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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