PRESENTS WC WITH ABOVE THE LAW VAULT 350 | 350 PINE AVE | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.590.5566 | VAULT350.COM | SAT 8PM | $30-60 | ALL AGES

Tags: gangsta rap, Long Beach, Music, vault 350, wc, westside connection