A s Ice Cube found himself increasingly focused on study and self-reflection in the early 1990s, Eazy-E and Dr. Dre were enjoying the lifestyle that came with their celebrity.
Around the release of their 100 Miles and Runnin’ EP in 1990, N.W.A held its first of two “Wild ’N Wet” pool parties, which drew hundreds of guys in shorts and polo shirts and women in bikinis. The first bash, which featured open bars, DJs spinning N.W.A songs, and lots of twerking (before “twerking” was a word), was held at Eazy’s Westlake house. Ren said they would have thrown the parties in Compton except the police would have broken them up, and he was probably right. MC Ren, DJ Yella, Eazy, and Dre lounged with women in their laps, and the wet T-shirt contest had a $500 prize. Before sunset the party devolved into a virtual sex show, with beer bottles turning into sex accessories. “I had a drink in one hand, and was smoking a blunt with the other,” said rapper CPO Boss Hogg, who was signed to MC Ren’s label for Capitol Records. Eazy and Dre also threw a “pajama party” at the ornate downtown Mayan Theater, with Eazy donning a turban and a Hugh Hefner–style robe. Go-go dancers gyrated on raised blocks above the packed dance floor, while women vied in the “freaky lingerie” contest.
“How has our lifestyle changed?” Dr. Dre asked, repeating an interviewer’s question between swigs of 8 Ball in the studio while they worked on N.W.A’s second full-length album, Efil4zaggin. “Eatin’ a little bit more, a little bit fatter,” he said, patting his belly.
“Only thing changed is our tax bracket,” said DJ Yella.
Indeed, Dre had put on a few pounds. But they were also living much larger, at least Eazy, Heller, and Dre, who joined the other two by purchasing a French colonial mansion in their Calabasas gated community in 1991. Michel’le outfitted the house with marble tables, and special touches included a huge fish tank that could be viewed from both sides, as well as a recording studio. Dre liked to host barbecues by the pool, with deafening music, and even amateur boxing matches. Jonathan Gold, writing for Rolling Stone, asked if his neighbors ever complained. “They try to,” he said, “but I slam the door in their face. I paid a mil-plus for this house, so I figure I can do whatever the fuck I want to do in it.” He spent recklessly to keep the good times going. He said he bought between eight and ten cars, Ferraris, Mercedes, Corvettes, and bankrolled a nonstop soiree. “You could come over on Sunday morning and there’s just people laying out on the floor asleep,” he said.
Heller lived a couple of blocks away. His cars included a white BMW with the license plate “RTHLSS2,” which Eazy bought for him. (The rapper’s matching version, same make and model, had “RTHLSS1.”) Eazy’s pad, two doors down from Heller, boasted Graceland-levels of goofy grandeur. A neon sign in the marble foyer read “Eazy’s Playhouse.” The house included a pitch-black TV room complete with a LaserDisc player, fluorescent pillows, and mirrors all around. “He’d impress girls by bringing them there, a select few,” said his assistant Charis Henry. Eazy also collected various monster movie mementos, including a life-sized version of Hellraiser villain Pinhead (with the nails in his skull), and a creepy Chucky doll, from the horror movie Child’s Play.
Despite the fancy trappings, Eazy didn’t actually spend much time at the Calabasas home, since it was so isolated in the Valley. He let friends and Ruthless artists live there, as well as at his main house in Norwalk. Eazy also had a home in Woodland Hills, close to Ruthless’s offices and in the shadow of the 101 freeway. “You wanna move in?” Eazy asked rapper Steffon, almost immediately after he signed with Ruthless in 1993. The Woodland Hills home’s previous occupant, Eazy’s girlfriend Tomica Woods, had moved into yet another of Eazy’s homes, in Topanga. Steffon took him up on the offer. It was like winning the lottery.
Despite the lavish living, Eazy kept his focus on business. As he pondered how to promote N.W.A’s upcoming second album Efil4zaggin, an opportunity fell into his lap. He’d somehow ended up on a Republican Party mailing list. (It was likely owing to a charitable donation he’d made.) In early 1991 he accepted an invitation from Texas senator Phil Gramm to hear President George H. W. Bush speak to a group of campaign contributors called the “Republican Senatorial Inner Circle.”
Somehow nobody put two and two together, and Eazy received a follow-up letter from Senate minority leader Bob Dole, which noted that Inner Circle members included Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Walton, and Estée Lauder. The cost? A mere $2,490 for two tickets (one for him and one for Heller) to an event called “Salute to the Commander-in-Chief” on March 18, 1991, two months before the new N.W.A album would drop. It would pay off in what Wright would characterize as “a million dollars worth of publicity.”
Eazy arrived at D.C.’s National Airport, carrying his suit in a bag over his shoulder and signing autographs for fans. Ruthless had tipped off CBS News, and Bob Schieffer was there to report on the absurdity of the whole thing. Do you think the Republicans know who Eazy is? he asked Heller, who responded that he doubted it. “But as for us,” the Ruthless manager went on, “we’re happy to be here.” The event was held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel (not the White House, as is claimed in the Straight Outta Compton film and often reported) and went off without a hitch. Eazy showed his ticket, went through the metal detector, and dined on roast beef and salmon.
Not everyone thought Eazy’s cavorting with right-wingers was funny. Though before the luncheon Eazy’s PR flack told the Los Angeles Times that Eazy was a “big fan” of Bush, Eazy afterward switched gears in an interview with Spin, complaining that many, including director Spike Lee, failed to get the joke. “I’m not a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t even vote.”
The incident wasn’t Eazy’s only brush with political controversy. He enraged the hip-hop community by publicly supporting Theodore Briseno, one of the officers charged in the Rodney King trial. Eazy met Briseno through his lawyer, Harland W. Braun, who also did work for Ruthless, and the rapper attended the 1993 federal trial. At a time when most people believed all four cops to be guilty, Eazy put his reputation on the line by literally standing next to Briseno. The pair made the Los Angeles Times front page, prompting Geto Boys’ rapper Willie D to call Eazy a “sellout.” Eazy responded that he believed Briseno had attempted to stop the beating and that, despite the media’s characterization of the four officers as white, Briseno was a Latino. (It is possible to be both white and Latino.)
Indeed, Briseno did not hit Rodney King with a baton, and broke ranks with the other officers at trial, saying their use of force was not justified. But he can clearly be seen in the video kicking King in the back of his head with his boot. “Sure, I’ve seen that little stomp Briseno does on the video, and I’m not saying it’s justified, but we don’t know what it was about, do we?” Eazy said. “It could have been him just trying to tell Rodney, ‘Stay down, man, stay down.’ Who’s to know?” (Eazy sometimes didn’t appear to be very sympathetic toward King. In a 1991 interview with Spin he said: “Rodney King’s all fucked up, man! He going out with transvestites now. He don’t know what the fuck’s goin’ on! He don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground!”) A rapper in Eazy’s own camp named B.G. Knocc Out was so enraged about Eazy’s support of Briseno that he wrote a diss song about him. Ruthless rapper Toker said Eazy later regretted standing by the officer.
Whatever the case, one can’t help admire Eazy’s chutzpah. He never did what anyone expected of him. This, along with the Bush fund-raiser, were vintage contrarian Eazy-E.
In May 1991 Efil4zaggin (“Niggaz 4 Life” spelled backward) debuted at number two. Many reviews were not flattering, but it reached Billboard’s top slot the next week, displacing Paula Abdul’s Spellbound and making it the first gangsta rap album to hit number one—buoyed by a new system implemented by SoundScan that determined rankings not based on dodgy figures supplied by record store employees, but tabulations of actual sales. It was a watershed event, the moment when rap began its decades-long dominance of mainstream music.
Efil4zaggin also marks a great leap forward in Dr. Dre’s production skills. Whereas Compton was all over the place sonically, Efil is mostly unified in its doomsday grooves. “Always into Something” is a slow-building sonic masterpiece, kicking off with a spoken-word MC Ren introduction and a quick Dre verse before unveiling the alien-sounding, high-pitched Moog synthesizer sound, similar to the “funky worm” Dre had employed on “Dope Man.” It would become a staple of Dre’s solo work. Hoping to capture the magic of Parliament-Funkadelic member Bernie Worrell’s eerie, melodic keyboard sounds, Dre had engineer Colin Wolfe go out and buy a Moog.
On Efil4zaggin Dre realized that less is more, that silence on a track can be just as important as sound. “Dre has a lot of space in his music. It’s open, there’s not always too much going on,” said his future collaborator Dawaun Parker. The basslines are mostly played live in the studio—the funk of James Brown was also in his ears—and there’s a real musicality. When you add in the taunts from Above the Law and Kokane, along with Dre’s own much improved efforts as an MC, Efil delivers on its rebellious, R-rated promises. (Once again DJ Yella received a coproduction credit on the album, but his contributions weren’t on the level of Dre’s.)
Owing to Ice Cube’s departure, there’s not much political commentary, though “Niggaz 4 Life” addresses their use of the inflammatory word in the title: Why do I call myself a nigga, you ask me? MC Ren raps. Because police always wanna harass me. “We didn’t give ourselves this name,” Eazy elaborated around this time to a quasi-outraged NBC News reporter who asked why he used it so often. “People have been calling us ‘niggas’ for years, and so we carry that word.” To promote the album, Eazy portrayed himself in the media less as a street soldier and more as a cartoonish psychotic, with duct tape over his mouth and glasses missing a lens. For Arsenio he donned a straightjacket and hockey mask. (He even began putting together, but eventually scrapped, an album called Temporary Insanity.)
Today, Efil4zaggin is not remembered as warmly as Straight Outta Compton. Ice Cube’s voice is definitely missed. Whereas Cube’s enemies were clearly defined—those who would suppress the black man—Efil’s themes and antagonists aren’t well drawn. Efil4zaggin features blowjob tutorials, stories about girls who won’t give it up, and tales of violence against women that range from cartoonish to appallingly realistic, especially considering Dre’s history of abuse. ’Cause if a bitch tries to diss me while I’m full of liquor / I smack the bitch up and shoot the nigga that’s with her, Dre raps on “Findum Fuckem & Flee.” But mainly it seems shocking for the sake of being shocking. “We were trying to see how far we could push the envelope,” Dre admitted. MC Ren perhaps found that limit on “She Swallowed It,” in which his character preys on a preacher’s fourteen-year-old daughter.
The bitch sucks dick like a specialized pro
She looked at me, I was surprised
But wasn’t passin’ up the chance of my dick gettin’ baptized
“I’d Rather Fuck You,” Eazy’s lounge-style parody of Bootsy Collins’s “I’d Rather Be With You,” flips a straightforward love song into an Andrew Dice Clay–style seduction anthem. Singer Jewell, who’d recently done an impromptu audition for Dre in the corner of a club, sings on the chorus. (“I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, my mom is going to kill me’” for being on the song, she remembered.)
Owing to the album’s sex and violence, reaction from social conservatives was swift. Libraries banned the album, British police confiscated thousands of copies, and Minnesota’s attorney general Hubert “Skip” Humphrey III—son of the former vice president—called its lyrics “nothing but filth” and threatened to prosecute Minneapolis-based record store chain Musicland Group if it sold Efil4zaggin to minors. Ultimately, the Minneapolis city attorney’s office determined the work didn’t violate Minnesota’s statutes.
Despite receiving little radio airplay—they didn’t bother recording a radio-friendly track without cursing—Efil4zaggin went platinum. “We ain’t selling out. Fuck crossing over to them, let them cross over to us,” MC Ren said at a live show in 1989. He had no idea how prophetic his words would be.
The nationally syndicated TV hip-hop show Pump It Up! launched in 1989, a counterpart to Yo! MTV Raps that mixed videos with artist interviews. The program was hosted by Dee Barnes, a petite, Afrocentric rapper from a duo called Body & Soul, who were signed to Delicious Vinyl and rapped on “We’re All in the Same Gang.” (They once recorded a demo in Alonzo Williams’s house coproduced by Dr. Dre.)
Barnes’s interviews, like her music, tended to be upbeat, though she didn’t shy away from asking tough questions. She, along with her sometime cohost, Ruthless rapper Steffon, featured everyone from De La Soul to Biz Markie to N.W.A. Barnes began hanging out with Dre at one point, though it’s unclear in exactly what capacity. When Dre was asked by The Source in 1992 if he and Barnes had been romantically involved he said, “so-so,” though Barnes denied it.
In November 1990 Pump It Up! did another story on N.W.A, who were on the tail end of promoting the EP 100 Miles and Runnin’. The interview went fine, but the editing of the piece angered the group. Following their segment was Barnes’s interview with rapper Yo-Yo on the set of the Boyz n the Hood movie. Ice Cube crashed the interview. On camera, he disparaged his former group, and mocked the title of their EP. “I got all you suckers a hundred miles and runnin’,” he said.
N.W.A had dissed Cube in the episode as well. But they hadn’t been told Cube would have a chance to respond, and felt the editing made it look like he had the final word. Reportedly Barnes herself wasn’t a fan of the final cut—chosen by a producer—but the group blamed her. “She tried to make us look stupid,” MC Ren said. “Tried to play us in front of millions of people.”
On January 27, 1991, at a West Hollywood nightclub called Po Na Na Souk, Def Jam hosted a record-release party for a group called BWP, or Bytches With Problems. Niggaz With Attitudes had opened the floodgates for tough girl groups with three-word names, including Ruthless acts H.W.A. (Hoez With Attitudes) and G.B.M. (Gangsta Bitch Mentality). At the Def Jam event the liquor was flowing freely, and Dre later admitted to Spin that he was “drunk.” Doug Young, N.W.A’s promoter, was talking to Dee Barnes when Dre and a bodyguard walked up to them. “[Dre] looked over to her, said, ‘That was some fucked-up shit you did, bitch, on that show,’” Young recalled in an interview with me. Then Dre suddenly hit her in the face, Young said. “He just fired on her. BAM! I saw the punch, and I just saw her fall like a sack of potatoes.”
“He grabbed me by my hair, picked me up and started slamming me into a brick wall,” said Barnes, who is nearly a foot shorter than Dre and weighed about half as much. Dre’s bodyguard held back the crowd, she added in a statement. According to eyewitness accounts, Dre began kicking her and tried to push her down a flight of stairs. She fled to a bathroom, but Dre followed her in and began beating her more. Doug Young said the room full of spectators watched and did nothing.
“I was thinking, ‘He’s trying to kill me,’” Barnes said. The police and ambulance were called, but Dre was hustled out without being arrested. Barnes suffered bruises on her face—and recorded episodes of Pump It Up! behind dark glasses. “Dre was like a big brother to me,” she told Rolling Stone in August 1991. “I still get very emotional about it.”
The day after the beating, Dre told The Source, Barnes called to say she wasn’t going to press charges. She soon changed her tune, he went on, saying that if he wanted to avoid court he was going to have to produce some songs for her group, “without putting my name on it or anything like that and they would forget it.” Dre said he agreed to the deal, but that Barnes later reneged and instead wanted “a million dollars.” “I was like, ‘What? Fuck you, take me to court,’” Dre said he responded. “Next thing I know, the shit is in every motherfuckin’ newspaper there is and I’m in court.”
The alleged Lisa Johnson, Michel’le, and Tairrie B beatings had never been reported in the media, but following Dee Barnes’s attack the allegations against Dre were widely publicized. Rolling Stone entitled its first major story on N.W.A “Beating Up the Charts.”
Barnes, fearing for her safety, hired a member of fearsome Samoan rap crew the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E. to act as security. “She’s going through a lot of emotional turmoil,” said her mother Joan Barnes. “The first three months, we were both really paranoid. Now it’s gone beyond fear. We’re just trying to exist.” Statements Dre made to reporters further fueled the situation (“[I]t ain’t no big thing—I just threw her through a door,” he told Rolling Stone) and Eazy and Ren callously defended him, bragging about the beating and offering further intimidations. Said Ren: “It’s not over yet.”
Barnes’s mother speculated that the violence of N.W.A’s songs was coming to life. “They started believing [what] they were writing,” she said.
In August 1991 Dre pleaded no contest to battery charges. His sentence was a $2,400 fine, 240 hours of community service, and probation. He was also ordered to pay $1,000 to a victims’ restitution fund, and to make an antiviolence public service announcement. Barnes also filed a $20 million civil lawsuit against him that was settled out of court, for six figures. “People think I was paid millions, when in reality, I didn’t even get a million, and it wasn’t until September of 1993. He and his lawyers dragged their feet the whole way,” Barnes wrote.
For many years after the incident Dre never offered a formal public apology. Following the release of the Straight Outta Compton movie in 2015, his abuse allegations again became news. “Twenty-five years ago I was a young man drinking too much and in over my head with no real structure in my life,” he told The New York Times. He continued: “I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all of our lives.”
In his statement, Dre partly tied his abuse to alcoholism. But Johnson and others who knew him in the early and mid-eighties, including World Class Wreckin’ Cru companions, told me he didn’t have a drinking problem in this time. (His alleged abuse of Lisa Johnson occurred in 1984 and 1985.) Dre said he started “boozing” following the death of his brother Tyree in 1989. “I think that triggers it because he turns into somebody else,” said Michel’le. Tairrie B also said Dre had been drinking before he hit her, which was seconded by her manager Linda Martinez.
Barnes says the incident with Dre cast a spell over her life. She was “blacklisted” from further television work, she wrote, because potential employers didn’t want to threaten their relationships with Dre, and ended up working “a series of nine-to-five jobs” to live. “I suffer from horrific migraines that started only after the attack,” she went on. “I love Dre’s song ‘Keep Their Heads Ringin’—it has a particularly deep meaning to me. When I get migraines, my head does ring and it hurts, exactly in the same spot every time where he smashed my head against the wall.”