In that span, Eazy was visited by many of those longtime friends with whom he’d recently fallen out, Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Cube among them. He announced his diagnosis a week prior to his death, and radio stations held what were essentially city-wide vigils during his final days. Eazy-E passed away on March 26, 1995, of complications from AIDS. There was money to be made.Īt the end of February 1995, Eazy was admitted to Cedars-Sinai, thinking that the piercing cough he’d caught might be due to asthma. He was going to get his records into every home in America through force of charm and sheer will, not by spending 10 thousand hours scribbling rhymes and practicing his breath control. Today we know the slightly different, even more American truth: Eazy was deeply invested in the success of N.W.A, Ruthless, and himself, but subscribed to the sort of antagonistic, absurdist capitalism that grounded so much hip-hop through the 80s and 90s. Maybe, in 1988, this had the chilling effect of casting Eazy as a criminal who couldn’t be bothered to perfect his musical skills. There are points on the album – take the brutal crime narrative on “Nobody Move,” which Eazy occasionally strains and struggles to sell – when you are distinctly aware of the star’s amateurism when it comes to the finer aspects of making a record. This is true of the production, but also could be read as a natural extension of Eazy’s style in the vocal booth. Unlike Compton, which aimed to synthesize many different sounds that had been bubbling in Los Angeles into a unified whole, Eazy-Duz-It often lets you see the seams. The album is anchored, of course, by the “Boyz-n-the-Hood” remix, which is Eazy’s appeal and worldview boiled down to six minutes: a grinning, goofy ride where death lurks around every corner. It tries to round out Eazy’s persona, and does so by careening from threats to jokes to improbable boasts and back again. He made the group funnier, meaner, more alien, and while N.W.A’s fashion aesthetic might have been born out of collaboration, no one wore all-black like Eazy.īut Eazy-Duz-It was not the careful balancing act that Straight Outta Compton had been. Despite being only a vocal performer (throughout his career, Eazy’s lyrics were penned chiefly by Ice Cube, the D.O.C., and MC Ren), Eazy was inimitable, his voice a high-pitched, sneering whine that could cut through radio distortion or attempts at censorship. Dre’s production, which fused the frantic, layered buzz of Public Enemy with the long, laconic grooves of Southern California, and by Ice Cube, who was a world-class political agitator from the moment he picked up a mic. But when he founded Ruthless Records in 1986, he set in motion a chain of events that would make him one of the most infamous figures in the country at the end of the Reagan years. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and made money for years in ways that could be described, at best, as quasi-legal. And while the album isn’t the history-making, genre-warping masterpiece that Straight Outta Compton is, it’s a valuable document from one of hip-hop’s most daring, brazen capitalists, unafraid of anybody and sensing his time had come.Įazy was born Eric Wright in Compton – of course – in 1964. But just a month after its release, Eazy, the mastermind behind the group and its label, Ruthless Records, returned with another LP: his solo debut, Eazy-Duz-It. It irreversibly changed the course of the genre and gave the West coast the sort of commercial cache that had previously been limited to New York. There’s no question that the N.W.A album, from which the movie takes its name, is one of the most essential records in the history of rap and American pop culture at large. But by 2015, when N.W.A was further immortalized in the movie Straight Outta Compton, which became an international hit, their impact – and Eazy’s – had become undeniable. Part of this was by design: Eazy and the rest of N.W.A were banned from many radio stations when they debuted, and the charts did not exactly account for non-traditional forms of distribution. Despite being one of the songs that best typified early gangsta rap – especially the variety that sprawled out from the West coast to validate the experiences or capture the imaginations of young people around the country – its success was not exactly measurable. When “Boyz-n-the-Hood” finally made the Billboard charts, Apple was rolling out its fifth generation of iPhones, the Barack Obama presidency was winding down, and Eazy-E had been dead for more than 20 years.
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