You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Sulfurblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Ricardo Cortez Cruz, the author of Straight Outta Compton.

It's a book recently published by the Fiction Collective, in fact, Fiction Collective 2, and the University of Colorado.

It's in paperback.

Now, I thought I'd begin by...

It's a very hot book, and it's full of fun.

And a lot of the things that go on in the book

seem to have a certain kind of raised eyebrow

about official black culture.

For instance, there's a film drama being filmed of the poem,

We Be Cool, in the course of the book.

And I wondered what your attitude was to some of the writing that precedes you

and seems to be being made fun of in the course of the book.

One of the things that I was interested in was sort of unveiling what the traditional black aesthetic has been.

And in terms of the writings that I used for my book, I looked at, I really wanted to sort of flush out, or flesh out, rather, a lot of things

concerning traditional black writings.

In some cases, when I allude to them, it's sarcastically done.

And in other cases where I allude to them, it's done to kind of detorn them, put them

...