Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  Before Eazy-E died of complications from AIDS on March 26, 1995, the Ruthless Records mastermind wanted nothing more than to reunite his old group. In spite of the petty beef that came after Cube and Dre exited, he knew how big a reunion could be. In the months after his tragic death, attention turned to getting an Eazy project to fans. His final album, Str8 off tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton, was released, and while it was certified gold, the company he built struggled to remain relevant in his absence. Eazy’s widow Tomica Woods-Wright was calling the shots and doing her best to keep her late husband’s dream going. She fought off a seemingly endless list of opportunists looking to cash in on Eazy’s throne, even amid accusations that she manipulated her husband on his deathbed so that she could control the company.

  “When he died, to me, Ruthless died. All Ruthless Records is now is just a name,” said DJ Yella, who helped piece together Eazy’s swan song after he passed away. Yella was the last of N.W.A to issue a solo album, which he aptly titled One Mo Nigga ta Go and dedicated it to Eazy (he poses next to his grave on the cover), but it wasn’t issued on Ruthless. The album, released exactly a year after Eazy’s death, was the only solo material from Yella, who went on to a career in adult films, directing titles such as H.W.A.: Ho’s With Attitude, West Side Stories, and DJ Yella’s Str8 Outta Compton before again focusing on his DJ career and touring the world. MC Ren, the group’s core lyricist next to Cube, stuck around Ruthless for a few years before taking a hiatus. He’s never really gotten the proper due for his contributions to the group, the unfortunate pitfall of being in a group with a producing savant, an acerbic poet, and a charismatic frontman who sold himself as a maniacal thug.

  N.W.A is mostly remembered for its polarizing controversies and the members it launched to rap stardom. Sadly, Eazy doesn’t get exalted the way other rappers have whose lives were cut tragically short. He’s rarely placed in the conversation alongside seminal emcees like Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G., J Dilla, Big L, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, or Big Pun. Some of it probably has to do with the fact that he didn’t always write his own rhymes and some of it has to do with him dying of AIDS—and not as a martyr of street violence. Even the coverage of his diagnosis and his death paled in comparison to the frequent media attention he got when he was in the midst of controversy, a real shame considering the teachable moment this was for a community largely uneducated about AIDS. Eazy had done the unthinkable with Ruthless Records. During its height, Ruthless was the biggest black-owned independent label since Berry Gordy’s Motown empire. He created the blueprint for the street rap mogul that remains foundational decades after his death. Dre took Eazy’s cues when he launched Death Row and, later, Aftermath. An enterprising business major at Howard named Sean “Puffy” Combs was able to take his Bad Boy Entertainment to the top of the pop charts after Ruthless kicked the door down. It’s hard to imagine a No Limit or Cash Money had it not been for Eazy-E.

  “He’s not just some rapper who died from AIDS. Without Eazy-E the world of hip-hop would be very different now,” said Cold 187um, whose group Above the Law was signed to Ruthless. “He never got behind anything he didn’t believe in. From [Above the Law] to Bones to J. J. Fad. Everything he believed in, he believed in it for real.”

  In November of 1999, Dre and Cube were in the studio mulling the idea of an N.W.A reunion. It wasn’t long before Ren was back in the fold. He hadn’t worked with Dre since the group split, but Cube had appeared on “Comin’ After You,” the second single from Ren’s third studio album, Ruthless for Life—the first time they worked together since Cube left in 1989. There were even talks that the reunion would include Snoop. A superstar on his own, Snoop directly traced his success to the door opened by N.W.A and his mentor, Dre. Cube, who was deep at work on War & Peace, Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc), the second of a two-album project, was about to release the long awaited sequel to his 1995 stoner comedy Friday, appropriately titled Next Friday. For the film’s soundtrack, the guys got together and recorded “Chin Check.” “Nobody was talking about old beefs,” Ren remembered of the recording sessions. And why would they be? It was over ten years since the men had been together in the studio, and it felt like old times. Dre and Cube were like “two field generals” in the studio. Cube eased into his old role as lead writer with Dre taking the reins behind the board. “The chemistry is just incredible,” producer Mel-Man said of the three day recording sessions.

  “Chin Check” was the first N.W.A single since 1991. Vibe gave it a negative review, stating that Dre’s G-funk beat was “bland” and that MC Ren and Ice Cube sounded “geriatric” and “lukewarm,” respectively. There was some praise for Snoop, who fans were largely rejecting as a replacement for Eazy.

  It was a test run for a proposed reunion album, Not These Niggaz Again, which was announced in the summer of 2000 as Dre, Cube, and Snoop coheadlined the Up in Smoke Tour. The tour was a celebration of West Coast hip-hop with Dre, Snoop, Cube, and Eminem headlining. A stable of acts connected to the four rap titans also joined the bill including Kurupt, D12, Westside Connection, Warren G, Xzibit, the D.O.C., and MC Ren. Dre set up a mobile recording studio in one of the tour buses to record while they were on the road—but their respective solo careers were a constant impediment. No music ever came from the sessions.

  On a film set in Leimert Park in the fall of 2014, Dre and Cube watched as a parking lot behind an old dilapidated theater was transformed into Compton circa the late eighties. Lowrider Impalas bounced around, and extras rocking glistening Jheri curls milled about. Near their trailer were racks of neatly arranged wardrobe with vintage LA Raiders gear and LAPD uniforms peeking out. Dre found himself immersed in a rerun of The New Detectives: Case Studies in Forensic Science, a true crime series on the Investigation Discovery channel. He wasn’t someone who liked to look in the past, and watching it literally unfold in front of his eyes wasn’t the easiest thing to do. “It’s fucking weird. This whole process. Watching somebody re-create scenes . . . when I met my wife or realizing my brother died. Having to pull those emotions out again. Its been really difficult. It’s weird [watching someone] portray you. You’re being immortalized,” Dre said, admitting he was 100 percent against a film based on N.W.A because he thought it would blemish the group’s legacy.

  As challenging as it was for Dre to relive his past during production of Straight Outta Compton in 2014, it was even more difficult bringing the film to the big screen. Coproduced by Dre, Cube, and Tomica Woods-Wright, the biopic tracing the group’s humble beginnings in the eighties to its controversial success, infighting, and the death of Eazy had been in the works for more than a dozen years. An early draft of the screenplay focused the story on the group’s leader and Ruthless Records founder before Cube came aboard and spearheaded rewrites. Those placed Eazy, Dre, and Cube as the story’s coleads—with Ren and Yella as peripheral characters (they served as consultants on the film)—before it landed at Universal Pictures with a $29 million budget. Directed by F. Gary Gray, the film’s cast was made up of mostly unknowns, aside from Paul Giamatti as Jerry Heller. Heller had been publicly talking about his plans for an N.W.A film for years, and Cube’s own son played him in one of the most spot-on castings for a biopic.

  It wouldn’t be an N.W.A affair without scandal, and Straight Outta Compton certainly had its share. On the afternoon of January 29, 2015, a few months after production had wrapped, filming was under way for a promotional video for the movie when Suge Knight arrived on set unannounced. While many of the artists affiliated with N.W.A and Death Row have abandoned the Gangsta rap image over the years, Suge never seemed to grow out of it. Instead he continued to amass a mountain of legal and personal troubles that have tarnished the Death Row legacy.

  After Dre gave up his stake of Death Row in 1996, the label descended into chaos with the drive-by shooting of its marquee act Tupac Shakur—with fingers pointing at everyone from Suge, who was driving with Shakur and injured in the gunfire, to Puffy and the FBI. Not to mention Suge’s nea
rly five-year imprisonment following the brutal beating of a rival of Shakur’s that was caught on camera hours before the shooting. “Ultimately Suge was gonna destroy it, one way or another,” the D.O.C. said of Death Row. Suge and Dre’s relationship since then has been mostly contemptuous.

  Suge wanted to be paid for his likeness when he discovered that he was being portrayed in the film (the actor cast for the role, stuntman-turned-actor R. Marcos Taylor, bared an uncanny resemblance to Suge). So he did what Suge does when he feels he’s owed money: he shows up to collect. Suge drove his red Ford pickup truck to set past security. As soon as he arrived he spotted Cube’s head of security, Kebo, and the men had a cordial conversation about Suge’s desire to set up a meeting with Cube. But before he could leave Suge got into an argument with Cle “Bone” Sloan, an affiliate of the Bloods working as a technical adviser to the movie, who Suge had longstanding beef with. The spat was diffused and Suge left without incident before he got a call from Terry Carter, a revered South Central businessman. Carter told Suge to return so he could help ease the tension further. They agreed to meet at Tam’s Burgers, a Compton fast-food institution located close to set.

  Accounts vary, but Sloan told police Suge was talking shit as he arrived, so he unleashed a barrage of punches at Suge through his car window. However, surveillance video shows what appears to be Sloan immediately attacking Suge upon his arrival. Suge, these days, was a shell of his once formidable self, having not yet recovered from being shot six times a few months prior at a party thrown by R & B star Chris Brown during the weekend of the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards. Suge threw his car into reverse, knocking Sloan down before putting it in drive and crushing his ankles. And he kept going, taking down Carter, crushing his skull and killing him before he fled. Suge has now been in jail for more than two years, shuffling through several lawyers as his family worries about his declining health while he sits in solitary confinement. His murder trial begins in January 2018, and if his defense team can’t persuade a jury that he acted in self-defense, the rap mogul will likely spend the rest of his days behind bars. “It makes no sense,” said Nina Bhadreshwar, who worked as Suge’s assistant. “He has chosen that route. He has lost a lot of friends. He lost his business. A lot of stuff has happened to him. It’s a tragedy.”

  Straight Outta Compton was a smash upon its August 2015 release. It opened to critical acclaim, topped the box office, and made more than $200 million. But not everyone was pleased with the film. MC Ren felt his contributions to the group were greatly diminished, and after doing a deluge of press for the film he got to the point where he was done being asked about N.W.A. Founding member Arabian Prince questioned why he was omitted—a question J. J. Fad, Michel’le, and a host of other Ruthless acts asked after the film’s release. “They were our family. They were like brothers,” J. J. Fad’s Dania “Baby D” Birks said. “We go to sleep with them, wake up with them . . . work with them. It was everything. It just seemed like, you don’t forget about people that easily. I mean, I didn’t.”

  Eazy’s kids weren’t too pleased either.

  “It was like seventy-five percent accurate,” said Eazy’s daughter Ebie Wright. “Everybody else wanted to make themselves look good, and he was not here to make himself look the way [he] really was. If he were alive, [it] would have been a whole different movie, completely.”

  Cube was unbothered by the gripes, suggesting instead that anyone pissed off should tell their own version of the story. “There’s been several movies made about Elvis; go make your own N.W.A movie if you don’t like the way the one the four surviving members, and everybody else we could find that was around, put together. If you can do one better than that, knock yourself out.”

  “This movie was just a blip on the radar. You can’t sum up a group’s life in a hundred or so scenes,” Cube continued. “There’s no way to sum up ten years. It’s just an eye blink of what happened.”

  Jerry Heller was actually trying to do just what Cube intimated, but he never got his project further than teasing it to the press. After Straight Outta Compton’s release he filed a $110 million libel lawsuit against Dre, Cube, Woods-Wright, Eazy’s estate, Universal, and a host of others involved with the production of the film. He claimed it was “littered” with inaccuracies that made him into the “bad guy” and depicted him as a sleazy manager.

  Jerry also claimed he had never consented to the use of his name and likeness, and that the film’s writers had lifted scenes from his memoir, Ruthless. Everyone interviewed for this book had differing views of Jerry and his role at Ruthless, but they all agree that Eazy remained loyal to him until the very end, despite popular belief that he fired him. Straight Outta Compton’s success struck a nerve with Jerry. He was incredibly hurt by the film and wanted to be publicly exonerated for what he felt was unjustified blame for the group’s demise. “I want to concentrate on other important areas right now,” Jerry said when asked to participate in this book. Jerry was open to showing off the collection of N.W.A memorabilia he kept in his Calabasas home (Eazy used to live two doors down, a marking of their closeness) but like Ren, he had grown tired of discussing N.W.A—particularly its famous former members, Cube and Dre. It was a meeting that never took place, though, as Jerry died from a heart attack in September 2016 at the age of seventy-five. His lawyer blamed the stress of the film lawsuit as a contributing factor.

  What the film chose to omit has been among its biggest criticisms. Long before it hit theaters, N.W.A fans wondered how the biopic would handle some the more difficult moments in the group’s history such as Eazy’s death from AIDS, its often misogynist and homophobic lyrics, and allegations of physical abuse from Dre by women associated with the group. In the end, none of the incidents were explored or they were intentionally left out, including his well-documented attack on female hip-hop journalist Denise “Dee” Barnes fueled by the group’s rivalry with Cube. Yet Barnes’s run-in with Dre was actually included in an earlier version of the film’s screenplay.

  In the scene, the fictional Dre, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt” (per notes from the script), spots Barnes at the party and approaches her. “Saw that bullshit you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.” “I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’s character retorts. “That’s what I do. It’s my job.” The confrontation escalates, and Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks her, “flinging her around like a rag doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”

  “I don’t think [my abuse] should have been in the movie, but I don’t think it should have been left out,” Michel’le said. “Maybe he didn’t want to show me in a bad light or whatever, and I appreciate that, but the truth is the truth. I get it, you want to tell your story and you want to make yourself look good. Why would you waste your time showing the bad part?”

  A gripping essay from Barnes and the revelation that the scene was omitted helped reignite conversations about Dre’s treatment of women, something he has never seriously addressed as he remade himself into a corporate mogul. With the chorus of outrage growing louder, and likely because of his relationship with Apple, Dre issued a blanket statement apologizing to all the women he hurt without addressing any specific incident. “Twenty-five years ago I was a young man drinking too much and in over my head with no real structure in my life. However, none of this is an excuse for what I did. I’ve been married for nineteen years and every day I’m working to be a better man for my family, seeking guidance along the way. I’m doing everything I can so I never resemble that man again. I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all our lives.”

  In early 2016 the prospect of an onstage N.W.A reunion seemed like a real possibility. The making of Straight Outta Compton had led to discussion of a European tour, with Eminem sitting in as an honorary member, but like previous talks nothing came of it. There was a
partial reunion before the film’s release, with Ice Cube performing a short medley alongside Ren and Yella during his headlining slot at the BET Experience where the group juxtaposed images of the 1992 LA riots and Rodney King beating with footage of recent civil unrest in the wake of police brutality cases across America. But still, fans were eager to see Cube, Ren, Yella, and Dre together on the same stage again. The announcement that N.W.A would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that spring (after they were passed over three times before) felt like the perfect opportunity. They didn’t perform at the ceremony, opting instead to relish the night with heartfelt speeches. “To the man . . . The late, great, often-imitated but never duplicated Eazy-motherfucking-E. This is his vision. He wanted us to be honest, he wanted us to be truthful, say what we feel,” Cube said. “He didn’t care if we got any record play. He didn’t even care if we got signed to a major label. All he cared about was for our story to be recognized and heard.” It was a breathtaking sight, a group once accused of destroying the moral fiber of America inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the highest validation the group could receive that its music made an impact—though the proof was there long before they were recognized by the voting committee.