Eazy’s pockets were well greased from the success of The Chronic, but to anyone on the outside looking in, the optics were humiliating. Both Cube and Dre walked away from what they had built with Eazy and found even success without him. Eazy, of course, had listened to The Chronic, flipping through it in the studio one day, surrounded by groupies. “This shit is wack,” he sneered to Ren, with his hangers-on joining the chorus.
“Nigga, this shit is hard,” Ren countered.
Eazy knew a real game-changer would be an N.W.A reunion album; it would be massive, given all the guys had gone through and what they meant to rap. Earlier in the year at a premiere for Chris Rock’s N.W.A parody/mockumentary CB4, he announced to Yo! MTV Raps host Fab Five Freddy that the group was getting back together without Dre because they were “staying sucka free.” Ren looked uncomfortable during the exchange and when asked if he was down, he tactfully said if they all couldn’t sit and talk about it like men then he wouldn’t be involved. He balked at the idea altogether when Eazy told him the album would be produced by Yella, Cold 187um, and new producers he’d recruit. “I wasn’t about to rap over any nigga’s beat back then . . . I mean, how you gonna go from the top muthafucka to that?” Ren said.
Granted, Eazy’s deal he brokered with Death Row and Jimmy Iovine to collect royalties from a massively successful album he had absolutely nothing to do with was a major power move, but rap fans were unaware of the behind-the-scenes dealings. What he really needed was to show that he could stand without Dre, the same way Efil4zaggin and 100 Miles and Runnin’ sought to prove N.W.A didn’t need Cube. Eazy replaced Dre with a new in-house producer, Rhythm D. The South Central producer was on the come-up after crafting Oakland rapper Paperboy’s debut album, The Nine Yards, including the funky, Zapp-sampling “Ditty,” which went platinum and became a top ten hit on the pop charts in 1993—it was even nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance, but lost to Dre’s “Let Me Ride.” Before he joined Ruthless, Rhythm D was briefly affiliated with Death Row when he was introduced to Suge by Lady of Rage. He wrote and produced a record on the Deep Cover soundtrack for Paradise, a female rapper Suge had signed to the label. While doing some beats for Tracy Jernagin, Eazy’s girlfriend and the mother of their daughter Ebie, Jernagin told Rhythm D that Eazy could use beats from someone like him. She offered to link them and Eazy invited him to his Norwalk home; Rhythm came prepared, bringing a tackle box filled with discs of his beats. “It just seemed like everything was kind of dead musically over there. Nobody was in there making beats,” he said. “Niggas was laying all around on the couch and stuff. Seeing all that equipment, I was excited.” Rhythm played him a beat that was a pastiche of Sir Jinx and the Bomb Squad. “Eazy went nuts. He went crazy off this beat . . . He pulled a few stacks out of his sock and was like ‘Rhythm, you rollin’ with Ruthless.’ ” And so Rhythm, who said he wasn’t getting paid from Suge, stopped coming around Death Row.
Eazy almost entirely devoted his next release, It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa, to dissing his former friend and collaborator. He assembled a new team of collaborators to make up for the absence of Dre, D.O.C., Cube, and MC Ren, who had converted to Islam and was working on his solo debut, Shock of the Hour. Yella was still around to handle production, but there was also Rhythm, Dr. Jam, Madness 4 Real, and Cold 187um—who more or less took Dre’s place—to help. “[Eazy] was cocky. He was very confident in his position and him having a voice without Dre,” Cold 187um said. “He was like a football coach—he just replaced the player and kept it moving. That was his attitude on that record.”
It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa opened with Eazy thanking his “bitch” Dre for making him money with The Chronic and the EP’s centerpiece was the scathing diss track, “Real Muthaphukkin’ G’s” (“Real Compton City G’s” for the radio).
Damn it’s a trip how a nigga could switch so quick
From wearin’ lipstick to smoking on chronic at picnics
“If Dre just left and didn’t say anything or said, ‘I just wanted to do my own thing,’ I don’t think Eric would have even tripped,” Cold 187um said. “But when it’s out there like, ‘Oh he fucked me over’ and this and that, it wasn’t right. If you’re brothers, family deals with business like family.”
Eazy and his collaborators, Dresta and B. G. Knocc Out—brothers from the Nutty Blocc Crips—blasted Snoop and Dre as “studio gangstas,” and the assaults continued throughout the eight-track EP. “Eazy would tell us stories about Dre, Death Row, and all these things and that’s how [we] came up with the lyrics,” B. G. Knocc Out said. The album art even included a publicity still from the World Class Wreckin’ Cru showing Dre, with his handsome baby face and thin athletic frame, dressed in a tailored white-sequined body suit fashioned out of a medical supply store smock, stethoscope around his neck, and his face touched with powder and eyeliner. It was included in a mock obituary or as The Eazy Times called it, an “Obitchuary,” announcing the EP as the death of Dre, a point he drove home by having his name crossed out in the graffiti-styled title on the cover the way gang members did when sending a threatening message—he’s even pouring out a bit of his forty, a hood tradition marking someone’s passing. And to further poke at his rift with Death Row, Eazy thanked Rhythm D for going AWOL. Released in October 1993, It’s On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa was the first issue under Ruthless’s new distribution deal with Relativity Records. It’s his most successful solo record, peaking at number five on the Billboard 200 and going on to sell over two million copies.
The beef between Eazy and Dre, unlike that of N.W.A and Cube, felt like it could explode beyond wax at any second. Although Cube and Ruthless signees Above the Law came to physical blows, the dissension between the group and Cube was contained to lyrical jabs and potshots in the press. Eazy, by many accounts, seriously contemplated killing Suge. The heavy presence of gangs at Death Row meant there were plenty of thugs ready to blast if things heated up. Extra muscle was employed at Ruthless and Death Row. A number of run-ins between the rivals happened, including a brief yet intense standoff at the 1994 Billboard Music Awards (legendary Crip Michael Concepcion intervened) and a melee between affiliates of Ruthless and Death Row on the set of a Montell Jordan video. Rap beefs would only escalate in later years as regions and rap empires fought on record, in the media, and in public. “It actually was some unnecessary bullshit,” said Nate Dogg, who can be seen on video hitting Dresta over the head with a gold club as pandemonium sweeps the set of Jordan’s “Somethin’ 4 da Honeyz” music video.
Death Row quickly emerged victorious in the battle for supremacy between Dre’s former home and his current one. At its height, Death Row was generating $100 million a year in profits. After the sensational release of The Chronic, an album that remained on Billboard’s Top 10 for months, work began on Snoop’s highly anticipated debut, Doggystyle. Dre had been through a gamut of legal troubles the year prior and was under house arrest, allowed to leave his Valley estate only for work. Like The Chronic, Doggystyle was another all-hands-on-deck approach to record making. Doggystyle elevated the G-funk sound Dre trademarked on The Chronic. Layered with P-Funk samples, that indelible and eerie “funky worm,” crisp drums, organs, and numbing basslines, the album was another slam dunk in Dre’s canon as a producer—there are some who would argue Doggystyle is superior to The Chronic. D.O.C. served as a mentor of sorts to Snoop, helping him craft his rhymes. During production, Dre’s beats and Snoop’s flow had sessions feeling like an all out party. “We were having a bunch of fun,” Dre once said, recalling a time the crew got kicked out of the studio because of the rambunctious atmosphere. Doggystyle was rife with the dark mores of gangster life, but the songs were injected with so much funk and catchy melodies, the actual content was easy to overlook. The album’s first single, “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)” heavily samples George Clinton’s funky earworm “Atomic Dog”—a record that’s been worked into hundreds of songs since its 1982 release—and is one of a handful of classic tra
cks on the album that still moves the masses today. “Gin and Juice” is probably one of the greatest party anthems ever created, with a laid-back groove that literally sounds like the first day of summer captured on record. “Lodi Dodi” flipped the Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick classic (though its preceding interlude took an uncomfortable dig at Eazy), and “Ain’t No Fun (If the Homies Can’t Have None)” is a swinging ode to group sex that’s as ribald as it is infectious. Seriously, if the reaction these records continue to get when performed is any indication, Snoop will be rapping them for the rest of his life.
But Snoop Dogg’s Death Row debut was also marred by real-life death. Shortly after the album was released in November 1993, Snoop was in a West Los Angeles courtroom to face a murder charge in connection with a shooting three months earlier. The rapper and his bodyguard McKinley Lee were accused of gunning down Philip Woldemariam after he tried to flee from a confrontation with them at Woodbine Park in Palms, where Snoop lived. Woldemariam was said to be a member of a local gang called the By Yerself Hustlers, who were at odds with Snoop and his crew. There was a fracas between the crews, and Woldemariam allegedly brandished a .380 automatic handgun; Lee fired as the rapper drove off. Snoop and his bodyguard evaded the cops for a week, with LAPD detectives trailing him to the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards at Universal Amphitheater where he presented the first-ever award for R & B video alongside Dre and George Clinton. After handing the VMA to En Vogue, Snoop snuck away and later turned himself in. Snoop and his bodyguard were charged with murder, with Death Row posting the million-dollar bail. The 1996 trial was a media circus. Prosecutors said the self-defense case was contrived and that Woldemariam was followed, taunted, and gunned down as revenge. Snoop’s defense team said the man was a hotheaded gangster looking to protect his turf and felt threatened when Snoop moved into the neighborhood. The defense said he was the one who brandished arms first after the heated argument, not anyone in Snoop’s entourage. Woldemariam’s family, a tight-knit clan of Ethiopian immigrants, said the man was an innocent victim whose biggest troubles were his health, and not gang beef. They condemned Snoop of not just killing in cold blood, but also using the murder to promote his own career. The LAPD was accused of inadvertently destroying the victim’s clothing and evidence, including shell casings. After six days of deliberation a jury reached a verdict, acquitting Snoop and his bodyguard of murder. The judge declared a mistrial as the jury was deadlocked on a lesser count of voluntary manslaughter and a charge of conspiracy after the fact.
Though he’d been in and out of jail over drug charges, which he was quite open about, Snoop became the latest representation of the confluence of Gangsta rap’s hard-core lyrics and real life. And he wasn’t the only emcee getting into serious trouble that added to the seemingly unrelenting backlash against the music. Public Enemy’s kooky Flavor Flav was charged with attempted murder and Tupac Shakur had released his hit sophomore album Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. . . . (N.I.G.G.A.Z. being an acronym for Never Ign’ant Getting Goals Accomplished) and was enjoying a blossoming film career—his ravishing debut in 1992’s Juice earned him rave reviews—when he was charged of shooting two off-duty policemen in Atlanta and sexually abusing and sodomizing a woman in a New York hotel. Both charges were within a month of each other. Like Snoop, extra attention was placed on his venomous lyrics. With hard-core albums from Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, Scarface, Too $hort, former N.W.A members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and MC Ren, and Snoop doing big business, it was enough to keep conservatives and the media wringing its hands. Jesse Jackson denounced record labels for issuing rap music and making money from “pain and degradation,” calling for a boycott. Reverend Calvin Butts of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem denounced the music at a rally. Surrounded by a few hundred supporters chanting “Negative rap is not all right!” he planned to take a steamroller over boxes of explicit albums but opted not to at the last minute, instead saying he would confab with rappers. And Newsweek in a November 1993 cover story asked “When is Rap 2 Violent?” alongside an image of a scowling Snoop.
“The media is quick to point their finger when trouble strikes, but nobody ever asks a successful rapper like me how he feels about what’s going on in the ‘hood,” Snoop said at the time. “I guess they think I’m macho and I don’t care or something.”
Despite all this, Doggystyle was a smash. Dre wanted to produce the perfect rap record, one that would redefine the genre. Doggystyle achieved just that. Before its release, the hype was palpable. Doggystyle was declared the most anticipated rap album in history by the same publications covering the denouncement of the genre. “They had trucks lined up, and they were waiting to ship it,” Chris “the Glove” Taylor said. During the final moments of editing the record, Taylor said Suge and Jimmy Iovine were literally breathing down his neck since production problems had already delayed its release six weeks. Record stores stayed open through the night, and fans waited in lengthy lines to purchase it. Doggystyle delivered on expectations, selling more than 800,000 copies in its first week—then a sales record for a debut—and becoming the first Gangsta rap album to open at number one. And yes, critics heaped on the praise. Snoop was called “the gangsta Marvin Gaye of Dr. Dre’s Motown,” Rolling Stone gave the collection four stars, and one review labeled it the smoothest gangsta album to date, but noted “it’s easy to be impressed one moment and appalled the next.” The album went quadruple platinum, eclipsing The Chronic and both N.W.A records—offering further, more definitive proof that Gangsta rap wasn’t slowing down any time soon.
NATURAL BORN KILLAZ
Dr. Dre wanted to follow up Snoop’s album with Lady of Rage, whom he long kept on the back burner, despite constant promises that she was up next to bat. She’d gladly guested on The Chronic and Doggystyle but like Nate Dogg, Tha Dogg Pound, and Warren G, she had yet to get any work done on her own project. The wait for Dre’s attention would continue as Suge inked a deal to executive produce the soundtrack to the Tupac Shakur–starring urban drama Above the Rim, which would be released through Death Row and Interscope in the spring of 1994. Although the film was about a cocky high school basketball player in New York City, the soundtrack was aggressively West Coast, with Death Row artists filling most of the slots. Dre took on the role of supervising producer, crafting Lady of Rage’s fiery breakout single “Afro Puffs” and pulling in CPO Boss Hogg to contribute to the project. Warren G was finally able to break out of his famous stepbrother’s shadow with “Regulate,” a G-funk staple featuring Nate Dogg. Warren’s work on The Chronic and the Poetic Justice soundtrack—he produced “Indo Smoke” for Mista Grimm and Tupac’s “Definition of a Thug Nigga”—got the attention of Chris Lighty at Violator, who signed him to a deal through Def Jam. “Regulate” was built around Michael McDonald’s mushy 1982 hit “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)” and was a crossover smash, peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The success of “Regulate” set the stage for Warren’s debut album, Regulate . . . G Funk Era, which went triple platinum (without any help from Dre).
The Above the Rim soundtrack was another hit for Death Row. The soundtrack peaked at number two on the pop charts and remained atop the R & B charts for ten nonconsecutive weeks, before going double platinum. It was a rare feat for a hip-hop soundtrack to have that type of commercial success (critics praised it, too), and the record showed Death Row as an industry leader and that hip-hop’s pop appeal was continuing to widen. In the summer of 1994, the Bad Boy Entertainment label was the next big push of bringing hip-hop to mainstream audiences with the release of its first singles, a hypnotic groove called “Flava in Ya Ear” by Craig Mack, and “Juicy,” a celebratory anthem from a burly former crack dealer with a poetic flow who called himself the Notorious B.I.G. Both records were instant rap classics that launched Sean “Puffy” Combs’s New York upstart. Bad Boy instantly became Death Row’s fiercest rival, and the war between labels anchored on opposing coasts would end in bloodshed.
By many accounts, Dre
and Suge were rapidly growing apart. The label that was positioned as a fifty-fifty venture between the two men—that is, once Harry-O, D.O.C., and Dick Griffey were iced out—was being usurped by Suge and his callous ways. Dre was getting more and more fed up. Despite the mounting riff between Suge and Dre, he agreed to Suge’s next project, Murder Was the Case, an extended-length video for Snoop. Dre was to direct the short film, in which Snoop would play a gangster killed in a drive-by, who then sells his soul to the devil, and returns to Earth to make it as a rap star, before the devil hatches a plan to send him to prison for murder.
Dre saw the project, which also included an accompanying soundtrack he would produce on, as an opportunity to link up with Ice Cube. Both men had found much success in their years apart. Dre was the creative genius behind one of the hottest rap labels in the country, while Cube had sold six million records, was a married father and a Hollywood player, and had just issued his forth album, Lethal Injection, a few months earlier.
One day, in the middle of production for Murder Was the Case, Dre heard some in-progress productions from collaborator Sam Sneed. One in particular struck his ear.
“Yo, what you gon’ do wit’ that, Sam?” Dre asked about the records.
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