Though he’s known today as a gritty West Coast rap pioneer, before he was Ice-T, Tracy Marrow was raised in the well-to-do New Jersey suburb of Summit. In the span of four years both Marrow’s parents died of heart attacks, and so during junior high, at the dawn of the seventies, he was sent to live with his dad’s sister in View Park, a middle-class part of South Central. But he attended the combustible Crenshaw High School, which, in the early days of gangbanging, featured both the Hoover Crips and their rivals in red called the Brims, who were later enveloped into the Bloods.
“The Crips kept their rag in the left pocket; the Crips pierced their left ear. The Brims did everything in the right. Like a mirror image,” Ice-T wrote in his memoir Ice. But before long, members of other gangs started transferring, and soon anyone who attended Crenshaw—whether or not they were even in a gang—was assumed to represent the Crips, and thus eligible for beat-downs from rivals. Ice-T said West Side Crips leader Stanley “Tookie” Williams sometimes dropped by Crenshaw with his equally muscle-bound comrade Jimel Barnes. “Most days, they dressed identically in farmer overalls with the bib down, showing off their bare chests, shoulders, and arms,” Ice-T wrote, adding that, at house parties, they were trailed by young Crips who rubbed baby oil on their muscles, to impress the girls.
Ice-T never formally joined the Crips, but hung around with members he got to know through his girlfriend, who lived in a Hoover Crip neighborhood. Like so many others, he got caught up in gangs’ primary appeal: affection. “My aunt never said she loved me,” he wrote. “My mother and father were never big on that word. You get to Crenshaw, and you got a male friend saying, ‘Cuz, ain’t nothin’ never fin’ to happen to you, homie. You safe, cuz. I love you.’”
At age seventeen he moved out of his aunt’s home. She agreed to give him the $250 monthly Social Security checks she’d been receiving on his behalf, which gave him enough for a cheap apartment and cans of Chef Boyardee. Before graduating he got his tenth-grade girlfriend pregnant, and he decided to join the army, where he spent four years, serving in Hawaii and becoming an M60 gunner. Upon his release he turned to crime—stealing jewelry, Rolexes, Gucci bags, as well as Pontiacs in which to complete such “licks.” As his partners started getting serious prison time, his interest in hip-hop began paying off.
He’d already penned numerous “Crip rhymes,” tales of intimidation and triumph performed aloud in front of friends like poems, rather than being set to music:
He said “Fuck a Crip nigga—this is Brim!”
So we pulled out the Roscoe, Roscoe said crack
I looked again the nigga was shootin’ back
The pimp turned bestselling writer Iceberg Slim inspired Ice-T’s stage name. He and his crew would show up at clubs and “buy the mic,” giving the DJ $500 so he could rap all night. After being discovered in 1983 while rapping to impress girls at a beauty parlor called Good Fred—where he got his perm—he agreed to make a single called “The Coldest Rap,” spitting all the rhymes he knew at the time. It paid about $250, sold well locally, and enchanted the hip denizens of MacArthur Park underground club Radio. There DJs like The Glove and Egyptian Lover and pop-lockers like Lil’ Coco and Boogaloo Shrimp held sway. The spot was the height of trendiness—you couldn’t buy booze, but could bring your own in—and it hosted the Cold Crush Brothers, and even Madonna. “Madonna drew us up on stage into her show, was trying to undress us and shit,” The Glove said.
The white kids at The Radio knew every word of “The Coldest Rap” by the time Ice-T performed there. He became the club’s house MC, pulling up each weekend in his criminally funded Porsche, and appearing in 1984’s breakdance-sploitation film Breakin’, which was inspired by the venue. In the rather corny film, the Mary Lou Retton–esque lead teams up with street toughs outfitted in studded belts, chains, and spiked wristbands. Following Breakin’ the club moved to a different venue downtown, and became known as Radiotron.
Another good-vibes spot was Leimert Park’s I Fresh, a “rap workshop” partly funded by a state grant. Running from 1984 to 1989, it allowed young MCs to hone their crafts, including South Central rapper Yo-Yo, whose high school English teacher turned her on to the program and who would go on to record with Ice Cube. “She was really good on her feet, bubbly and really creative, right at the tip of her fingers,” said I Fresh organizer Ben Caldwell. (Not encouraged, however, was Eazy-E, who refused to capitulate to Caldwell’s demands to jettison his misogynist lyrics.) I Fresh later morphed into the famed weekly open-mic session held at the nearby Good Life Café, which spawned the Project Blowed sessions.
Before things got gangsta, I Fresh and Radio characterized an optimistic era in Los Angeles when racially and socioeconomically mixed groups of kids got down together. Even New York’s king hip-hop impresario Afrika Bambaataa was impressed with the L.A. scene. “It brought together punk rockers, new wavers, hip-hoppers,” he said. “You could hear funk, reggae, all up in one club. It was like George Clinton said, ‘One nation under a groove.’”
As for Ice-T, by now he’d developed something of an identity crisis. In the early eighties he wore then-fashionable tight leather getups, spikes, and biker gloves, patterned after New York artists like Melle Mel, from the Furious Five. His early songs weren’t very tough.
But one day, while he and his friend Randy Mack were jamming to the Beastie Boys’ song “Hold It Now, Hit It,” Mack made a bold suggestion. Ice-T should abandon the “costume” and rap about the real-life details of his recently cast off criminal lifestyle. The resulting landmark 1986 song “6 in the Mornin’” embraced what was happening on the streets of South Central. Named for the LAPD’s early-hours battering ram raids, the song’s protagonist flees the police, beats women, and mows down adversaries. It soon became a local hit.
The poet and spoken-word performer Gil Scott-Heron, best known for “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” was undoubtedly influential on early hip-hop, as were politically minded spoken-word groups like The Last Poets and the Watts Prophets. But much of early rap was bawdy entertainment, influenced by the pimpadelic black comedy tradition, which included Rudy Ray Moore’s dirty-joke-telling character Dolemite, as well as the proudly scatological comedian and musician Blowfly. You can also see the influence of traditional African-American arts like the insult game the dozens, and toasting, which features braggadocious rhyming stories of a character’s exploits.
As the seventies turned into the eighties, disco, raunchy comedy records, and rap all began to merge, and it can be hard to tell the difference. In this vein, an argument could be made that the first West Coast gangsta rap song is an obscure 1980 track called “Badd Mann Dann Rapp,” a tale of crazed sex, homosexuality, prostitution, and violence. Its singsongy rap is performed by King Monkey, the alias of comedian Jimmy Thompson.
But it, like most early hip-hop, lacked the hard, percussion-driven sound we came to associate with rap. That would dominate after Run-D.M.C. helped change things with their 1983 song “Sucker MCs,” which popularized a sparse, drum machine beat that sounded great out of boomboxes. Run-D.M.C. weren’t gangsta rappers, but they influenced the man credited with launching the gangsta sound, Philadelphia’s Schoolly D. Born Jesse Bonds Weaver Jr., he was raised in West Philadelphia as one of nine kids, and witnessed a pair of murders growing up. An intimidating presence, he wrote, performed, and pressed up his own records, once brandishing a firearm at a record plant employee he accused of bootlegging his work. The protagonist of his 1984 track “Gangster Boogie” deals weed, macks the ladies, and flashes his 8 mm at a would-be jacker. But the song Schoolly D released the next year, called “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?,” is considered the first gangsta rap song. “P.S.K.” shouts out Schoolly D’s neighborhood gang, Parkside Killers, and follows the exploits of a local troublemaker who’s driving around town, smoking weed, and drinking beer.
Got to the place, and who did I see
A sucker-ass nigga tryin’ to sound like me
Put my pistol up against his head
And said, “You sucker-ass nigga I should shoot you dead”
Schoolly D didn’t initially feature such strong language in his songs, but began gaining attention for his music when he “started talking the way people talk on the streets,” he said. “P.S.K.” became a phenomenon; it’s got an eerie lo-fi quality, with huge drums and vicious scratching reverberating as if throughout a cavernous hall. “My jaw dropped,” wrote Ice-T, about the first time he heard it. “I turned to my homey and said, ‘Yo, this shit is so dusted!’ It sounded different than regular hip-hop. It sounded like you were high.”
“P.S.K.” inspired Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’,” which sounds even more like the tough hip-hop to come. Produced by the Unknown DJ, an enigmatic early World Class Wreckin’ Cru member who refused to let anyone take his picture, it succeeds through its details: our hero’s squeaking Adidas, his plush truck, his associate’s chiming pager, the march of the battering ram.
Got a knot in my pocket, weighing at least a grand
Gold on my neck, my pistol’s close at hand
I’m a self-made monster of the city streets
Remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats
“I rap about what I know,” Ice-T said in 1986. “If I grew up in a nice neighborhood, and lived in a half-million-dollar house, I’d be rapping about gold silverware and maids. But I didn’t, I grew up in South Central L.A.” At the time he recorded “6 in the Mornin’” Ice-T actually was living in Hollywood, but he remained Adidas-clad, thin, and a bit paranoid, with submachine guns hanging on his apartment wall as a form of decoration.
The song was a revelation. When Ice-T performed it at a South Bronx movie house in 1986, it even went over like gangbusters with New York kingmakers Rakim and KRS-One. “It shocked people when he said: We beat the bitch down in the goddamn street,” said Afrika Islam, another Ice-T producer. “Back then, people didn’t associate Los Angeles with ’hood stories. We thought it was all Hollywood and Malibu Beach.” Ice-T would be the first rapper signed to Sire Records, Madonna’s label.
Meanwhile, in 1987 KRS-One, Scott La Rock, and D-Nice—together Boogie Down Productions—released an early classic gangsta album, Criminal Minded. It featured “The Bridge Is Over,” championing their home turf of the South Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop and dissing Queensbridge rapper MC Shan and his Juice Crew. Other artists from the era also get credit for pushing the boundaries of what could be said on record, like New York rapper Just-Ice, known for his 1986 track “Gangster of Hip Hop,” and Oakland rapper Too $hort, whose “Freaky Tales” is a pimp-influenced 1987 account of an insatiable harem. In Los Angeles, Compton impresario Mixmaster Spade was an early archetype for Eric Wright, both as a musician and a businessman.
Led by songs like “P.S.K.” and “6 in the Mornin’,” street-centric hip-hop was emerging as a plausible alternative to soft electro, and the new sound did not escape the notice of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eric. “These were the only records we were playing, because they were saying things we could relate to,” said Dre.
Tired of all the bland crooning and wimpy party raps on the radio, he and Eric wanted to use the language of the streets to tell tales as rough and wild as their daily life. In 1986 they started getting together at Lonzo’s house, often accompanied by a songwriter named Laylaw Goodman—the other moneyman Dre had linked up with to help get his music made. He was known simply as Laylaw, a real street dude with cash to spare, owing to his other profession, the drug business. (Eric, in fact, sometimes obtained dope on consignment from him.) Cube also came with Dre to Lonzo’s house, and he and Eric began getting to know each other.
One day Dre played the guys his latest track. It featured a pared down, menacing beat with 808 bass and a long, electro fade-out. But there was also something gleeful and sadistic about it, a high-pitched keyboard riff that was immediately catchy. “What Dre wanted to do,” wrote Los Angeles Times’ Jonathan Gold, who interviewed him in this era, “was to create a signature, a sound so distinctive that he’d always know when people were bumping one of his tracks in their cars.”
Cube insisted he had the perfect song for the beat, hard-edged like Eazy was interested in for his label. Called “The Boyz-N-The Hood,” it was an epic tale modeled after “6 in the Mornin’.” The song’s young protagonist is drunk on malt liquor, prone to slapping girlfriends and murdering thieves. Its local references include the character’s ride (I pulled up in my ’64 Impala) and preferred malt liquor (From the 8 Ball my breath starts stinkin’), and even the local paper (Little did he know I had a loaded twelve gauge / One sucker dead, L.A. Times front page). “Now that’s the way I want the lyrics to sound,” said Eric, who added some personal touches to the track, like a verse about his old drug runner J.D., who started smoking crack and stole Eric’s radio: The boy J.D. was a friend of mine / ’Til I caught him in my car trying to steal an Alpine. Cube recorded a demo version of himself rapping over Dre’s beat, which Eric listened to on repeat while driving around in his Jeep.
Eric paid Cube a couple hundred dollars for the song, and then later, when it was blowing up, a Suzuki Sidekick. Their business arrangement was incredibly informal, which would later cause tension. But at the time Cube didn’t feel exploited. In fact, by not signing any paperwork, he unknowingly insulated himself. “I never signed my publishing away,” he said.
Dre met a group called H.B.O., aka Home Boys Only, who were from New York, but in 1986 were staying for a time in Southern California. They had a Run-D.M.C. vibe, and he agreed to record them. But upon arriving to Lonzo’s studio, they didn’t stick around for long. Their main historic claim to fame nowadays is that they passed on “The Boyz-N-The Hood.” “They was like, ‘Yo, man, we ain’t doing that song, that’s a West Coast record,’” Dre said.
“They was like, what are you talking about? What’s a ‘six-four’?” Cube said.
Having already booked the studio time, Dre and Eric weren’t sure what to do. Dre suggested Eric rap the song; he’d memorized Cube’s version, after all, and the song was more like his life than anyone else’s. He was already a street cat, so why not play one on record? But Eric was timid. “Put your glasses on, cut the lights down,” said Dre, motioning to Eric’s sunglasses. “Just do it.”
Eric gave it a go, but he clearly didn’t know what he was doing. His delivery was clunky, his cadence and timing a disaster. But Dre was patient, taking the time to “punch in” each line. He’d have Eric rap a short bit—Cruising down the street in my ’64—rewind the tape, perform it again, and then stitch together the best takes. It took eight or nine hours, but was worth the wait. Dre’s genius was recognizing that, for all his faults, Eric had the goods to be a memorable rapper: a unique voice. Indeed, Eric’s squeaky instrument turned out to be both terrifying and calming, foreign and immediately recognizable.
“I looked at Dre in amazement, like: ‘You turned this dude into a rapper,’” said Cube.
Still, “Boyz” wasn’t an immediate success. They weren’t sure at first how to promote it; some doubted it would work at all. A rapper who ran in their circles named MC Chip remembers being shocked after hearing it for the first time, what with all the cursing. “You’re thinking, like, ‘Damn, how’s he gonna get radio play?’”
They would worry about that later. For the time being, now that he was a rapper, Eric needed a rap name. The genesis of the moniker Eazy-E is a bit unclear, but he started using it around this time. Cube says they conceived it at the studio—“It sounded cool and it really described him.” Eazy’s childhood friend Bigg A says a pair of music industry brothers (he can’t remember their names) gave it to him. “He would sit in their office chair, and they said, ‘You really take life easy, you’re an easy kind of guy,’” Bigg A said. J-Dee from Da Lench Mob speculates Eazy may have gotten it from the 1984 song “Big Mouth,” by Whodini, of whom Eazy was a fan. The track concerns a rumor that has been spread around town:
Pam was overheard talkin’ to her man
Pam told Cookie what she thought she heard
And somehow Eazy-E had got the word
Whatever the case, on his very first attempt, he’d made rap history. “The line Cruising down the street in my ’64 created gangsta rap,” said Terrence “Punch” Henderson, the president of the label responsible for Kendrick Lamar.
“I was very blue-eyed,” Don Macmillan said. “I trusted everybody.”
Perhaps that’s why in 1986 he welcomed a Compton drug dealer to Macola, his record-pressing plant. The first thing Macmillan, then in his fifties, noticed about Eazy-E, three decades his junior, was how short he was. Then he realized that the room had emptied out; the other artists who were there to talk business had suddenly vanished.
“He’s dangerous,” someone told him later.
“You don’t even want to talk to him,” said someone else. “This guy will shoot you if he looks at you!”
Don himself found Eazy exceedingly pleasant, and in any case Eazy was there on legitimate business: He wanted “The Boyz-N-The Hood” pressed up.
Macmillan was an unlikely hip-hop champion. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, as a young man he drove a tugboat along the Pacific coast, pulling oil and gas barges to service logging camps and villages. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1960, but by the time Eazy-E came knocking he was a white-haired family man who lived in suburban Palos Verdes Estates and enjoyed golf.
Don had developed ties with the black music community in the sixties and seventies while working at a vinyl-pressing plant called Cadet on South Normandie Avenue. The South Central spot made records for artists like Ike & Tina Turner, Etta James, and BB King. In 1983 after Cadet folded, Macmillan bought Macola during a fire sale, and brought with him some of Cadet’s artists and employees. Though compact discs would soon take off, cassettes and vinyl still had a bit more life in them. Macmillan and his employees tended to vinyl presses and shrink-wrapping machines in the small, bare-bones plant on a dodgy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood that they shared with gangs and male prostitutes.
The cluttered plant had ashtrays strewn about and cardboard boxes everywhere—records going out, records being returned. Wearing slacks and a collared sports shirt, a cigarette on his lips, Don gave artists a certain amount of time to collect their records that hadn’t sold. But if they didn’t, beware: That vinyl was headed straight to the grinder to be pressed into something else.
By the mid-eighties Macola was doing great business with self-starting black artists from south of downtown. What made Macola perfect for their needs was that it was a printing plant, record label, and distributor all in one. Why wait for a major record label to discover you, when you could get your own professional-looking album on the cheap? A thousand dollars got you five hundred records, with Macmillan taking a percentage of sales in exchange for distribution. It was a fair trade: Macmillan had connections with record store–supplying distribution networks around the country (including with Memphis-based Select-O-Hits, whose co-owner Johnny Phillips’s uncle Sam discovered Elvis), and so a rapper could bring in his music one day and, quite possibly, have a hit on his hands soon after. “Macola was an open-door policy,” said Macola promoter Ray Kennedy. “A lot of people were coming in who normally wouldn’t get a chance.”
Macmillan’s somewhat ad hoc business model hit pay dirt with Greg Broussard, aka DJ Egyptian Lover, a breakout star from Uncle Jamm’s Army, the popular L.A. DJ crew who already had their own Macola vinyl, “Dial-A-Freak.” Broussard came in to press up his robotic twelve-inch 1984 record “Egypt, Egypt,” and returned for five hundred more copies, and then five hundred more. He was selling them himself—out of his car’s trunk, at swap meets, wherever—and Don asked to get in on the action, seeding the work through his distribution channels. For Egyptian Lover’s full-length On the Nile album shoot, Macmillan “costumed Broussard and rented the necessary Egyptian memorabilia,” according to a news account, which is hilarious to imagine.
Macmillan soon took his entrepreneurship to the next level by signing 2 Live Crew, then a Riverside, California-based trio of air force reservemen riding the electro wave. Their Macola single “The Revelation/2 Live” gained popularity in South Florida, and so at the invitation of a DJ named Luke Campbell, they performed in Miami and eventually moved there. After Campbell joined the group himself and raunchily recast their image, they broke nationally, going on to define the southern rap sound and soundtrack countless hot tub parties.
Macola eventually released records from a who’s who of important California artists, including MC Hammer, Too $hort, Ice-T, and Digital Underground. Their R&B electro group Timex Social Club broke into Billboard’s Top 10 with their song “Rumors.” The whole time, Macmillan didn’t know the L.A. hip-hop scene from Adam. “He couldn’t tell a good record from a bad record, at least as far as rap goes,” said Macmillan’s lawyer Gerald Weiner. His talent was timing, and he was smart enough to let his distributors and vendors tell him what to push.
Still, some found his business dealings shady. Egyptian Lover, Arabian Prince, Rodger Clayton, and others accused him of “bootlegging” albums—printing up extra copies, selling them secretly, and then keeping the proceeds for himself. “I would imagine Don was selling records out the back door,” said Chuck Fassert, marketing and sales manager at Macola. A number of Macmillan’s associates added that he had ties with a nefarious crew back east, who helped promote World Class Wreckin’ Cru’s hit “Turn Off the Lights.”
The Cru’s Lonzo Williams described getting a call from a man with a New York accent who accused him of improperly licensing “Turn Off the Lights.” “He said, ‘If you were in New York, they’d find you in the Hudson River.’” (Macmillan denied all impropriety and any associations with intimidations.)
“The idea that Don somehow didn’t treat people fairly, it’s just BS in my opinion,” said his lawyer Gerald Weiner, adding: “I will say that I think his accounting department was abysmal. I think if you asked Don at any one moment how many records he’d sold, he wouldn’t know.”
When I visited him at his Palos Verdes Estates home in March 2015, Macmillan did not dispute this characterization. Now in his eighties, his memory is fading, and he gets around slowly. His right leg was amputated below the knee after an artery burst. He insists he gave his artists a fair deal, producing old contracts to bolster his case. Eazy-E and rapper Ron-De-Vu, for example, signed a deal for a record containing “The Boyz-N-The Hood,” “Fat Girl,” and other tracks, which paid them a $1,000 advance. Any proceeds were to be split fifty-fifty after Macola took 15 percent of gross receipts as a distribution fee.
It doesn’t sound like a horrible deal, though without strict accounting the terms wouldn’t have mattered much. Whatever the case, Macmillan undoubtedly helped push these records out into the world. The successful artists usually left to make millions for other labels.
“He was a really nice guy,” said Doug Young, a record promoter who had an office at the Macola plant, “that I think was in over his head.”
Using his drug-dealing profits, Eazy had ten thousand twelve-inch vinyl copies of “Boyz” pressed up at Macola in early 1987. The vinyl listed his parents’ home address on South Muriel Drive, and credited Eazy’s new label, Ruthless Records. I’ve been told the imprint was originally going to be called Rockhouse Records—another name for a dope house. But rapper Yomo, who later signed to Ruthless along with a partner named Maulkie, takes credit for its ultimate moniker, which he said he came up with after seeing a newspaper ad for Danny DeVito and Bette Midler’s 1986 movie Ruthless People.
Eazy and his crew brought stacks of “Boyz” to record stores and swap meets. On weekends they handed out free cassettes on Crenshaw Boulevard, the spot where kids showed off their lowriders. The buzz was palpable, but reports about its initial sales vary. I’ve read it sold as many as 200,000 copies in its first months, but no one really knows. One important champion was a local white woman, a hip-hop enthusiast in her early thirties named Violet Brown. She was the director of urban music at Wherehouse Records, a chain with some 1,600 stores at the height of its popularity. Under her direction Wherehouse was the first major retailer to stock “Boyz.” “You knew by listening to it what would happen with the record. It caught fire very quick,” she said.
She put Eazy’s music in stores nationwide. This was rare at the time for West Coast acts, but that was changing. Los Angeles upstart label Delicious Vinyl kicked off in 1987 and soon hit with baritone rapper Tone Lōc, a former gang member turned pop rapper with hits like “Wild Thing” and “Funky Cold Medina.” They also had Young MC, a Queens-reared USC grad with smart, inoffensive tracks like “Bust a Move.”
These acts got play on KDAY, another crucial outlet for “Boyz.” KDAY was the little station that could, broadcasting a muddy AM signal from six towers on a hill between Echo Park and Silver Lake. With call letters likely derived from its strictly daytime broadcast license upon its 1956 birth, it featured personalities such as Alan Freed and Art Laboe in its early, Top 40 days. Since its signal shot straight into South Central, it began playing black artists, and even featured “Rapper’s Delight” when it came out in 1979. Though KDAY is often described as the first station to play hip-hop twenty-four/seven, it always included R&B in the mix. In fact, a conservative program director took rap out of rotation in the early eighties, and it didn’t return in force until the 1983 arrival of Greg Macmillan, originally from Van Alstyne, Texas. Greg called himself Greg Mack and wore cowboy boots. (He reminded Lonzo of Yosemite Sam.) Upon arriving in L.A. he moved to South Central. “All you had to do was listen to the cars driving by and you could hear what people were into,” Mack said.
Attempting to jumpstart ratings Mack put rap on heavy rotation, and it worked. Kids adjusted their antennas to pick up the signal, and Mack took his promotional efforts to the streets. He even began rubbing elbows with gangbangers. “I created such a good rapport with these gang guys they would call me at the station and tell me when someone got dusted,” Mack said.
He broadcast live from roller rinks, high schools, and clubs. Attempting to compete with Uncle Jamm’s Army, he enlisted tastemaker DJs like Tony G, Julio G, and M.Walk (called “Mixmasters”) to perform at events, while Mack’s own evening show High 5 counted down the week’s top five records. Between songs, high school kids called in to show off their rhyme skills and shout out their high schools: Crenshaw High, Locke High, Manual Arts. DJ Crazy Toones—Ice Cube’s DJ today—remembers listening to the countdowns. The next day he and his brother W.C. would travel to one of the schools, hop the fence, and commence lyrical and pop-locking battles over the lunch hour.
KDAY also sent young rappers like Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Ice-T, MC Hammer, and Candyman out on promotional “tours” around the city—community centers, shopping centers, schools. They wouldn’t always perform, sometimes just sign autographs or play basketball with the kids. East Coast acts like Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, and Big Daddy Kane were enlisted as well, in something of a strong-arm arrangement; Mack tended not to play you on the air unless you did concerts for his station. He attempted to appeal not just to young African-Americans, but Latinos, too, who made up almost half their audience, he said.
KDAY was a godsend for the emerging local rap scene. “KDAY was the one station that you could make a record, walk through the door, hand it to them, and they’d put it on the air,” said Ice-T. “Right then!” It was also an important community mouthpiece. Following the 1986 riot at the Run-D.M.C. concert in Long Beach, the station held a Day of Peace, suspending their playlist to take calls and promote nonviolence. The guests included Run-D.M.C. and singer Barry White, a former South Central gangbanger himself. Calls for a cease-fire were observed, at least temporarily.
For all his vision, Greg Mack wasn’t initially all that excited about “Boyz.” But he heard it every time he went out. And so at his request Eazy made a clean version, and it became their most requested record. Suddenly “Boyz” was everywhere. Eazy gave his first live show at Skateland on September 4, 1987 (C.I.A. opened). He was nervous, but he needn’t have been. The eight hundred or so kids in attendance knew “Boyz” by heart and rapped it for him.
Eazy played down his gang affiliation for the concert, probably a smart move considering he was a Crip playing in a Blood stronghold. Instead, he wore his typical street clothes: Raiders gear, jeans, Nikes. He had no idea he was creating a fashion template.
Joseph Nazel edited important black publications like the Los Angeles Sentinel as well as porn rags like Players. He wrote countless Blaxploitation novels, with titles like My Name Is Black! His musically inclined son Kim was raised in Compton and Inglewood and, like so many other kids in the early eighties, idolized Prince, so much so that he began dressing like the Minneapolis icon. He even called himself DJ Prince.
But that all changed while roller-skating one day with a friend. A cute girl skated up beside them and asked their names. “I’m Egyptian Lover,” said Nazel’s friend, the popular DJ. “I’m DJ Prince,” said Nazel. The girl sized him up before coming up with her own, Middle East–flavored moniker. “You should be Arabian Prince,” she said, “since you’re always with him.” And so it was. Like his buddy, Arabian Prince released electro records with spacy, exotic sounds befitting his name.
Arabian Prince began encountering Dr. Dre on the local DJ circuit. Before long they were shopping for records at Roadium, hitting the beach, and chasing women together. They’d even drive all the way out to San Bernardino County to visit members of a saucy, charismatic group of female rappers called J. J. Fad. Dre’s love interest was Anna Cash (aka Lady Anna), while Arabian Prince’s love interest was Juana Burns (aka MC J.B.). The girls wanted to make a record, but Dre wasn’t feeling it. “He was like, ‘This is corny,’” remembered MC J.B., then a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Express, part of the short-lived United States Football League.
But Arabian Prince had some studio time at his disposal, and so he helped the ladies put together a pair of tracks, called “Supersonic” and “Another Ho Bites the Dust.” The latter is a little-remembered entry in the mid-eighties “Roxanne wars,” a series of verbal volleys sparked by a dispute between MC Roxanne Shanté and the group UTFO, who made the song “Roxanne, Roxanne.” Despite the fact that J. J. Fad didn’t know the players involved or have any reason to be upset with them, they threw out their best insults: Roxanne Shanté ain’t got no hair in her back / She’s bald. “At that time, if you didn’t have a diss record, you didn’t have anything,” said MC J.B. The track didn’t go anywhere, but its contagious B-side “Supersonic” began to make some noise. Eazy-E saw them perform it at local club the Casa and left impressed.
Meanwhile, Eazy courted Arabian Prince for a “supergroup” he was planning of his own, which also included Cube (from C.I.A.) and Dr. Dre and DJ Yella (from World Class Wreckin’ Cru). Though he had a hot single, Eazy was still unconfident in his rapping abilities, and likely thought it best to surround himself with a group of ringers. It was good timing. Dre and Cube had outgrown their old acts, and so the group—along with Eazy’s buddy from the neighborhood MC Ren—met at Arabian Prince’s mother’s house, on Van Ness Avenue in Inglewood. The plan was to come up with a name. Despite Eazy and Dre’s inclinations, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion they’d be hardcore. After all, three of their original members—DJ Yella, Ice Cube (aka Purple Ice), and Arabian Prince (aka DJ Prince) idolized Prince.
One thing they quickly agreed on: They wanted to represent where they were from, just like the New York rappers who shouted out their boroughs. Arabian Prince jokingly imagined a cover where the guys were holding guns, with the title From Compton with Love. That idea didn’t go over so well. Eventually he and Dre began complaining about not getting paid for their production credits. “I feel like a nigga with an attitude,” someone said, and before long Eazy suggested “N.W.A—Niggaz With Attitudes.” It was a moniker shocking enough to turn heads, with a soupçon of righteous indignation. Cube, told of it later, was definitely down. “Black people taking that word and trying to use it, instead of getting abused by it.”
It’s a genius moniker in its provocativeness—thrilling some, and making others uncomfortable. “In early interviews, MC Ren took full advantage of the disparity, goading reporters, including me, into repeating a word many of them simply were incapable of even stammering,” wrote Jonathan Gold. “If you rose to the bait, you were a racist. If you didn’t (I didn’t), you were a wuss. There was no middle ground.”
Eazy was in charge of the group’s decision making. By now he’d quit the drug game entirely, and divided his time between his own solo projects and N.W.A. The group’s first EP Panic Zone, released in 1987, contains two songs that have gone down in history, and one that hasn’t. “8 Ball” is an ode to Olde English 800 malt liquor. I don’t drink Brass Monkey, Eazy starts off the song, responding to the Beastie Boys’ paean for their preferred elixir. (The song also samples the white New York act’s “Fight for Your Right.”) Notably, neither Eazy nor the song’s scribe, Ice Cube, actually drank at the time. Sir Jinx said when Eazy toted a forty-ouncer during performances, it would actually be filled with apple juice.
Like “8 Ball,” “Dope Man” was written by Ice Cube, and it foreshadowed the group’s sound and image to come. It’s the first example of Dr. Dre’s use of the “funky worm,” the high-pitched, irresistible Moog synthesizer sound whose name was coined by seventies funk group Ohio Players. “Dope Man” alternately glamorizes and condemns the pusher and his lifestyle, ending with a stern warning voiced by Mexican-American rapper Krazy Dee: You sold crack to my sister and now she’s sick / But if she happens to die because of your drug / I’m putting in your culo a .38 slug!
N.W.A’s first single was actually the electro-driven track “Panic Zone,” an apocalyptic dispatch from L.A.’s tough neighborhoods.
Ice Cube is from L.A., he’s in the panic zone
Eazy-E is from Compton, he’s in the panic zone
Arabian Prince from Inglewood, he’s in the panic zone
Though it hit locally, the song is barely remembered today. Robotic vocals were already on the way out, displaced by, well, gangsta songs like “The Boyz-N-The Hood.”
To capitalize on N.W.A’s emerging popularity, Macola put together an album called N.W.A. and the Posse. They did so without N.W.A’s consent, however, creating a bizarre situation in which the group was badmouthing their own record. “That shit was like some whack shit,” MC Ren said.
No matter its provenance, Posse actually succeeds as a pretty good compilation album of the group’s early works, including the Panic Zone tracks, “Boyz,” and gag songs like “Fat Girl,” with Eazy and Ron-De-Vu riffing on the randy, Rubenesque title character. Misogyny and humor comingle on “A Bitch Iz A Bitch,” in which Ice Cube denigrates girls who won’t give him the time of day.
Today, N.W.A. and the Posse is probably best known for its cover photo, an eighties time capsule featuring a dozen of the group’s affiliates, mean-mugging in a graffiti-covered, trash-strewn Hollywood alleyway near Macola, forty-ounce bottles in hand.
The record also introduced another extraordinary talent, Dallas rapper Tracy Curry, who performs on Posse with a group called the Fila Fresh Crew. Their contributions include the ode to liquor “Drink It Up” (a boozy parody of “Twist and Shout”) and “Dunk the Funk,” a banger showing off Curry’s dexterous rapping ability. Such lyrical acrobatics were unlike anything the West Coast had yet seen up to this point, and it turns out Curry was a master songwriter as well.
Curry was introduced to N.W.A via a Los Angeles DJ named Dr. Rock, an early member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. (Dre had taken Rock’s place in the group when the latter departed for college in Austin, and he later became an on-air personality for Dallas radio station K104.) At a Dallas party Rock happened upon Curry performing live. “I was blown away,” Dr. Rock said. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a guy I’ve got to get on wax.’” Curry originally called himself Doc, because a rap partner’s sister was a lab technician, and he thought he looked good in her coat. He later started calling himself D.O.C., adding the periods to connect himself with N.W.A. For the time being, however, he joined Dr. Rock and a friend named Fresh K in the Fila Fresh Crew. Dre, who recorded tracks with them, some of which ended up on N.W.A. and the Posse, was blown away.
“He was like ‘Nigga, you the shit,’” D.O.C. said. “‘If you come out to the West Coast, I guarantee you we will be rich.’”
D.O.C. soon moved into a Compton house behind Centennial High School, owned by a Dallas acquaintance. Before long, however, Dre scraped enough money together to move out of Sir Jinx’s house and into a two-bedroom apartment in the city of Paramount, just east of Compton. DJ Yella was his roommate, and they let D.O.C. crash on the floor of their unfurnished living room, where he didn’t have so much as a sleeping bag. But despite the spartan accommodations the guys quickly bonded. “That was my first real connection with Dre—that we both liked to drink,” D.O.C. said. In the mornings they’d shake off the fog and drive in to the studio in a battered Toyota Corolla, blasting Public Enemy. Their recording spot was the optimistically named Audio Achievements studios in Torrance. Attached to a Mexican restaurant, it was owned by a genial, long-haired recording engineer named Donovan “the Dirt Biker” Smith.
At the studio D.O.C. was quickly enveloped into the Ruthless fold, and became an unofficial member of N.W.A. His first task was writing lyrics for Eazy-E’s solo song “We Want Eazy.” It was D.O.C., with help from MC Ren, who began fashioning Eazy into the bawdy gangsta character we know today, and D.O.C. was a major writing contributor to Straight Outta Compton, as well.
It was ironic, really. Growing up in Texas, D.O.C. knew nothing about L.A. street culture. He used his naïveté to his advantage. “When I first got to Los Angeles, hip-hop music was a scary thing not only to white America but to middle-class black America. They were afraid of it, they thought it was nigger shit,” D.O.C. said, adding that he used Eazy as a “comedian” similar to Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav—to deliver serious messages with humor.
Eazy-E’s character played off a long-established hood archetype: the heroic dealer, surrounded by the finest trappings and women, conquering enemies but never forgetting where he came from. His melodies were hummable, and his tongue was often in his cheek. As he rapped on “No More ?’s” about the way he conducted business:
Walked in, said: “This is a robbery”
Didn’t need the money, it’s just a hobby
Fill the bag, homeboy, don’t lag
I want money, beer, and a pack of Zig-Zags
N.W.A wasn’t just the world’s most dangerous group, as they branded themselves. They were also gangstas having fun. With the help of D.O.C. and his songwriting, they became bad guys you couldn’t help but root for.