Of the great rappers, Eazy fulfilled that quality of uniqueness.
No one is ever going to mistake a Bob Dylan record for anything other than a Bob Dylan record, and the same could be said for Joan Armatrading, say, or the Beach Boys. Second, you can simply be better than anyone else at what you do, like Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton. The first is to actually be first, a trailblazer or innovator, like Louis Armstrong or Lenny Bruce. There are three qualities I've tabulated that can lift an act to superstardom. This was the Rolling Stones, the Black Panthers, Gil Scott-Heron this was music that would change everything. I thought it was the most important rap music I had ever heard. "Wow," was the word that Heller used to describe "Boyz-n-the-Hood." Heller writes: Though he always deflected questions on just how a street kid from Compton raised the money necessary to found a record label, it was perhaps fitting that Ruthless Records was born from the same vices its artists constantly rapped about.
In Heller's memoir, Ruthless, he remembers that Eazy had unmatched ambition and persistence in his dream to found a record label where black music artists would have the freedom and range to break new ground in the music business ( Source, 62).Įazy grew up in Compton, California, and had a reputation for being a quiet and well-connected crack dealer. Not that Eazy was a poor, starving artist exactly: that first meeting eventually led to him investing $25,000 to launch Ruthless Records. Heller had been in the music business since the 1960s and had seen some of the world's biggest acts rise and fall, so he had witnessed poor, starving artists ascend to greatness. When Eazy played the demo, Heller was struck by how unprofessional the voice sounded, but he was also captivated by the rawness of the lyrics. finished the demo for "Boyz-n-the-Hood," Eazy intentionally sought out a down-on-his-luck record executive named Jerry Heller, aware of his previous music success in the 1970s, and eventually paid a mutual friend $750 just to get a meeting with him. Maybe Eazy was never a great rapper in the technical sense, but he made up for it with charisma and drive.Īfter Eazy and N.W.A. When Eazy began to rap, his friends knocked his delivery and the sound of his voice, which has been described as high-pitched and whiny. They didn't like the first cut much, mostly due to the fact that Eazy was an amateur. Dre and former Cru member DJ Yella to lay down a vocal track, Eric Wright drew the short straw, stepped to the mic, and became Eazy-E.
The two rappers hated it, and left the studio.Īs it turned out, Ice Cube didn't even show up that day, and it seemed like rented studio time was going to go to waste. Another recruit, Ice Cube, wrote a song called "Boyz-n-the-Hood," and they offered it to a couple of East Coast rappers calling themselves HBO. Dre, brimming with inspiration from groups like Run-DMC and happy to be away from the Wreckin' Cru, quickly agreed.Īfter putting together a rag-tag group of MCs, they got to work. Now that Dre owed Wright a favor, Wright asked him to create a couple of beats for a rap collective Wright was putting together, to be called N.W.A. Fed up with the amount of money he was spending to keep Dre out of jail, Williams finally told Dre to call someone else.
As a member of the party rap group, the World Class Wreckin' Cru, Dre frequently relied on the group's leader, Alonzo Williams, to bail him out when the tickets piled up. Dre found himself in jail thanks to a growing number of unpaid parking violations. Fleming couldn't keep a tidy workspace in his lab.Īnd a revolutionary gangster rap group came together in 1987 because of.parking tickets? In 1928, penicillin was discovered because Dr. The Chicago Fire of 1871 supposedly started when a cow kicked over a lantern in a barn. Sometimes, something big happens as a result of a small event that seems inconsequential at first.