“Ice Cube, how’s he going to write about something he’s never been through?” Go Mack sniped a few months after Livin’ Like Hustlers’s February 1990 release. “Ice Cube had a good house, he had both a mother and father with him, he got bused to a good school. . . . The only rowdy people he knew was us. He was writing about us. What you hear on N.W.A’s album, we was in it while he was only writin’ about it.”
Cube dismissed it, remarking that “New jacks [poseurs] from Pomona should only talk about the 10 Freeway” when the reporter asked him to respond to the criticism by his one-time labelmates. The quote infuriated Above the Law, with its members coming to physical blows with Cube and his squad, Da Lench Mob, on multiple occasions, including a melee at the 1990 New Music Seminar at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square that has become hip-hop legend.
“For me and my crew, that was really messed up, because we were really from the streets. We made our beans coming up as dope dealers—that wasn’t a secret to nobody. We’ve never been on the outside looking in, so when he made that statement, it escalated from me and him having a fight to him and his clique in New York, us having a big brawl with them,” Cold 187um said. “A lot of people think it had something to do with us having animosity with him leaving. Nope. For him to disrespect our background and where we are from? He could have said we were wack and our beats ain’t worth nothing and we probably wouldn’t have cared, but when he talking about we new jack niggas and we ain’t about nothing, we not really cut like that. And at the time we’re fresh off the block, so we had to handle our business. We were so close knit that a lot of things that happened, they could turn physical not because of the business but because of the personal ties people had. You don’t poke at that kinda stuff, so the deed got done. But I love my brother, don’t get it twisted.”
“I was like, ‘Yo, we can’t do business together, but we can still be homies.’ I was a little naïve on that tip until I saw that there was true venom there,” Cube said of the beef. “Then my attitude changed.”
The same year Ruthless signed Above the Law, the label also drafted a female rapper from Anaheim named Tairrie B. Born Theresa Beth, she got her start as a part of a female dance-rock duo called Bardeux, departing after the release of debut single, “Three-Time Lover,” in 1987 to go solo. In 1989 she was introduced to Jerry Heller backstage at an N.W.A show. Jerry, having learned the curvy blonde was an artist, told her to drop by Audio Achievements with some music. Her demo was only one song, a spin on Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” but Eazy offered to sign her on the spot. Tairrie was the first white female rapper to get a major deal.
Eazy signed her to a sublabel he was starting called Comptown Records that would be distributed by MCA. As house producer for Ruthless, Dre was expected to oversee the album while Cube penned its lyrics, a plan that changed after he left the label. Tairrie and Dre didn’t work well together, often butting heads in the studio. The newbie didn’t care about Dre’s status, if she didn’t like something she stood her ground to Dre. Tairrie wanted to handle production of the album herself, tapping Schoolly D, Bilal Bashir, and Quincy Jones III to assist.
As became customary for new Ruthless signees, N.W.A was supposed to appear on the project’s final track—like D.O.C.’s “The Grand Finale” and “The Last Song” on Above the Law’s debut. Eazy had the idea for a record called “I Ain’t Your Bitch,” in which the members of N.W.A would take turns calling Tairrie a bitch, and then she’d respond on the last verse.
“Fuck that,” she thought.
Instead, Tairrie came up with “Ruthless Bitch.” On the record she flipped the slur into a term of empowerment: “ ‘Bitch’ means ‘being in total control of herself,’ ” she declared on the eight-minute, guest-free track built around a sample of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”
Aside from attempting to remove the power from the word “bitch” and turn the tables on the misogyny that ran rampant in hip-hop, and especially intensely from her labelmates, Tairrie also dedicated a verse to throwing jabs at Dre. “If your name ain’t on it, then my record won’t hit. If you don’t produce it, it ain’t legit,” she rapped.
Dre was outraged when he heard the track, especially her digs about his time in the Wreckin’ Cru in a line that included the use of a slur that’s long been used to degrade gay men. And when the two crossed paths at a Grammys after-party in downtown LA, a screaming match ensued before Tairrie alleges that Dre punched her twice—once in the mouth, and then in the eye—before security intervened. “He hit me like Tyson, but I took it,” she said. “I don’t know how.”
Tairrie declined to press charges against Dre, saying she did so after being advised her record would get caught up in the drama and likely shelved. She rerecorded “Ruthless Bitch” after the Zeppelin sample didn’t clear and added a reference to the attack, which Dre has never publicly commented on.
“It takes a punk motherfucker to play himself / Your best shot was weak, I didn’t need no stitches,” she rapped.
Tairrie filmed videos for “Murder She Wrote” and “Swingin’ Wit T” for Power of a Woman, the sole record she would cut for Eazy’s short-lived Comptown Records before being released from the label and walking away from rap altogether. Tairrie would later resurface as a rock artist, fronting a number of heavy-metal bands.
The split between Ice Cube and N.W.A could have remained a quiet, amicable one—instead it boiled into a nasty feud.
In the spring of 1990, Spin tackled the group’s fallout in a feature that, strangely, called them “Niggers with Activators” and questioned if N.W.A’s soul and intelligence left with Cube. In the piece Cube detailed the financial dispute and questioned Jerry Heller’s motives. Jerry, in turn, accused Cube of being jealous of Eazy. “He wanted to be Eazy-E. He was jealous because not only is Eazy a key member of N.W.A with a successful solo career, he’s also the president of his own record company. Eazy-E is a major star and a successful businessman. Ice Cube isn’t.”
When asked how things were in the group without their most vocal member, Eazy said the dynamic had vastly improved. “It means we get more money,” he told a reporter.
“Yeah, it got better,” Ren agreed. “Way better. Cause there ain’t no ego trips in the group no more.”
And Dre even went as far as saying it was his production prowess that made Cube a star: “You could’ve grabbed anybody off the street that could rhyme and could’ve been a fuckin’ Ice Cube,” he said, claiming Cube sounded good only because he dialed him in a line at a time the way he did with Eazy.
When N.W.A returned to the studio to record its next project, an EP called 100 Miles and Runnin’ as the follow-up to Straight Outta Compton, Cube was across the country recording his solo debut. Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted dropped a month after that Spin article aired out the group’s dirty laundry. Although Cube said nothing about his former group on wax, N.W.A didn’t extend the same courtesy.
100 Miles and Runnin’ is a largely forgettable entry in N.W.A’s canon and is mostly talked about for the jabs the guys took at Cube. “Just Don’t Bite It” was a rancid joint about a woman who gave terrible fellatio. It was crass, but the chorus was brilliant. Dre yanked a piece of a dirty recording from comedian LaWanda Page—“It’s the world’s biggest dick”—while the group chants back “Don’t matter, just don’t bite it.” There was also “Sa Prize,” a quasi-sequel to “Fuck tha Police” that added very little to the original.
For the title song, Dre leaned on his Public Enemy influence to craft a track that was loaded with breakbeats and dialed up with noises and horns. He sampled Michael Jackson’s seminal “Thriller,” alongside an arsenal of records including Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run” and “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” by Funkadelic, the usage of which became embroiled in a landmark case that has helped define American copyright law for recorded music—“Get a license or do not sample,” the court ruled. The track opened the five-song EP and featured the first of a few digs at C
ube.
“It started with five but yo, one couldn’t take it,” Dre rapped. “So now there’s four ’cause the fifth couldn’t make it.”
Later on the EP, on a record called “Real Niggaz,” they further antagonize Cube by likening him to Benedict Arnold, the canonical example of a traitor.
Shots were officially fired. “For them to come out on they shit . . . and diss me, that was they attitude,” Cube shrugged. He was disappointed, no doubt—but he also knew he needed to hit back, harder.
“I want you all to hear this song,” Priority Records head Bryan Turner said to the group, after calling them into his office one day.
Turner pressed play on “Jackin’ for Beats,” which Cube planned on including on Kill at Will, his first EP, which Priority was releasing in December 1990 to capitalize on the breakout success of his debut, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. “I’ll have you marks a hundred miles and running,” Cube sneers at the end of track.
To promote 100 Miles and Runnin’, N.W.A agreed to do an interview on Fox’s Pump It Up in October 1990. The hip-hop show debuted the year prior as a response to the reception of Yo! MTV Raps and was hosted by Dee Barnes, a member of the Afrocentric girl group Body & Soul. On the weekly show Barnes profiled hot acts like De La Soul, Beastie Boys, Heavy D, and Biz Markie.
N.W.A weren’t granting many interviews at that time, but Barnes had a strong rapport with Dre since the two had worked together before (she categorically denies an assertion he made that they had been romantically involved). Dre coproduced a demo for her duo back during the days when he tinkered in Lonzo’s studio. Body & Soul also sang on “We’re All in the Same Gang,” the star-studded single Dre produced earlier that year to promote peace between warring LA gang factions—and was among the first records nominated for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group by the Recording Academy.
Barnes’s interview with the group went down and about a week later. Barnes was on the set of the film Boyz n the Hood to interview Cube’s protégé Yo-Yo. Boyz n the Hood was the directorial and screenwriting debut of John Singleton, who was fresh out of USC’s film program. He had written a drama about a group of friends coming of age during the eighties in drug-, gang-, and crime-infested South Central, and paid Eazy $50,000 for the rights to use the title for the film. Singleton met Cube in 1989 while he was a directing intern on the Arsenio Hall Show and the rapper was his first choice for the role of Doughboy, one of the film’s leads and a tragic character based on a childhood friend. The director actually wanted the entire group to appear, but Cube was the only one who took him seriously—and even that took convincing.
Cube was on-set while Barnes was interviewing Yo-Yo, who also appeared in the film as well as on its soundtrack, and he playfully crashed the segment. With cameras rolling he made a snarky comment about his former group, ridiculing their EP the way he did on “Jackin for Beats.” “I got all you suckers a hundred miles and runnin’,” Cube chided before taking a subliminal shot at D.O.C. by shouting him out and mocking the gravelly voice he was left with after his near-fatal accident the year prior. When Pump It Up aired the N.W.A interview, Cube’s quick diss was tacked on to the end of the segment, despite Barnes’s insistence that it not run at all.
N.W.A was fuming. Barnes had no control over how the show was edited, and even though they dissed him during their interview, they were blindsided by Cube’s remark and blamed the show’s host for it.
Two months later, on January 27, 1991, Barnes and Dre were at a record-release party for female Gangsta-rap duo Bytches with Problems at Hollywood’s Po Na Na Souk club. Dre made his way to Barnes, who was standing against a wall near a record promoter and MTV host Ed Lover. Dre, who said he was drunk that night, confronted her about the segment. Words were exchanged, and things escalated. Dre grabbed her by the front of her shirt, she said, with his bodyguard punching the club promoter in the jaw when he stepped in to intervene.
“Then Dre picks me up by my hair and ear and starts slamming my face up against a wall,” Barnes said. “It was a brick wall.”
Dre began kicking her in the ribs, and then stamped on her fingers. He then tried to toss her down a flight of stairs, she says. Barnes managed to flee to a bathroom in the club, but he moved in on her and continued his attack, bashing her in the back of the head.
The room was packed with partygoers, and yet no one bothered to help.
After the incident, Barnes continued to host the show, wearing dark sunglasses to cover up the bruises on her face. Dre told the Source that she called him up to say she wouldn’t pursue charges so long as he produced a handful of songs for her without putting his name on them. Dre agreed but claimed Barnes later reneged on the deal and, instead, asked for $1 million. “I was like, ‘What? Fuck you, take me to court.’ Next thing I know, the shit is in every motherfuckin’ newspaper there is and I’m in court,” Dre said.
To the other members, the brutal assault was a joke. Ren said Barnes “deserved it.” Eazy bragged that the “bitch had it coming.”
“He grabbed the bitch by the little hair that she had. Threw the bitch to the bathroom door. Pow! She hit her head. He just start stomping on the bitch,” Eazy giggled. “Threw the bitch down a flight of stairs! Bitch didn’t even know her name!”
“People talk all this shit, but you know, somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them,” Dre told Rolling Stone. “I just did it, you know. Ain’t nothing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain’t no big thing—I just threw her through a door.”
Barnes, who was twenty-three at the time, pressed charges against Dre and filed a civil suit against the group seeking $22.7 million in damages for assault and battery, infliction of emotional distress, and defamation.
Dre pleaded no contest to battery charges. He received a $2,500 fine, 240 hours of community service, probation, was ordered to pay $1,000 to a victims’ restitution fund, and required to film an antiviolence public-service announcement. The civil suit was settled out of court for six figures.
In the years since, Barnes has become an advocate for women in hip-hop. She hardly worked in entertainment again after the attack, and has claimed the incident got her blacklisted from the music business.
APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION
Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was one of the hottest records to come out in 1990, a year that saw seminal works from Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and LL Cool J. It made the stakes high for N.W.A and its first project without Cube, which arrived just three months later. After the release of 100 Miles and Runnin’ the group began working on its follow-up album, Efil4zaggin (Niggaz4life backward). Coming off a debut as successful and disruptive as Straight Outta Compton would have been tough for any act. N.W.A had benefitted a great deal from the many controversies that came with the album’s unflinching lyrics about life in the ghettos of South Central. But the man who was largely responsible for bringing such vivid, startling realism to those narratives was now gone. Though they were down a key member, N.W.A was hell-bent on showing it hadn’t lost any of its edge, that they weren’t a fluke. Cube’s departure, while downplayed by some members, had placed a considerable strain on the rest of the group—stress that went beyond creative differences.
“There was tension all through that album,” Dre recalled. “We were just arguing back and forth about the business—when before, our arguments were whose gonna say what on the track.”
The source of this new tension? A man named Marion “Suge” Knight.
Raised on the East Side of Compton, Suge was a charismatic mama’s boy who was fiercely protective of his older sisters (with the help of his uncles, he once went after a guy a decade older than him that punched his sister in the eye). Growing up in an area dominated by the Pirus Bloods, he had seen the destruction of gang violence and drugs firsthand—even claiming he and his friends would pickpocket the dead bodies they stumbled upon in the neighborhood and buy candy with the stolen bounty. Suge, though, never fell into gangs, despite h
aving relatives that were Crips and Bloods. Nobody in the hood fucked with him because he was built like a tank before he was twelve. In high school, Suge enjoyed being a local football and track star. After graduating from Lynwood High School, he attended El Camino College on a football scholarship before later transferring to University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a powerful defensive end.
“As soon as I was old enough, I told myself that I’d never live, or end up dying, in a place like that. There’s no respect in poverty: Anyone who ever says that talks bullshit,” Suge once said about growing up in South Central. “I made up my mind that I wanted everything, and nothing would stop me.” Football was his ticket out but in spite of two impressive seasons at UNLV, he failed to get drafted. Suge did, however, have a short-lived career in the NFL when he played two games with the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the strike season of 1987. And then the trouble started. In October of that year he was arrested and charged with domestic violence after his future wife, Sharitha Golden, said he grabbed her by the hair and cut off her ponytail during an argument. Two weeks later he was charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting a man twice while trying to steal his car. It was dropped to a misdemeanor and he pled no contest and avoided jail. Suge even callously boasted about how he used the victim’s own gun to shoot him.
With his football career over, he put his formidable size to use and turned to security work at the Forum before he was hired as R & B star Bobby Brown’s bodyguard. Eventually he moved into promoting shows in LA. Suge met the D.O.C. through their mutual friend, Andre “LA Dre” Bolton, a keyboardist who played on many Ruthless records. Suge and D.O.C. became fast friends. They ran the streets with their hard-partying ways. Suge would get an underage D.O.C. into nightclubs, and he often found himself knocking out dudes when D.O.C. got drunk and did boneheaded things like slap a woman on her butt or pick a fight. “They wanted me to be the gangster, so I acted like one, knowing that if anybody said anything wrong to me, Suge would beat the shit out of them,” D.O.C. said. “I played the role.”
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