Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  Eazy was impressed with J. J. Fad when he saw them perform at Casa Camino Real. Ruthless didn’t have a female rap act on the label and there needed to be one, Eric thought, especially since pioneering New York group Salt-N-Pepa blew up with “Push It.” With J. J. Fad now under Ruthless, Dre, Arabian Prince, and DJ Yella worked together to rework “Supersonic,” and the ladies recorded this remixed version. “The cool thing about Eazy was he was about motivating you to do you. He was never the person to say do it this or that way,” said rapper-producer Gregory “Cold 187um” Hutchinson, whose group Above the Law signed to Ruthless in 1989. “He never played like he knew any more than what he knew already.”

  J. J. Fad have long been written off as a one-hit wonder, but the reality is “Supersonic” was a monster hit that really established Ruthless. From the success of that record, the burgeoning label secured the group a distribution deal with Atlantic Records’s subsidiary Atco.

  The group’s debut album, Supersonic, released in July 1988, was the first release for Ruthless. It was a huge success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and being certified gold. “Supersonic” went on to be nominated for the first Grammy awarded for Best Rap Performance in 1989, alongside Salt-N-Pepa, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, LL Cool J, and Kool Moe Dee. J. J. Fad showed up, but since the show opted to not televise the award announcement, most of the other nominees boycotted the Grammys, including the winners, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. “If they don’t want us, we don’t want them,” Salt-N-Pepa said in a statement.

  J. J. Fad gave Ruthless its first successful album, but the bright pop confections the group put out are mostly forgotten—lost in the shadows of the fiery brand of risqué rhymes that came to define Ruthless. Even to this day, J. J. Fad is often overlooked in the conversation of Ruthless’s legacy.

  With the Wreckin’ Cru behind him, Dre focused on a solo record for Eazy, aptly titled, Eazy-Duz-It. “Boyz” was still in constant rotation on KDAY, with the single selling thousands of copies each week. In Cube’s absence, MC Ren stepped up. Ren and D.O.C. pushed Eazy toward the brash gangsta archetype that would make him infamous. Eazy, the exaggerated persona of Eric Wright, only gave a fuck about pussy, money, and gangbanging and that’s it. D.O.C. penned breezy jams like the hit “We Want Eazy.” Ren wrote the album’s title track, “Ruthless Villain,” and “Radio,” which featured KDAY’s Greg Mack on the song’s intro. “What you heard is one take. Matter of fact I never got a penny off that record,” Mack laughed. “We just helped each other like that.”

  The lyrics crafted for Eazy were stellar, but he was deeply insecure about becoming the frontman—not because he lacked confidence, but he hated his voice and lacked rhythm, constantly struggling to pick up on the twisty flows that were written for him. Dre would sit behind the board with a sheet of paper and every time Eazy missed a take, he’d jot down a mark on the page. Notch. Notch. Notch. Hundreds of marks filled the page.

  “He sounded and looked like a little kid. That’s why we pushed him out front—he was the image,” said Yella, with his group members reassuring him by saying how commercial his voice was and encouraging him to continue.

  During a session for “Ruthless Villain,” Ren spent hours attempting to teach Eazy how to recite the lyrics for one particular verse to no luck. The beat was faster-paced than “Boyz” and Eazy kept stumbling over the words. He couldn’t grasp the wordplay. Ren would repeat the lines, and Eazy would try—and fail—to get it. Again. And again. And again. Dre finally got frustrated enough to tell Ren to just perform the verse.

  Sessions for Eazy-Duz-It were progressing when Jerry booked the group its first tour. He knew they needed serious promotion and a distribution deal to really get to the next level. N.W.A had ironically opened for Lonzo’s new, revamped version of World Class Wreckin’ Cru and in November 1987, the group landed a slot on the West Coast dates of the Salt-N-Pepa tour, as Jerry went looking for a partner to distribute the music.

  N.W.A was touring on the strength of a few of its early singles while Cube was away at school. He had gone to Arizona to study drafting as a fallback plan because he was unsure if anyone outside of South Central would care about what they were talking about. But the music was starting to pick up, and although Cube didn’t regret his decision to pursue a degree, he felt left out of the action. “I’d get calls from them, ‘We’re about to go to Chicago, then we fly to Atlanta.’ And I’m asking, ‘How much you all making?’ ‘They’re gonna give us $10,000 a show.’ And here I have six months of school left! That was the worst year of my life,” he said. “My dreams were leaving me behind.” When Cube finished, the nineteen-year-old fell right back into the groove, getting to work creating verses for Eazy.

  “Panic Zone,” “Dope Man,” and “8-Ball” comprised N.W.A’s first EP. To capitalize on the group’s budding popularity, Macola took the EP and fused it with an assortment of tracks Dre produced for other artists, including Eazy and the D.O.C.’s Film Fresh Crew, and packaged it as an album. “That shit was like some wack shit,” Ren said. The unauthorized bootleg, N.W.A and the Posse, was released on November 6, 1987, and sold very well, staying on the Billboard black album charts for a chunk of a year. The group was incensed as many of the tracks—high-energy party cuts mostly mirroring the work Dre did with the Wreckin’ Cru—weren’t supposed to be released. In early interviews the group even declined to discuss the album. “They ganked us, man, straight fucked us with no grease,” a miffed Eazy later said.

  GANGSTA GANGSTA

  “Oh, fuck, here we go,” Eazy said, seeing the black-and-white cop car creep to a stop. Eazy, Dre, Yella, and Jerry were in front of Audio Achievements, catching some air in between studio sessions when the cruiser pulled up to the curb. The Torrance recording studio was base camp for N.W.A in the fall of 1987 as the collective worked on Eazy-Duz-It. They were quite familiar with the studio, especially Dre and Yella, who’d recorded there with the Wreckin’ Cru before and were most often the first ones to arrive and the last to leave.

  Two officers emerged from the squad car, their right hands cautiously hovering over their pistols.

  “On your knees, hands behind your neck,” one commanded, approaching Yella. The same directive was given to Eazy and Dre by the other cop, albeit a little more forcefully.

  “What’s going on?” Jerry asked, befuddled at the casual stop-and-frisk happening in front of his eyes.

  Eazy felt his legs kicked apart as he was pinned up against the stucco facade of the studio, while Yella was forced to kneel. The officers dug into the men’s pockets, withdrawing their wallets, checking their IDs, and tossing them on the pavement before retreating to the squad car and pulling away.

  “What the hell was that?” Jerry asked, distraught by the event and the casual response he received from the guys.

  “Day in the life,” Dre told him, as they filed back into the studio, shrugging off the incident. Indeed they were all used to this, feeling like targets to a police force that saw their black bodies as a threat. Shoved up against walls, slung over the hood of squad cars, laid out on the concrete—it was all the same. The LAPD’s reputation was especially notorious among blacks in South Central: there was a good chance a cop would fuck with you if they saw you on the street. For many, it felt like a daily way of life, and change wasn’t coming. There wasn’t a single young black man growing up in South Central during the 1980s who wasn’t fed up. N.W.A decided to channel that.

  “The world was changing from ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’ to kids just don’t give a fuck,” D.O.C. said about the feelings he and the members of N.W.A felt at the time.

  Nearly a decade had passed since Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” arrived to soundtrack a movement brewing on the streets of New York, establishing a genre that would permeate pop music and become the most influential sound in American music since the birth of rock two decades before. But in 1988 as Jerry Heller worked to get a distribution deal for Ruthless and N.W.A, hip-hop
was still mostly viewed as a blip.

  Pop audiences embraced “Rapper’s Delight,” but many dismissed the ubiquitous tune as a novelty and a reminder of the glittery days of disco. All the while, rap continued to innovate with seemingly every release. A sweep of 1987 alone yields Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid in Full, Criminal Minded by Boogie Down Productions, LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer, Ice-T’s gangster-fied Rhyme Pays, and Public Enemy’s siren of a debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show—a wide sampling of how radically diverse the genre was, almost from infancy. It was the emergence of the politically and racially charged Public Enemy that showed hip-hop could be more than party starting, chasing girls, and bragging on material possessions. Public Enemy’s brand was about celebrating blackness. Their music was uplifting and empowering, while giving voice to the anger and frustration that comes with being black in America. Confrontation was a major through line of Public Enemy’s lyrics, which often provided a biting critique of societal ills. Ever provocative, their logo was a silhouette of a young black man in a rifle’s crosshairs. But while Public Enemy provided a lightening bolt to the earliest days of mainstream hip-hop, a storm was brewing out West.

  Finding a major-label distributor for N.W.A, however, wasn’t as easy as Jerry imagined. He greatly prided himself on his robust Rolodex, always bragging how he knew everybody who was anybody in the industry. Jerry thought N.W.A was a surefire thing and it was only a matter of time before he procured a deal given his deep connects. He went to Capitol, believing it aspired to become a presence in rap, given Columbia’s deal with Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin’s Def Jam Records was a game-changer. Jerry said he tried to play “Boyz-n-the-Hood” and “Dopeman” for famed label head Joe Smith and got stopped right on the spot. “What makes you think anyone is going to buy this garbage? Who’s going to listen? Tell me who is going to play it? No radio station in the world,” Smith lectured. He did, however, offer to buy the rights to the Ruthless name.

  Elektra was a no. Columbia passed. Same for Atlantic. Jerry was indignant. His pride was on the line, and rejection doesn’t bode well for a man like Jerry. He was, after all, the guy, or so he thought. Pride aside, Jerry really believed in the music and felt it was among the most important rap records he’d ever heard. Jerry knew N.W.A could change the face of pop music, if they just had the shot.

  While Jerry struggled to secure a deal, N.W.A continued to get busy in the studio. Dre worked for hours at a time, going as long as twelve hours behind the board—starting sessions at noon and keeping things moving as to not waste studio time. He was the group’s main ear, telling them what worked and what didn’t as they cut material. “He’d tell you, ‘Try to make it like this.’ You’d do it. He’d be like, ‘Cool.’ Or, ‘That’s terrible.’ Dre’d look at you like, you dumb mother . . .” Ren remembered. “We’d go in there, lock the doors, then just start working.”

  At the mixing board Dre would work on beats, Yella would work on the recorder, board, drum machines, and other equipment. Dre would stack 808s, synths, and an E-mu SP-1200 sampler, and he’d get session musicians to cover old riffs, turning to the original records if he didn’t like the sound. As Dre programmed beats, MC Ren and Cube served as the group’s lyricists with some assistance from D.O.C. Cube would also offer ideas for records to scratch. It got incredibly competitive in the studio among the guys. “Everybody in the room had great music minds. Great writing minds. There was always major competition among the ranks. Everybody had that kinda edge—Cube, Ren, Dre, Yella, everybody,” remembered Cold 187um. “Everybody was trying to showcase their wares and do their best,” D.O.C. added. “That’s why the shit was so good. It was about making great songs.”

  The competition was healthy, and there was just as much playtime going on between sessions, as they joked and bagged on each other. “They were having a ball, being young dudes just having fun,” CPO Boss Hogg said. “When the transformation came was when it was time to work. Everybody went into their mode.”

  One day, at Dre’s apartment, Cube brought up an idea for a chorus. After hearing the words “Fuck tha police,” Dre skims the lyrics and passes.

  “What else you got?” Dre asks Cube, initially dismissing the song because it isn’t something you can drink and party to. Dre’s attitude about the song changed when he and Eazy got busted by some cops for shooting paintballs at people and the officers put guns put to their heads.

  Cube initially wanted “Fuck tha Police” to be a solo number, but both Dre and Ren believed it should include the whole group, and so they all gathered with pen and paper to flesh out the song, with lyrics inspired by old-time radio courtroom dramas.

  Dre surveyed the milk crates housing his stacked record collection. Flipping through breakbeats he got from Steve Yano’s booth at the Roadium, Dre started pulling out records.

  The beats Dre was producing for N.W.A varied differently than what he did with the Wreckin’ Cru. No more dancey techno. Soul and funk samples collided with sirens and gunshots. He wanted to craft productions that sounded as dark and ominous as the streets often felt. Dre built around James Brown’s “Funky President (People It’s Bad)” and “Funky Drummer” (both are some of the most-sampled rhythmic breaks in hip-hop), Marva Whitney’s “It’s My Thing,” Roy Ayers’s “Boogie Back,” and Fancy’s “Feel Good.” The beat was aggressive, ferocious, and in-your-face, and when paired with the words Cube and Ren penned, “Fuck tha Police” was a fire-starter that played like an episode of a juicy prime-time drama.

  The scene is an easy one to imagine playing out:

  INT. COMPTON COURTHOUSE—ROOM 603—AFTERNOON

  We track backward through a wood-paneled courtroom to reveal a jury box filled with young black and Latino men. The gallery is split—on one side, there are rows of red-faced and seething police officers of varying races and on the other, black and Latino men, some of whom antagonize the officers by throwing up gang signs; a few even cradle Olde English bottles in their hand. Next to the jury box, a panel of lawyers are hastily scribbling on yellow legal pads at one table. They are huddled around a white police officer (voiced by the D.O.C.). Seated at the opposing table, DJ Yella, MC Ren, Arabian Prince, Ice Cube, and Eazy-E are dressed in suits, sunglasses and black ball caps. The entire room stands as Dr. Dre, dressed in a black silk robe, enters and sits at the bench.

  JUDGE DRE

  Right about now, N.W.A court is in full effect, Judge Dre presiding in the case of N.W.A versus the Police Department. Prosecuting attorneys are MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy-motherfucking-E. Order, order, order! Ice Cube, take the motherfucking stand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to help your black ass?

  Cube approaches the stand. He pushes away the Bible the bailiff is holding and takes a seat, the white officer rolls his eyes and mutters what sounds like the N-word under his breath. Cube is seething with anger.

  ICE CUBE

  You goddamn right!

  JUDGE DRE

  Well, won’t you tell everybody what the fuck you gotta say?

  ICE CUBE

  Fuck the police coming straight from the underground, a young nigga got it bad cause I’m brown. And not the other color so police think they have the authority to kill a minority.

  The camera pans across the jury box to show the men whooping and hollering in agreement. Some of the spectators raise middle fingers to the cops, all of whom sit their with their mouths agape as Cube continues his rant.

  Cube’s indictment is a fierce, audacious one. In just that one verse, he details the abusive cops that frequent his hood, racial profiling, police brutality, blasts black officers as more violent in a bid to impress their white counterparts, and threatens violent retribution. Ren continues the takedown, with an even angrier verse calling “the so-called law” weak before there’s a vignette with Eazy on the receiving end of harassment from a squad of officers.

  “What did I do?” Eazy pleads with the officers.

  “Just shut the fuck up—and get
your motherfucking ass on the floor.”

  Eazy was just as acidic with his verse. “Yeah, I’m a gangsta, but still I got flavor,” he brags before dismissing cops as weak and dumb. “Without a gun and a badge, what do you got?”

  The scene concludes with Judge Dre finding the white cop guilty of his crime—“bein’ a redneck, white-bread, chickenshit motherfucker.” D.O.C., voicing the offending cop, shouts movie-worthy dramatics.

  “I want justice!”

  “Fuck you, you black motherfuckers!”

  “Fuck tha Police” was one of the first songs the group put together. And it was a spark in their early recording sessions. “We were trying to see how far we could push the envelope,” Dre said. They continued to push, crafting startling vivid tales of inner-city life—from streets ravished by gang warfare and crack to beef with police. Liquor store holdups, bank robberies, drive-by shootings—the nightmares of urban life were brought to reality. Their words were piercing. The beats were menacing. And the message clear: We don’t give a fuck.

  “Do I look like a muthafuckin’ role model?” Cube proclaimed on “Gangsta Gangsta,” a track that opens with a woman being robbed of her purse before the sounds of gunfire silence her pleas. “To a kid lookin’ up to me: Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.”

  Sessions continued like this. Cube, Ren, and the D.O.C. churned out vivid ghetto noir, both brash and profane. Dre was like a Dr. Frankenstein of sorts in the studio, piecing together songs by assembling a complex weave of obscure records and breakbeats. He found funk records by Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players. A recording of Ronnie Hudson saying “In the city of Compton” got plugged in on one track, as did the Jimmy Castor Bunch, Bob James, the Honeydrippers, Kool and the Gang, Jimi Hendrix, Public Enemy, a guitar lick from Steve Arrington’s “Weak at the Knees,” and Richard Pryor’s routine “Prison.” Yella assisted him, programming the drum machine and splicing together songs. Particularly close attention was paid to how the record sounded, especially in the car. This was crucial to Dre. Since LA is a sprawling maze of highways and freeways, riding with the radio blaring was a way of life, and he wanted the music to be perfectly primed for those rides.