It can be a letdown when LA Hood Life & Hip Hop Tours customers pass the Welcome to Compton sign and see an ice cream truck, tidy bungalows and the lot where the new Wal-Mart Supercenter's going up.

"The perception is that Compton is a very decadent, dangerous place where you got guys running around wearing red or blue, with guns and this or that. That's what they kind of expect to see," says Hodari Sababu, who runs the tour company, selling $75 tickets from a Hollywood Boulevard kiosk. "It was like that at one time. Now it is a much kinder, gentler place. You can walk through without being accosted, mostly."

The violent Los Angeles suburb the tourists pay to see has mellowed in the decades since N.W.A put it on the map in 1988 as the birthplace of gangsta rap. Today, Compton is rebranding itself as a center for commerce and affordable housing, and bracing for the Aug. 14 release of "Straight Outta Compton," a movie about the rise of N.W.A and its seminal album, whose famous lyrical salvos include "f—- tha police."