The story of N.W.A

Five kids from Compton and South Central

The story of N.W.A begins in Compton, California, a city just south of Los Angeles that had slid from middle class suburb into a place shaped by white flight, poverty and the spread of the Crips and the Bloods. Eric Wright was born there on the seventh of September 1964. His father worked for the post office and his mother ran a grade school office. Eric dropped out of Compton High in the tenth grade, later earned his high school equivalency, and made his money on the street. Friends from the Kelly Park neighborhood knew him as a small, sharp talker who always had a scheme. The world would soon know him as Eazy-E.[1] [2]

Andre Young was born in Compton on the eighteenth of February 1965. His middle name, Romell, came from his father's amateur rhythm and blues group. His family moved constantly around Compton, Carson, Long Beach and Watts, and he has said his grandmother did much of the raising. School never held him. What did was a Grandmaster Flash record that showed him what a DJ could do with two turntables. He started spinning at a club called Eve After Dark, first as Dr. J, after his basketball hero Julius Erving, then as Dr. Dre. In the club's tiny back room studio he met another young DJ, Antoine Carraby, who went by Yella.[1] [2]

Dre and Yella joined a local crew run by the club owner Alonzo Williams, the World Class Wreckin' Cru. This was electro, the bright, danceable sound that ruled Los Angeles in the early eighties, and the Cru dressed the part in sequins and eyeliner. Their record Surgery sold tens of thousands of copies around Compton, and the two DJs mixed live on the radio station KDAY during the afternoon rush hour, which lifted the station's ratings. Yella, born in Compton in December 1961, was the second youngest of nine children and a quiet kid who loved funk and played drums. He would become the steadiest member of everything that followed.[1] [2] [3]

O'Shea Jackson was not from Compton at all. He was born in Los Angeles on the fifteenth of June 1969 and grew up in South Central, where a friend challenged him to write a rap in ninth grade typing class. His older brother gave him his name by threatening to slam him in a freezer until he became an ice cube. With his friend Sir Jinx he formed a trio called C.I.A., and they performed at parties Dre was spinning. Lorenzo Patterson, born in Compton just one day after Cube, drifted into a gang and small time dealing before music pulled him out. He would become MC Ren. Kim Nazel, a DJ and producer known as Arabian Prince, rounded out the circle.[1] [2] [3]

Ruthless Records and a song nobody wanted

By the mid eighties Eric Wright was looking for a way out of the drug trade. It was said he had made as much as a quarter of a million dollars, and the killing of his cousin pushed him to put that money somewhere safer. He started a label in his parents' garage and called it Ruthless Records. Dre, meanwhile, kept landing in jail over unpaid traffic tickets, and Alonzo Williams had grown tired of bailing him out. Eazy paid the bail instead. In return, Dre agreed to make records for Eazy's new label. That small favor, a debt of a couple of hundred dollars, set the whole thing in motion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eazy wanted a hit, so he hired Dre to produce and Ice Cube to write. Cube had already sold his first song to Eazy at sixteen. The song they built was Boyz-n-the-Hood, a day in the life of a Compton hustler told with dark humor. It was meant for a New York group called H.B.O., who came to the Audio Achievements studio in Torrance, read the lyrics and walked out. Dre told Eazy to rap it himself. Eazy had never rapped, so they recorded it line by line over two days, as Yella remembered it. The strange, flat, high voice that resulted became one of the most recognizable sounds in hip hop.[1] [2] [3]

Boyz-n-the-Hood came out in March 1987 and became a local hit, sold hand to hand and blasted from cars. On the third of March that year Eazy had also met Jerry Heller, a veteran music agent in his mid forties who had worked with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye and Pink Floyd, but whose career had faded. Eazy paid Alonzo Williams seven hundred and fifty dollars to arrange the introduction. Heller loved the record, invested in Ruthless and became its manager. Their deal gave Eazy eighty percent and Heller twenty. Heller later recalled Eazy telling him he was the first white man he had talked to who was not trying to collect rent or arrest him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

With a hit in hand, Eazy pulled the team together as a group. The first lineup was Eazy, Dre, Ice Cube and Arabian Prince, with Yella soon joining on turntables. The name was a deliberate provocation: the initials stood for a phrase built on a racial slur, ending with the words with attitudes. Their first single was Panic Zone, a bouncy electro track that had started life as Hispanic Zone until Dre told its co-writer Krazy Dee that the word would hurt sales. Alongside it came Dopeman, a grim portrait of the crack trade, and 8 Ball, a tribute to cheap malt liquor. Nobody outside Los Angeles was paying attention yet.[1] [2]

The Posse, a detour to Phoenix and Eazy-Duz-It

In November 1987 the distributor Macola Records, which had handled the early singles, gathered them up with tracks by other acts and released N.W.A. and the Posse. The group did not really consider it their album. The cover photo was shot in a Hollywood alley, and it is a snapshot of how loose things were. Yella missed it because he was sick. MC Ren, who lived near Eazy and was not yet a member, is standing in it anyway. So is the rapper Candyman. The record sold slowly at first, but it was later reissued by Priority Records and eventually went gold.[1] [2]

After an autumn 1987 tour opening for Salt-N-Pepa, Ice Cube made a practical decision. Rap did not look like a safe career, so he enrolled at the Phoenix Institute of Technology in Arizona and earned a one year diploma in architectural drafting. He kept it as a backup plan. While he was gone, Eazy needed lyrics for a solo album, and MC Ren, who had signed to Ruthless as a solo artist while still in high school, stepped up. Ren had nearly joined the army after graduating, but changed his mind after watching the war film Full Metal Jacket. By the summer of 1988 he was officially a member of N.W.A.[1] [2] [3]

Another key writer arrived from Texas. Tracy Curry had rapped in a Dallas trio called the Fila Fresh Crew, whom Dre had met on a trip to a club there. He moved to Los Angeles, took the name the D.O.C., and became the group's secret weapon on paper. He later said he was a shy, bookish kid from Dallas who had to write in character, inventing lines from the stories the others told him. He also claimed Dre stopped writing his own verses almost as soon as he arrived. The D.O.C. never became an official member, but his words run all through the group's records.[1] [2] [3]

Eazy's solo debut, Eazy-Duz-It, came out on the twenty second of November 1988 through Ruthless and Priority Records. It was a group effort in everything but name. Dre and Yella made the beats, and MC Ren, Ice Cube and the D.O.C. wrote the words. It was funnier and more cartoonish than what came next, and it barely got any radio or television support, yet it went gold within three months and eventually sold more than two million copies. Priority, a small independent label whose first big success had been the California Raisins, had found something far more explosive. The group was about to make it official.[1] [2] [3]

Straight Outta Compton

N.W.A recorded Straight Outta Compton at Audio Achievements in Torrance during the summer and fall of 1988. It was cheap and fast, made for a reported twelve thousand dollars in a matter of weeks. Dre produced with Yella and Arabian Prince, building tracks from drum machines, funk samples, horn blasts and turntable scratches. Ice Cube, MC Ren and the D.O.C. wrote most of the words, including many of the lines Eazy and Dre rapped. The group had no word for what they were doing. They called it reality rap. The press would soon call it gangsta rap, a name Ice Cube always said the media invented.[1] [2] [3]

The album opens with a three song assault that still defines the group. The title track introduces them one by one, with Cube, Ren and Eazy trading verses about their hometown. Cube was not even from Compton, but he later said it felt silly to shout South Central when everyone else was shouting Compton. Next comes the group's protest song against the police, a track whose title cannot be said on the radio, staged as a mock trial with Dre as the judge. Then Gangsta Gangsta paints a violent, boastful picture of a day out in the neighborhood. The rest of the record ranges from the drinking song 8 Ball to the sunny single Express Yourself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Express Yourself was the odd one out. Rapped by Dre alone and written by Cube, it had no profanity at all and argued for free speech over a borrowed groove from Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's song of the same name. The sample was not credited at first, and Wright complained. Priority eventually sent him an apology from Ice Cube along with back royalties. The song became the group's calling card in Britain, reaching the top thirty on reissue in 1990. The closing track, Something 2 Dance 2, was Arabian Prince's only rap on the album, and it was later dropped from some pressings in a dispute.[1] [2] [3]

Straight Outta Compton reached number thirty seven on the Billboard 200, with almost no radio play, and MTV refused to show the title track's video. It did not matter. The album went gold three months after release and was certified platinum on the eighteenth of July 1989, the first gangsta rap album to reach that mark. Priority estimated that about eighty percent of the sales came from mostly white suburbs. Critics were split, with some hearing brilliant, disturbing documentary and others hearing crude posturing. Dre himself later said he could not stand the album, and that he threw it together in six weeks to sell out of the trunk.[1] [2]

The world's most dangerous group

On the first of August 1989, Milt Ahlerich, an assistant director in the FBI's office of public affairs, wrote to Priority Records. He did not name the song, but he said recordings like N.W.A's encouraged violence against police, and he noted that seventy eight officers had been killed in the line of duty in 1988. He later confirmed he meant the group's protest song against the police, admitting he had only read lyrics sent to him by police officers. When the letter surfaced that autumn, free speech groups and a congressman accused the FBI of censorship. Jerry Heller later called Ahlerich a single angry bureaucrat. The letter now hangs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The controversy was the best advertising N.W.A ever had. The group now billed itself as the world's most dangerous group, and police across the country took them at their word. On their first national tour in the summer of 1989, the promoter said all thirty six dates ran into trouble. Police in Toledo, Ohio refused to work security, and in Shreveport, Louisiana they barricaded the hall. Many venues made the group sign contracts promising not to perform the police song, some with fines of twenty five thousand dollars. Several shows were cancelled outright, including a Labor Day rap revue near Washington that went ahead without them.[1] [2] [3]

The tour ended at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit in the summer of 1989, where local police at first refused to work the show at all. After long negotiations it went ahead with a heavy police presence. Near the end, the group launched into the forbidden song. The sound was cut and police rushed the stage, and there were scuffles backstage as officers looked for the band. Accounts of what happened next vary, and the moment became legend. For N.W.A it was proof of everything they had been rapping about, and the scene became one of the most famous moments in the 2015 film about them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first crack in the group had already appeared. Arabian Prince, a solo artist before N.W.A, understood royalty statements, and he did not like what he saw. He said the group was not being paid properly, including for touring. He began skipping sessions and photo shoots, and after a short tour with Public Enemy and Ice-T that ran from December 1988 into January 1989, he left, just before Straight Outta Compton came out. He is still on the album cover. He released a solo album called Brother Arab later that year. Ruthless kept rolling, with gold and platinum albums from J.J. Fad, Michel'le and the D.O.C.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourteenth of November 1989, the D.O.C. fell asleep at the wheel driving home from a party and crashed on the Ventura Freeway. He was thrown through the rear window into a tree. He needed hours of reconstructive surgery, could barely speak for a month, and was left with a damaged, raspy voice that ended his career as a rapper just as his debut, No One Can Do It Better, was climbing the charts. He later admitted he had been drinking and smoking. He kept writing for Dre and the group, but the loss of that voice is one of the great what ifs of West Coast rap.[1] [2]

Cube walks out and the war of words

Ice Cube had written a huge share of the group's words, yet by his own account he had been paid about thirty two thousand dollars. After the 1989 tour he asked for a meeting about money. Heller offered all five members a new contract with a seventy five thousand dollar signing bonus. Cube was the only one who refused to sign it. He could not understand why Eazy and Heller drove luxury cars and lived in big houses while he was still living with his parents. At the end of 1989 he left, sued Heller, and later settled out of court. The D.O.C. said he did not even ride home with the others.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cube wasted no time. He flew to New York and made his debut, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, with Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad. It arrived in May 1990 to rave reviews and big sales, and it largely avoided attacking his old crew. N.W.A struck first. In August 1990 they released the EP 100 Miles and Runnin', its title track inspired by the gang film The Warriors, one of Eazy's favorites. It was Dre's last fast tempo production and the group's first single to get national radio play. It also took shots at Cube, and another track on the EP called him a traitor, comparing him to Benedict Arnold.[1] [2] [3]

That feud led to one of the ugliest moments in the story. The Fox rap show Pump It Up!, hosted by Dee Barnes, aired an episode in November 1990 that spliced an N.W.A interview together with one where Ice Cube mocked the group. On the twenty seventh of January 1991, at a record release party in Hollywood, Dr. Dre attacked Barnes. She said he slammed her head and body against a wall while his bodyguard held back the crowd, then kicked her and punched her in the back of the head after she fled to a restroom. Dre's comments at the time were dismissive, and other members made light of it in interviews.[1] [2] [3]

Barnes pressed charges. In August 1991 Dre pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery and was fined about two and a half thousand dollars, given two years' probation and two hundred and forty hours of community service, and ordered to make an anti violence public service announcement. Her civil lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993. Barnes later said her career dried up afterwards, as if she had ruined his. Her show was cancelled that year. Decades later, Dre said the assault was a low point of his life and that there was no excuse for it. Another Ruthless artist, Tairrie B, also said Dre punched her at a party in 1990.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Number one, then the end

N.W.A's second album came out on the twenty eighth of May 1991. Its title was a slur spelled backwards, so it is usually known as Efil4zaggin, and the cover showed the members as corpses with their spirits leaving their bodies. Dre and Yella leaned away from samples toward live musicians, fusing heavy metal riffs, horror movie strings and deep funk, and the album pointed straight toward the G-funk sound Dre would soon perfect. It debuted at number two and hit number one the next week, the first gangsta rap album to top the Billboard 200. Yella joked that groups break up at number one thousand, not at number one. They were about to prove him wrong.[1] [2] [3]

The album's second half was relentlessly obscene and violent toward women, and many critics recoiled. Rolling Stone gave it two stars and called it tiresome in its hatred of women, while the Los Angeles Times called it the most unlistenable great album since Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. In Britain, police from the Obscene Publications Squad seized thousands of copies from a warehouse in June 1991, and major shops pulled it. Island Records fought the case, and on the seventh of November 1991 magistrates in Redbridge cleared the album after only fifteen minutes. Eazy said he was amazed they had actually played the record in court.[1] [2]

Ice Cube hit back that autumn on his album Death Certificate with No Vaseline, one of the most savage diss tracks ever recorded. He tore into each former bandmate and saved his worst for Jerry Heller, including a threat against him and repeated references to his being Jewish. The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned it as antisemitic, and it was left off the British release. Cube denied being antisemitic and in 2015 said he regretted using the word Jew. He also mocked Eazy for attending a Republican fundraising lunch with President George H. W. Bush that March. Eazy had paid to attend after receiving an invitation, and said at the time that he did not even vote.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The end came from inside. Dre and the D.O.C. grew convinced they were being underpaid, and they turned to the D.O.C.'s imposing friend Suge Knight. By several accounts, Knight confronted Eazy at a studio in 1991, claimed he was holding Heller captive in a van, and then handed Eazy a piece of paper with his mother's address on it. Eazy signed releases for Dre, the D.O.C. and the singer Michel'le. Heller later said the men carried baseball bats and pipes. Dre, the D.O.C. and Knight went on to found Death Row Records. N.W.A, number one in America a few months earlier, was finished.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Death Row, diss records and Eazy's last years

Dre's first Death Row album, The Chronic, arrived in December 1992 and changed hip hop. Its slow, rolling G-funk sound made Dre and his discovery Snoop Doggy Dogg stars, and it came loaded with shots at Eazy. In the video for Dre Day, a comedian named A.J. Johnson played a desperate, money grubbing parody called Sleazy-E. Eazy answered in October 1993 with the EP It's On, Dr. Dre, 187um Killa. Its lead single, whose title is too profane for radio, came out in a clean version called Real Compton City G's. The video flashed old photos of Dre in sequins and makeup from his Wreckin' Cru days. It became Eazy's biggest solo hit.[1] [2] [3]

The feud had real menace behind it. When Eazy brought back A.J. Johnson to reprise Sleazy-E for his own video, Johnson failed to show up for the second day of filming. He later said Suge Knight had summoned him and threatened him with a gun. Eazy was also making enemies elsewhere. In 1993 he sat in court supporting Theodore Briseno, one of the officers charged in the Rodney King beating, saying Briseno had tried to stop it. Much of the rap world called him a sellout. In 1994 police named him as one target of an alleged murder plot by white supremacists.[1] [2] [3]

The others scattered. MC Ren's solo EP of 1992 went platinum within two months without radio play, and he joined the Nation of Islam before his album Shock of the Hour. Ren and Eazy stopped speaking for two years, with Ren calling him big headed, before they made up in October 1994 and recorded a duet. Yella stayed loyal to Eazy and kept producing at Ruthless. Eazy's biggest late triumph was a group he found in Cleveland, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Their 1994 EP went multi platinum, and Eazy executive produced their next album. By then, Eazy had also begun talking with Ice Cube about getting the old group back together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty fourth of February 1995, Eazy checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with a violent cough. He was diagnosed with AIDS. On the fourteenth of March he married Tomica Woods, the mother of his young son, and two days later he announced his illness to the world. That week he drafted a final message to his fans. The hospital said it took more calls than it had for Lucille Ball. Dre came to see him but found him unconscious. Ice Cube said he also went, but left after being told Eazy was not awake. Eazy died on the twenty sixth of March 1995. He was thirty years old.[1] [2] [3]

More than three thousand people came to his funeral on the seventh of April at First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. He was laid in a gold casket, and he was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier in a flannel shirt, jeans and his Compton hat. The mayor of Compton, who had once attacked the group's image of his city, declared Eazy-E Day. Yella was a pallbearer. Ren stayed away, and an associate said he could not bear to see Eazy that way. Months later Bone Thugs-n-Harmony dedicated their number one single Tha Crossroads to him, and it won a Grammy.[1] [2]

Reunions, a movie and the Hall of Fame

In the years after Eazy's death the surviving members slowly found their way back to each other. Cube and Dre had already made up, recording Natural Born Killaz together in 1994. Dre left Death Row in 1996, founded Aftermath, and returned in 1999 with the album 2001, which featured MC Ren. That year Dre, Cube and Ren reunited on Chin Check for the film Next Friday, with Snoop Dogg filling Eazy's spot, and then on Hello for Cube's album. On the Up in Smoke Tour of 2000 they recorded in a mobile studio and planned a whole album. It collapsed amid busy schedules, three rival record labels and a fight over who owned the N.W.A name.[1] [2] [3]

Each man's path went its own way. Ice Cube became a movie star, from Boyz n the Hood to the Friday and Barbershop franchises. Dre became the most powerful producer in hip hop, signing Eminem, 50 Cent and later Kendrick Lamar, and in 2014 sold Beats to Apple for billions. Yella made one tribute album to Eazy in 1996 and then spent about twelve years directing adult films. Ren kept releasing independent music. Arabian Prince moved into special effects and video games. Jerry Heller published a memoir in 2006 defending his management and insisting everyone had been paid what they were owed.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In 2015 the story became a Hollywood film. Straight Outta Compton, directed by F. Gary Gray and produced by Cube, Dre and Eazy's widow Tomica Woods-Wright, opened on the fourteenth of August and grossed more than two hundred million dollars worldwide. Cube's son O'Shea Jackson Junior played his father. The film sent the old album back into the top ten, and the title song finally became the group's first top forty hit, twenty six years late. But it drew criticism for what it left out, especially Dre's assaults on women and the role of Arabian Prince. Days after release, Dre apologized to the women he had hurt. Heller sued over his portrayal, and died in September 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The film shoot had its own darkness. A week into filming in Compton, a drive-by shooting took place in front of the crew. Then on the twenty ninth of January 2015, after an argument near the set, Suge Knight ran over two men in a burger stand parking lot, killing Terry Carter, a co-founder of a record label with Ice Cube. Knight later pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to twenty eight years in prison. In June 2015, Cube, Ren and Yella performed together at the BET Experience in Los Angeles, their first time on stage together in more than twenty five years.[1] [2]

On the eighth of April 2016, N.W.A were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Kendrick Lamar, only the fifth hip hop act to get in. Ice Cube answered critics who said rappers did not belong by declaring that they were rock and roll. Weeks later, at Coachella, Dre walked out to join Cube, Ren and Yella, the first time the four surviving members had shared a stage since 1989. In 2016 Straight Outta Compton became the first rap album in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and in 2017 it entered the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. In 2024 the group received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around N.W.A

Eazy-E and Jerry Heller. Heller was a faded rock agent in his forties when Eazy paid to meet him in 1987. They built Ruthless together on an eighty twenty split, and Eazy called him the best manager money could find and like a father. The rest of the group came to see Heller as the reason they were underpaid. Eazy stood by him through two departures, then fired him shortly before he died.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eazy-E and Dr. Dre. Eazy bailed Dre out of jail over traffic tickets, and Dre repaid him by producing Boyz-n-the-Hood and building the sound of Ruthless. After Dre left in 1991, the two traded some of the nastiest diss records in hip hop, with Sleazy-E on one side and sequin photos on the other. Dre visited Eazy in hospital in 1995, but found him unconscious.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ice Cube and Eazy-E. Cube wrote Eazy's breakthrough and most of his early rhymes. Their split over money in 1989 turned into open warfare on record, capped by No Vaseline in 1991. By early 1995 they had made peace and even talked about reuniting the group. Cube said later that what he missed most about Eazy was his humor and his instinct for what people wanted.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dr. Dre and DJ Yella. They met as teenage DJs at Eve After Dark, cut their first demos in its back room and rose together through the World Class Wreckin' Cru and KDAY radio. They co-produced every N.W.A record. Heller wrote that they had an almost eerie understanding in the studio, barely needing to speak. When the group split, Yella stayed with Eazy while Dre left.[1] [2] [3]

Dr. Dre and Suge Knight. Knight, Dre's bodyguard and a notorious strongman, helped Dre escape his Ruthless contract through intimidation and co-founded Death Row with him in 1991. The partnership made The Chronic and a string of hits, but Dre grew alarmed at Knight's violence and left in 1996. In 2018 Knight was sentenced to twenty eight years in prison for a fatal hit and run.[1] [2] [3]

Dr. Dre and Michel'le. Michel'le was a teenager when she sang on a Wreckin' Cru record and began dating Dre, who produced her gold selling debut on Ruthless. They had a son in 1991. She has said he beat her repeatedly during their years together, and she left after learning he was engaged to someone else. She later married Suge Knight, a marriage that turned out to be invalid.[1] [2] [3]

Dr. Dre and Dee Barnes. Barnes was a rapper and the young host of Pump It Up! when Dre assaulted her at a Hollywood party in January 1991, angry over how her show had covered his group's feud with Ice Cube. He pleaded no contest. For decades she said the attack wrecked her career. Dre has since called it a major blemish on who he is as a man.[1] [2] [3]

MC Ren and Eazy-E. Ren grew up near Eazy in Compton, was signed to Ruthless while still in high school and wrote much of Eazy's debut. He stayed at Ruthless after the split, but by 1994 was calling Eazy big headed. They reconciled in October 1994 and recorded a duet, months before Eazy died. Ren skipped the funeral because he could not bear to see him that way.[1] [2] [3]

The D.O.C. and Dr. Dre. Dre discovered the D.O.C. in Dallas and produced his classic debut. After the 1989 crash wrecked his voice, the D.O.C. became Dre's ghostwriter, pushing him to leave Ruthless and helping found Death Row. Dre thanked him in The Chronic's liner notes for talking him into making it. They later fell out more than once, and the D.O.C. named his 1996 album after a shelved Dre project partly to spite him.[1] [2] [3]

Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. Cube's first group performed at parties Dre hosted, and Dre produced their early records. When Cube left N.W.A, Dre joined in the attacks, but the two quietly made up after Dre left Ruthless. They recorded together in 1994, led the Up in Smoke Tour reunion in 2000 and together produced the 2015 film about their group.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eazy-E and Tomica Woods-Wright. Eazy met Tomica Woods at a Los Angeles nightclub in 1991. They had a son, and they married in hospital on the fourteenth of March 1995, twelve days before he died. She was pregnant with their daughter at the time. She took control of Ruthless Records after a legal fight, later sued and settled with Heller, and co-produced the 2015 film.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about N.W.A

• MC Ren was born in Compton just one day after Ice Cube, in June 1969. Ice Cube was born on the fifteenth of June 1969 and MC Ren on the sixteenth. The two became the group's sharpest writers, and Ren later reminded fans he wrote much of the group's early material.[1] [2] [3]
• Ice Cube's stage name came from an older brother's threat to put him in the freezer. His brother threatened to slam him into a freezer and pull him out when he was an ice cube. The name stuck, and Cube carried it from a ninth grade typing class rap challenge to Hollywood.[1]
• Dr. Dre first called himself Dr. J, after his favorite basketball player, Julius Erving. He DJed at Eve After Dark under that name before blending it with his first name, Andre, to create Dr. Dre, the self styled master of mixology.[1]
• Arabian Prince got his name from a girl at a skating rink who kept seeing him with Egyptian Lover. He had been DJ Prince, dressing like the singer Prince. When a fan noticed he was always beside his friend Egyptian Lover, she suggested Arabian Prince, and it stuck.[1]
• Eazy-E recorded his first hit line by line over two days because he had never rapped before. The song was written for a New York group who rejected it and walked out. Dre persuaded Eazy to try it himself, and according to Yella they pieced it together one line at a time.[1]
• Ice Cube earned a diploma in architectural drafting in the middle of N.W.A's rise. After an autumn 1987 tour, Cube left for the Phoenix Institute of Technology in Arizona, earning a one year diploma. He kept drafting as a backup plan in case rap failed.[1] [2]
• MC Ren planned to join the army until he watched the war film Full Metal Jacket. Ren graduated from high school in 1987 intending to enlist, but changed his mind after seeing the film. He signed to Ruthless instead and joined N.W.A by mid 1988.[1]
• Priority Records, which released N.W.A, first hit it big with the California Raisins. The label signed the singing raisins in 1986, and their record sold more than two million copies. Two years later it was distributing the most controversial rap group in America.[1] [2]
• Eazy-E paid seven hundred and fifty dollars just to be introduced to Jerry Heller. He paid Wreckin' Cru boss Alonzo Williams to arrange the meeting. Heller said Eazy told him he was the first white man he had spoken to who was not collecting rent or arresting him.[1] [2]
• Panic Zone, N.W.A's first single, was originally called Hispanic Zone. Its co-writer, the Mexican American rapper Krazy Dee, changed the title after Dre advised that the word Hispanic would hurt sales.[1]
• MC Ren appears on the cover of N.W.A's first album before he was even a member. He lived near Eazy and was pulled into the photo shoot in a Hollywood alley. Yella, meanwhile, missed the shoot because he was sick.[1]
• About eighty percent of Straight Outta Compton's sales came from mostly white suburbs, Priority estimated. The album went platinum with almost no radio play and an MTV ban on its title track video, helped instead by word of mouth and controversy.[1] [2]
• An FBI official admitted he had never heard the whole song he wrote to complain about. Milt Ahlerich told the Los Angeles Times he had only read lyrics sent by police officers. He said he knew of no previous FBI stand on a pop record.[1]
• Some venues threatened N.W.A with a twenty five thousand dollar fine for playing their police song. On the 1989 tour, most halls made the group sign contracts banning it. They obeyed until the final show in Detroit.[1]
• Charles Wright received an apology from Ice Cube and back royalties over Express Yourself. The song borrowed the groove of Wright's 1970 hit without credit at first. Priority passed on the apology along with the money.[1] [2]
• An Australian radio station played Express Yourself eighty two times in a row as a protest. Triple J staff struck after a news director was suspended for airing part of N.W.A's police song. They looped Express Yourself all day, and the station later sampled its scratch for a news theme.[1] [2]
• Dee Barnes's cameraman for her Ice Cube interview was F. Gary Gray, who later directed the N.W.A film. That 1990 Pump It Up! segment fed the feud that led to Dre's assault on Barnes, an attack the film chose not to show.[1]
• British police seized thousands of copies of Efil4zaggin in 1991, and a court cleared it in fifteen minutes. Island Records' lawyer compared the lyrics to rugby songs. The magistrates ruled it was not obscene in law, and the police paid compensation.[1]
• Efil4zaggin was also the first independently distributed album to reach number one in America. It debuted at number two, then topped the Billboard 200 in its second week, reportedly selling around nine hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first week.[1] [2]
• Eazy-E attended a Republican lunch with President George H. W. Bush in 1991. He got the invitation after his name appeared on charity donor lists, paid two and a half thousand dollars, and said he was simply curious. Ice Cube mocked him for it.[1] [2]
• Hospital staff said Eazy-E's illness drew more calls than Lucille Ball's had. Cedars-Sinai was flooded after he announced he had AIDS. Members of the Nation of Islam's security wing stood guard near his room.[1]
• Eazy-E was buried in a flannel shirt, jeans and his Compton hat. He lay in a gold casket at a church service attended by more than three thousand people, and Compton's mayor declared Eazy-E Day.[1] [2]
• A comedian who parodied Eazy-E as Sleazy-E said Suge Knight threatened him with a gun. A.J. Johnson played the character in Dre's video, then quit Eazy's own video shoot after being summoned by Knight. Arnez J was suggested as his replacement.[1]
• The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been playing Boyz-n-the-Hood live since 1989. They first used it as an intro jam on their Mother's Milk tour and were still pulling it out in 2024.[1]
• DJ Yella says he produced more than three hundred adult films after leaving music. After his 1996 tribute album to Eazy, he spent about twelve years directing and producing. A comeback album he began in 2011 remains unreleased as of 2026.[1]
• Straight Outta Compton was the first rap album inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. That came in 2016, and a year later the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry, calling it one of the definitive works of the genre.[1] [2]
• N.W.A's first top forty hit came twenty six years after the song was released. The title track Straight Outta Compton reached number thirty eight on the Hot 100 in 2015, boosted by the biopic, after years of radio bans.[1] [2]
• Arabian Prince was cast in the 2015 biopic, then cut out entirely. Actor Brandon Lafourche appeared in early photo shoots, but the director said there was no time for a member who left early. Arabian Prince said he was present for many scenes shown.[1] [2]
• Slipknot's Corey Taylor said N.W.A influenced him as much as Slayer and Metallica. Defending their Rock Hall induction, he said N.W.A sounded like rock and roll because of their attitude, even though it was hip hop.[1]
• Dr. Dre has said he suffers from social anxiety. He told Rolling Stone in 2015 that he dislikes the spotlight, calling it a weird career choice, and that it explains his secluded image.[1]
• In 2023 a street in Compton was renamed Eazy Street. The hundred block of Auto Drive South, leading into a shopping plaza off Alameda Street, now carries a name that doubles as the title of one of his songs.[1]
• The D.O.C. said Dre wrote his own raps for two days after he arrived, then never again. The Dallas rapper ghostwrote many of Dre's verses on both N.W.A albums and on his solo records, writing, he said, in character.[1] [2]
• DJ Yella was the only former N.W.A member serving as a pallbearer at Eazy-E's funeral. Organizers could not say whether Dre or Cube attended, and MC Ren stayed away.[1]
• Jerry Heller sued over his portrayal in the biopic, and the case outlived him. He filed in 2015, died in September 2016 after a heart attack at the wheel, and a judge dismissed the suit in 2018.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.