From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

So if your knowledge of NWA only comes to the movie straight out of Compton,

where if you go all the way back to the 80s, you would be remiss to miss out on this terrific new book.

Parental Discretions Advise, the rise of NWA and the Donner Gangster Rapids.

Writer is Garrick D. Kennedy, music writer for the LA Times. I'm thrilled to have you here. It was funny. One of the things I was thinking about this book starts reading, you can almost call the book Ruthless Records, just because

there's so much ruthlessness in this book, isn't it? Right. Yeah. It's very Shakespearean almost,

and that's sort of kind of when I was thinking of the proposal years ago right before the film came

out was sort of this idea of doing this, you know, in like three acts, like a classic

Shakespeare drama, just because there was so much that the guys, you know, had done to each

other and also the things that were happening against them. But ultimately, I really wanted

to approach it as part history, book, and part bio. And I let that just sort of kind the rest

of it. So it did change really

quickly. But yeah, that Shakespeare and idea of is like just from the ruthlessness of what was going

down at the time was like really what geared the original proposal for the book.

It's so funny you say that because I was reading it. It was thinking it reminded me of Henry the

fourth part one and easy could be Hotspur.

I mean, really, I really think about it like that. But again, I thought, first of all,

this book goes so deep in the crazy, even brings up somebody I thought, a name I never thought I'd say out loud again, Terry B. Oh, my gosh, right? And it even details M.C. Wren's history of the group and his own attempts to make records.

And what's so interesting to me about the book is that you really make it a book about community and about what this group meant to L.A.

And so much, let me ask you this to start off with because as a family of work, I'm not going to get into asking you why you think Ed Sharon is a modern

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