CUBE CURATES THE COAST

In this Rolling Stone sidebar to the backstory of the Straight Outta Compton film, Ice Cube runs down 10 songs to introduce listeners (or, to be fair, extraterrestrials) to West Coast hip hop.

As you can see, most of these are related to the N.W.A family tree, including his own, Dre's and Eazy-E's solo work, but Cube also gives a shout-out to Ice-T for "the birth" of the form. T attracted a firestorm of his own with "Cop Killer," the thrash tune by his band Body Count, in 1992; the same cadre of self-styled moral crusaders who'd condemned N.W.A called for his head as well. Like Dre and Cube, Ice-T ended up squarely in the mainstream—as righteous cop Fin Tutuola on TV's long-running Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance" has of course survived as a mainstay of dance-party playlists ever since; it's worth pointing out that the group's initial squad including a young dancer named Tupac Shakur.