COLUMN ONE : Violence Tops the Charts : Death Row Records has become a music industry powerhouse fueled by ‘gangsta rap.’ The success of the firm’s founders and top star continues despite their troubles with the law.

One night last month two incidents--a music award and a killing--pointed up the relationship between artistry and violence that defines Death Row Records, the nation’s hottest producer of “gangsta rap” music:

The debut album of Snoop Doggy Dogg, Death Row’s charismatic superstar, took top honors at the Soul Train Music Awards. A few hours after the show, a 28-year-old fan was fatally stomped at a party the company threw for its out-of-town retailers and promoters.

The slaying was the latest example of how Death Row’s meteoric rise has been marked by violence and legal problems involving its key figures.

In just three years, Death Row has grown from an unknown operation run by two young men from the Compton area into the most profitable and influential company in the increasingly mainstream world of rap.

Death Row’s music transforms the macho subculture of Southern California’s black street gangs into a driving funk sound that has captured an audience of millions of young people of all races, from the inner city to suburbia. In 1993 and 1994, the firm--which is affiliated with media giant Time Warner--grossed a total of $90 million from the sale of tapes, CDs and merchandise.

With a corporate logo of a hooded man in an electric chair, the Westwood-based company has thrived under its co-owners: Andre (Dr. Dre) Young, 29, the architect of gangsta rap and one of the nation’s most respected music producers, and Marion Knight, 28, a former college football star turned rap entrepreneur.

But with success has come trouble for them and for their top star, Snoop Doggy Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Broadus.

Broadus, 23, faces a murder trial this month in the 1993 killing of a 20-year-old man in a Palms park. Broadus was at the wheel of a parked Jeep when his bodyguard shot the man, police say. Broadus says the bodyguard fired only after the man threatened them with a gun.

Long Beach police files identify Broadus as a member of the Long Beach Insane Crips, a notorious street gang. But he has told interviewers that he never was a member, although he says he hung out on the gang’s fringes.

Young is serving a five-month term in Pasadena City Jail for violating the probation he received after breaking another rap producer’s jaw in 1992. He also was convicted of hitting a New Orleans police officer in a 1992 hotel brawl and of slamming a TV talk-show host into a wall at a Hollywood club in 1991.

Knight was charged with assault with a deadly weapon in a 1992 altercation with two aspiring rappers at a Hollywood recording studio. One rapper said Knight hit him with a gun and fired a shot at him. Knight pleaded no contest to the charges this February and was sentenced to five years probation plus 30 days in a halfway house on a work-furlough program, which he will begin serving this month.

But their real-life run-ins with the law pale in comparison to some of their more outrageous works. In a video for their song “Natural Born Killaz,” Young and rapper Ice Cube alternately belt out lyrics from atop a pile of human bones and re-enact the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman and Kitty and Jose Menendez.

“America loves violence. America is obsessed with murder,” Young has said. “I think murder sells a lot more than sex. They say sex sells. I think murder sells.”

The company’s products have intensified the nationwide debate over the artistic and social merits of gangsta rap. Critics maintain that such music glamorizes gang violence for profit.

“I know it doesn’t bother their fans, but I think it’s loathsome that these guys make money bragging about being criminals,” said one prominent record industry executive, who requested anonymity.

Fans praise the music as honest, if unsettling, portrayals of inner-city life. “I like the way Dr. Dre lays it down and puts the music together,” said 24-year-old John Hamilton, a graduate student at Loyola Marymount University who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles. “I’m not a gangbanger, but as far as the lyrics of (Death Row’s) rappers go . . . I can relate to about 80% of what they are talking about.

“I think they are just our own ghetto reporters,” said Hamilton, who buys all of Death Row’s records as soon as they hit the stores. “And if you don’t know what’s going on in the ‘hood, they will run it down for you.”

Indeed, Death Row hasn’t forgotten the ‘hood. The firm has donated $500,000 to a South-Central anti-gang program and its stars have denounced gang violence.

“Nobody in the media ever asks me how I feel about what’s goin’ on in the ‘hood, but I wish the gang violence would stop,” said Broadus. “More of us just keep droppin’ every day. I mean, what’s the game here? Ain’t nobody gettin’ rich off ridin’ around the ‘hood shootin’ each other up.”

Death Row’s artists are hardly the only rappers to get in trouble with the law. But industry observers are divided over whether their notoriety pumps up sales.

“It’s hard to say whether or not Snoop’s run-ins with the law have boosted his sales--because everybody expected his debut album to be huge anyway,” said Geoff Mayfield, director of sales charts at Billboard Magazine, the music industry’s leading trade journal. “But what might otherwise have been construed as negative publicity for anybody else did not hurt Snoop’s sales impact whatsoever.”

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From a 48-track recording studio in his $1-million Calabasas home, Young--the creative locomotive behind Death Row--has pumped out a stream of hits that have cemented his reputation as the rap equivalent of Phil Spector, the brilliant 1960s record producer.

Young is known as a gifted innovator who created a new sound by smoothing out rap’s pile-driver beat with an overlay of 1970s-style funk. His studio talents attract frequent producing offers from pop stars such as Madonna. But he has chosen instead to work with unknown artists, who often write the controversial lyrics to his songs.

Young began his career in the mid-1980s as a deejay in Compton dance clubs, learning the rudiments of record engineering while many of his friends gangbanged.

He later helped assemble the trail-blazing rap group N.W.A. It rose to fame with an underground hit titled “F--- Tha Police,” an angry attack on police harassment that was bitterly criticized by the FBI and police groups for allegedly encouraging violence against officers.

Young masterminded N.W.A.’s 1989 breakthrough album, “Straight Outta Compton,” and produced its 1991 crossover hit, “Efil4zaggin”--”niggaz4life” spelled backward--which was the first hard-core rap collection to reach No. 1 on the pop charts. His productions account for sales of more than 18 million albums.

Broadus, Young’s protege, was raised in a tough east Long Beach neighborhood dominated by the Crips. As a child, he sang in the choir of a storefront church. But by the time he reached high school, he has said, he was selling drugs on the street. Less than a month after his high school graduation, he was in jail on a drug charge.

Chastened by that experience, Broadus concentrated on becoming a professional musician. He put together a popular Long Beach rap and R&B; trio whose members sold homemade tapes out of their cars.

One tape fell into the hands of Young, whose producing expertise soon had Broadus’ voice blaring out of boomboxes from Compton to Harlem on the soundtrack of “Deep Cover,” a 1992 movie about an undercover Los Angeles drug agent.

Since then, Broadus has become the most popular act in rap. His 1993 album “Doggystyle” sold a spectacular 803,000 copies in its first week. That figure was the third-highest for a debut album in recent years, trailing only Pearl Jam’s “Vs.” and “Vitalogy,” according to SoundScan, a firm that monitors music sales. Last year, Broadus’ U.S. sales outpaced those of such pop icons as Madonna and Prince.

Knight is Death Row’s management star. The son of a truck driver, he was an All-American defensive end and dean’s list honoree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He later played briefly with the Los Angeles Rams but dropped football to work as a concert promoter.

He began amassing his fortune in 1989, creating a music publishing company and hiring a stable of unknown songwriters. Acquiring ownership rights to their work, Knight made a financial killing when some of his songs were used by white rapper Vanilla Ice on his smash-hit debut album.

Knight met Young in 1990, not long before N.W.A. broke up over financial disputes.

At the time, Young was still under contract to Ruthless Records, headed by rapper Eric Wright, known as Eazy-E, another N.W.A. founder who died March 26 of complications of AIDS. Knight told Young that he wasn’t being paid enough by Ruthless and offered to negotiate a richer contract for him with another label.

Young decided to leave Ruthless. But the firm later sued Knight, contending that he and two other men armed with baseball bats forced Wright to release Young from his contract. The suit eventually was dismissed by a federal judge.

In early 1992, Knight and Young began recording Young’s album “The Chronic,” a title that in street slang refers to particularly potent marijuana. They shopped the album to various distribution companies, but none was willing to take a chance on the two young African Americans.

Later that year, a talent scout from Interscope Records--now half-owned by Time Warner’s Atlantic Group--approached Young to produce records. Knight and Young negotiated a $10-million deal with Interscope to distribute their records and to finance Death Row’s start-up. In a shrewd move, Knight and Young retained all publishing and recording rights, allowing them to pocket their label’s profits in perpetuity.

Since then, Death Row has mushroomed into the most successful company in rap, with sales of Young’s and Broadus’ albums surpassing 10 million.

With its huge popular appeal, Death Row has changed the recording industry itself, observers said. It has paved the way for more African American artists to demand not only creative autonomy but economic control in a business in which blacks often are denied the full fruits of their labors.

“Death Row is the only label that can do whatever they want right now,” said Sean (Puffy) Combs, a former MCA Records talent scout who last year launched his own rap label with financing from a German conglomerate, Bertelsmann Music Group. “Since they are selling so many albums, record stores and record labels have to listen.”

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To some listeners, Death Row’s “reality rap” is a powerful musical depiction of the brutal, fatalistic warfare among Los Angeles gang “sets” and of the struggles of young black street hustlers to survive.

To others, the music is a for-profit celebration of murder, mayhem and misogyny.

With its violent imagery and obscenity-laden lyrics, gangsta rap has provoked sharp debate since 1992, when the record industry clamped down on “incendiary” rap in reaction to controversy over Ice-T’s “Cop Killer.”

Critics said the song glorified the murder of police officers, and then-President George Bush sided with law enforcement groups protesting Time Warner’s release of the record. The company stopped distributing the song at Ice-T’s request after police groups protested.

Ice-T left the label soon after, triggering an exodus of gangsta rappers, including Da Lench Mob and Paris, from other Time Warner-affiliated companies. Following Time Warner’s lead, Sony and MCA dropped controversial rappers. Most of the artists formed their own labels.

Under Death Row’s deal with Interscope, Young was forced to delete such anti-police lyrics from “The Chronic” as: “Mr. Officer, I want to see you layin’ in a coffin, sir.” But critics complain that Interscope has done nothing to ban lyrics that depict ghetto youths murdering one another.

“They say they’re just describing reality, but I think they glorify and glamorize violence and promote it in such a way that they make it seem fashionable,” said C. Delores Tucker, head of the Washington, D.C.-based National Political Congress of Black Women.

But she added: “This isn’t just about Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre, though. . . . To me, gangsta rap is really an indictment of our society. American culture has not given young men like them any alternative but to earn money this way. This is the culture they grew up in, and they see it as their only entry into the workplace.”

Defenders said Death Row’s music is a legitimate, if hard-edged, commentary on the gun violence, drug abuse, despair and anger that afflict the inner city.

“I think their music is more the result of violence” than a cause, said USC professor Todd Boyd, who is writing a book about black popular culture and gangsta rap.

Boyd and others said Death Row is merely doing what Hollywood movie-makers have done for decades: telling stories that happen to have violence as a theme--and making bales of money doing so.

Because they are black, gangsta rappers are judged by a double standard, Young maintained.

“You don’t hardly ever hear anybody hollering about Oliver Stone or Martin Scorsese or Clint Eastwood and all the violence in their work,” he said. “To me, the records and the videos we make are just pure entertainment. . . . I think the main reason that people keep coming down on us is because we’re young and we’re black and we’re in charge of what we do.”

But for Death Row, images of violence turned sickeningly real March 14 at a Mid-Wilshire nightclub where the record company threw a post-Soul Train party attended by hundreds of fans.

Despite the presence of 20 security guards, a dispute broke out on the dance floor just after 1 a.m. A group of men began beating Kelly Jamerson, a roofer from South-Central Los Angeles, stomping him until he was covered with blood. He died less than 12 hours later at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Broadus and some friends were leaving the club at the time of the fight, and Knight was trying to calm the crowd, witnesses said. So far, no arrests have been made.

Knight insists Death Row and its artists have learned from their brushes with violence at the nightclub party and elsewhere.

“When you come from where we come and you’re headed to where we’re going, you don’t just suddenly lose the baggage you started out with on the trip,” he said. “Death Row got so successful so fast, and there’s a lot of resentment out there from people who want to bring us down.

“The goal for us is to get over that hump, to escape the trouble, to leave it behind us and move safely into the future. It isn’t just a fluke that Death Row made it this far. Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us now.”