It’s that same feeling that any white hip-hop fan has when rapping along to their favourite tunes and the “N” word pops up.

I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be an excellent idea to actually give them the opportunity to actually go to some of these places that the rappers are talking about? Not only go there but be safe and be able to jump out and take pictures in Compton and South Central that they can take back home with them?Ĭoming up with an angle for this article was quite difficult. In the words of Hodari, when asked by Hollywood Reporter why he started these tours: Hodari runs the tours with a few friends of his – I, along with a teenage hip-hop fan and his mum from Boston, were driven around by Hodari’s friend James, a Compton born and bred boxer. Hodari Sababu, stepfather of rapper The Game, runs a company called LA Hood Life Tours, which gives people the opportunity to drive through the hood with a local, learn about the area, and see some of the places referenced in all of those West Coast hip-hop songs, and of course, the movie Straight Outta Compton. I grew up listening to hip-hop, and coming of age in the 1990s meant that there was a lot of West Coast hip-hop involved. LOS ANGELES | Visiting “The Hood”, and Compton and South Central (called South Los Angeles today) in particular, is one of the many reasons that Los Angeles was on my list of cities to travel to for a long time.

Hood lawhead