Chronic Issues: Dr. Dre vs. Eazy-E

Back in the late 1980s, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E were members of N.W.A., one of the most important and iconic hip-hop groups ever. But in the wake of their historic 1988 album Straight Outta Compton, the two fell out over business disagreements. Once Dre went solo, he proceeded to rip Eazy apart on diss tracks prominently featured on his blockbuster LP The Chronic, forever fixing Eazy in the eyes of millions of pop fans as the clownish "Sleazy-E." A few years after that, however, Eazy tragically died at a young age, and Dre proceeded to recontextualize his relationship with Eazy, making it seem as though they never beefed bitterly at all.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Rivals as a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to Rivals, the show about music beefs and
feuds and long simmering resentments between musicians. I'm Steve and

(00:21):
I'm Jordan's and today we're gonna talk about the defining
feud of West Coast hip hop dr dre versus Easy.
It's the battle but tore apart n w A one
of the most influential ratbacks in history, and sparked a
distract battle that only ended with easyes tragic AIDS related death.
But did it ever really end? As Dre goes to
sleep each night on his pillow stuffed with hundreds, I

(00:42):
wonder how he really feels about his ex bandmate. And
this is a fascinating feud to me because at its
height it really was one of the pettiest and most
vicious beefs and hip hop history. I mean, you had
Dre and Easy, these former bandmates who were just terrible
to each other in public, and then Easy died and
you could see how remorseful Drey was about all of
these terrible things that he had said about Easy, and

(01:04):
also how Drey over the years went on to try
to essentially rewrite history and make it seem almost like
there really wasn't ever a few at all, but there
was Jordan's and we're here to rehash it all. So
without further ado, let's get into this mess. The story
of benb really begins with Eric Wright a k A. Easy,

(01:24):
the so called godfather of gangster Wrap, and he very
famously grew up in the rough l a neighborhood of Compton,
and as one of his associates would later say, you
have to have a role play to stay safe in
those streets, and you were either a thug, a player,
an athlete, a gangster, or a dope man. Otherwise, according
to Easy associate, there was only one role left to you,

(01:44):
the role of victims. And Easy he was a small
guy and he had to keep himself safe, so we
chose dopeman for a time dealing drugs, but after his
cousin was shot and killed, he decided that he could
make a better living in the emerging l A hip
hop scene, which was really growing in popularity at that point.
And it was around this time in that that he
met Andre Young a k A. Dr Dre, who soon
became his best friend. Yeah, I think it's pretty well

(02:06):
documented at this point that like Easy was not really
a good rapper. I mean it's my understanding that he
pretty much had to be coached line by line in
the studio and ice Cube I think wrote almost all
of his lyrics, like on those classic and debut records.
But what Easy he had was this authenticity, you know,
of having a legitimate crime background. I also have to

(02:29):
say too that I think Easy he has like a
really cool sounding voice. Like there's something about Easy, like
when you hear him on a record, like it doesn't
seem like there's any artifice there, Like he just sounds
like a dude from the main streets of Los Angeles
talking about his life, even like when the stuff he's
talking about is like pretty outlandish. Because I feel like
n w A, as their career progressed, like their records

(02:52):
kind of got pretty far out there, you know, from reality,
but like Easy, he kind of kept it grounded just
by force of his persona yeah, and just his path
like as Easy he would later point out on dis
tracks to Dr Dre. Dre came from the same neighborhood,
but he never had the same street cred that Easy
E did. Uh and Dre since hearing Grand Master Flash,
he wanted to be a DJ. He hung out at
a club called Eve after Dark, which is where many

(03:14):
of the West Coast mcs would would would rhyme and perform,
and it was here that he met Future in w
a member DJ Yella, and he became a DJ there
himself under the name Dr j at first after his
favorite basketball player, Julius Irving, and that gradually morphed into
Dr Dre the Master of Mixology, which sounds like someone
who would make like a mean old fashioned or something
about I guess master of mixology had a very different

(03:36):
meaning at that time. And this club had a small
four track studio in the back room, and that's where
Drey and his friends would make early demos. Yeah, you know,
like when you look at Dre and Easy early on,
I mean they almost seemed like opposites of each other
in terms of like what their attributes were. Like, you know,
Easy had this authentic background for against rapper, but he
wasn't really like that great in terms of being a rapper,

(03:56):
whereas Drey was really like, I think, already becoming a
musical mastermind, but he was also I mean, it's it
fair to say that he was a dork at this time,
Like he's kind of like a nerdy guy. Like you
can google Dr Dre and find pictures of him in
the group that he was in at this time called
the World Class Wrecking Crew. I don't have you ever
seen these photos, Like they're wearring, like these goldle mace suits.

(04:19):
They're playing like key tars. They're like worrying key tars
are very prevalent, and they're worrying makeup. I mean, it's
not the image that we associate with Dr Dre or
n Way. It's pretty corny when you're looking at it now.
And of course it's like Electro a little Richard exactly.
I feel like easy he had a lot to do
with people seeing these photos eventually, because like he would eventually,

(04:40):
you know, kind of bring these photos out as a
way to make fun of Dre, like when they were
deep into their feuds. But this was a pivotal moment
in Tray's career. Not only was he working with I
think Yellow was in World Class Wrecking Crew with him,
he also ended up hooking up with this really talented
rapper and writer named ice Cube when ice Cube was
only Sick Team, and then he worked on a song

(05:01):
together called Cabbage, and that was the beginning of their collaboration.
Did you hear the story about like how Dre Easy
kind of got together. Apparently like Dre had like a
parking ticket and he needed Easy to like help him
get out of it. And then just it's sort of
like to repay the favors, like all right, fine, I'll
help produce some songs for that little label that you're developing.
And and that little label that Easy was developing became

(05:23):
Ruthless Records, which was home to n w A and
became a really pivotal label in the hip hop scene,
especially for West Coast. When she said, oh, yeah, absolutely,
I mean this really was the beginning I think of
like the West Coast having a real presence in hip hop.
I mean before then, you know, like in the early eighties,
it was very much based on the East. But as
we get to the end of the eighties and into

(05:44):
the nineties, the West Coast is going to really make
their presence felt. So one's Easy. He decides to get
out of drug dealing and go into music full time.
He took his profits and formed Ruthless Records, and to
help him run it he asked this guy, Jerry Heller,
and Jerry Heller is kind of like generally viewed as
the snake in this story. He's like a really polarizing figure,
usually cast as the villain, but also cited as a

(06:04):
really crucial figure in the band's development. And you know,
both of these are probably true. I think he's probably
mostly responsible for getting the bands to break outside of
the West Coast and certainly outside of their neighborhood, but
I think he also tore the band apart. When he
first started managing m w A, he was like something
like a forty year veteran of the music industry and
he represented all kinds of people. Van Morrison CSN y

(06:27):
otis reading the Who Black Sabbath, the list is like
really extensive and um. In later years, the story was
put around that Heller sought out in w A specifically
to like take advantage of these inexperienced man and try
to rip them off basically with industry contracts that he
knew a lot about and they didn't. But he would
say in his in his memoir that it was actually

(06:48):
Easy who sought him out, and not the other way around,
and that Easy actually paid somebody I think like seven
hundred and fifty dollars to make an introduction to him,
because he knew Jerry Heller had all these contacts into
the you know, the Hollywood music and just reseen and
he wanted to make this band big, and he was
he was first and foremost a businessman. I would read
later on that he was generally described Easy was as

(07:08):
like a businessman who happened to wrap and so seeking
out Heller was his way to bring the band to
the next level. So Hellard becomes n W as manager.
And look, if you listen to our show, you know
that like artists having managers that they don't trust. It's
got common story in music history, like n W as
far from the first group to have this. But I

(07:28):
think the reason why this ended up being such a
divisive moment in the group's history is that from Drey's perspective,
he really looked at Jerry Heller as being Easy's guy,
and if Jerry had any loyalties at all, it wasn't
to the group overall. It was always going to be
too easy and he really felt, and I think with justification,
like as the group's career progressed, that oftentimes, Drey was

(07:49):
getting the short end of the stick financially, while Easy
was making out really well with his good friend Jerry Heller.
And you know, Drey said later on that he felt
that Heller's strategy in the group was basically divide and conquer,
that he could split up the group's loyalties and in
that way he could weaken the other members and it
could just consolidate the power with Easy and Jerry. And

(08:09):
it seems like, in a way that's what is going
to happen as we move forward here. The first nw
A recordings were born out of a song called Boys
in the Hood that he tried to give to his
Ruthless record signing HBO, who turned it down. So Cube
dre E formed the first version of NWA to record
it themselves, and this was followed up by Panic Zone,

(08:31):
which was included in the seven compilation n w A
and the Posse, which is kind of like a compilation
party oriented jam record kind of thing. And n w
A was still in just developing stages and they're only
on I think like three of the tracks on the album.
The songs are Panic Zone, eight Ball, and Dopeman. But
it was the first collaboration with Arabian Prince, DJ, Yellow

(08:51):
Dr Dre and Ice Cube, and it was the first
time they were all together. The thing about that record though,
is that I feel like most people didn't hear about
that album until the net w A record, which of
course is Straight Out of Content, which drops in August.
This is really, I think, not the official first record,
but it's like the true first record for an n
w A. It's where they really become the band that

(09:12):
we know, like this dangerous, innovative hip hop group that
is going to just change really like the face of
music at that time. This is a really crucial summer
in hip hop history because you know, you have Straight
Out of Content that comes out in August, and then
two months before that you have Public Enemy putting out
what I think many people consider to be their classic record.
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back,

(09:33):
and it really is the peak of like this sort
of angry, provocative and very political type of hip hop
and w A. Of course, the signature song ends up
being Fucked the Police, which is I think still an
anthem for people. That's still probably the best known protest
song about police brutality that hip hop has ever spawned.
That song actually resulted in a letter sent to the
group from the FBI. I mean, what is the implication

(09:55):
of that letter. It was like basically like a warning
letter to them, right, I mean, like what were they
warning them about exact basically? I mean what I had
heard was that it was basically a rogue member of
the FBI. That it wasn't like a formal thing from
sent on high from them. It was just like one
member who happened to work for the FBI put it
on FBI stationary basically, and he was kind of warning
them to stop releasing these inflammatory songs because it was

(10:19):
basically like a notch below like excitement to riot. And
I think the song like they got in legal trouble
from performing in a lot of gigs too for the
same reason. It was almost like a Lenny Bruce kind
of thing where they there would be police in the
wings and stuff. Um, yeah, that was really strange, and
it's on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
and yeah it was. It was more like a low

(10:40):
level bureaucrat I think who actually sent that. But still
the impact was I mean, the press value of that
alone was pretty impressive. It was sent to their label,
and I think the band members themselves, well, I was
gonna say, like, I mean, could you ask for better
publicity than giving a letter from the FBI. I wonder, like,
you know, if this rogue Agent was like a and
of the world class Wrecking Crew and he was just

(11:03):
upset at this like more sort of like you know,
they to turn. Yeah, it's like where the key tars Man,
Like I miss I missed the gold le may suits.
I'm not sure about this new image. That's my theory
anyway about that rogue Agent. If like Public Enemy was
like the Clash, I feel like n w A was
like Guns and Roses at this time, you know, n
w AY they called their music reality rap. But I

(11:25):
do think that there was this kind of like over
the top element to like what they did, like where
they took the reality of like street violence in Los
Angeles and they just like blew it up to like
a grand scale. So like kids in the suburbs that
were like just totally attracted to n w A. They
loved the danger of this group. They were just sucked
into some of the reality and also like some of

(11:46):
the fantasy of those records. And if I can continue
this analogy, I would say that like easy E was
like the Axl Rose of n w A because he
was like the most colorful and the most charismatic and
like really like I think, kind of the most dangerous
one in the band, you know, like ice Cube. Again,
he was doing a lot of the writing, Dre was
handling the music. But I think Easy along with being
the businessman, he just felt the most like he could

(12:08):
have actually been one of the characters that they were
like talking about in their songs. He felt like he
was actually from the streets in a way that maybe
those other guys weren't. And I remember at the time
it seemed like Easy almost from like the jump of
that record was being set aside as a standalone star.
Like just three months after Straight Out of Comptent comes out,
he puts out his first solo record, and it's really

(12:30):
the only solo record that he completed during his lifetime.
That of course is Easy does it. That album goes
undergo double platinum, So that record is a big hit
on its own. So not only is Easy you know
a star in n w A, but he's already kind
of establishing his own career on the side now. As
we see so often on this show, relatively instant success
is almost never a good thing for a young band,

(12:52):
and the success of Straight Out of Compton underscored the
fact that the bandmates weren't getting the money that they
felt they'd been owned. And it's what we were talking earlier.
The contracts that Jerry Heller put together vastly favored E
as the head of the record label rather than the
rest of the group. And it was a pretty large
group too, So ice Cube in particular is the one
who really has a problem with the way that the

(13:13):
money is being arranged because he's the chief writer of
this huge album. Plus he wrote most of Easy Ease
debut album too, and he's still living at home with
his parents and doing the dishes and stuff. Meanwhile, Jerry
Heller and E are living in huge mansions and driving
luxury cars, and it looked awful lot like they were
all getting rich off of his work, which they were,
so by the middle of Ice Cube had received thirty

(13:36):
two thousand dollars in album royalties and a little bit
less than that. I'm out for performing on the n
w AS first National Tour, which is I mean laughable
to Pittans for you know, multi platinum record. Yeah, I
mean he's basically being paid like what you would be
paid to like manage like a fast food restaurant, you know,
I mean, not the kind of money that you would
expect from the writer of like you know, a couple

(13:58):
of like platinum records. So, like ice Cube actually ends
up leaving the group pretty early on, and initially, like
Dre is kind of lashing out a Cube about this,
he has loyalty to n w A. But then Drey
starts to realize that he also is not making the
kind of money that he should be making because along
with you know, producing a way, he's also like working
on like the Easy record, He's like producing like the

(14:20):
d O C. Michelle A, like all these hit records
and not making a lot of money. Like Jerry Holler
bizorted mission like in an article of that Rolling Stone
did on this, he said that like Drey only made
like eighty six thousand dollars from all of the production
work that he was doing for Ruthless Records. And the
thing here, I mean it's interesting because like Drey, of

(14:41):
course he would accuse Jerry Heller of ripping him off.
But it's like, if you sign a bad deal, are
you being ripped off? Or have you just not taking
care of your own business. I mean, that seems like
the issue here, and it it's kind of like a
hazy distinction to make because obviously, when musicians first get
into the business, many times they don't know much about
contracts or like how to negotiate like the best deals

(15:04):
for themselves. And you know, people like Jerry Howard take
advantage of that. They heavily tilt the scales so that
they make way more money than the artists who was
actually doing the work. And I think, again from Drey's perspective,
he was angry at Jerry Heller about this, but I
think he also felt betrayed by Easy because he felt
that Easy was essentially working in concert with with Jerry Howard.

(15:25):
And it's like, you're my friend, you're my bandmate, and
yet you consciously allowed this to happen. You knew that
he was going to basically screw me over with this contract,
and you just let him do it because ultimately you
knew that it was the best thing for your bottom
line exactly. I mean, at the end of the day,
he blamed e for bringing this outsider into their myths,
into their neighborhood. Really, and it's interesting that, you know,

(15:47):
for all of the frustration that ice Cube and Dre felt,
they never actually sued Heller for financial malfeasance, which means,
like he said, he wasn't legally doing anything wrong. He
just put a deal together of heavily favorite him and
Dre didn't know any better at this time, and and
his associates at this time would say this too, like
he really didn't read contracts. It really wasn't you know,

(16:08):
his thing. He was more of a creative and so,
and that came back to haunt him in this case.
And ice Cube ended up leaving the group right after
Straight out of Compton went global, and he was the
biggest star in the band at this time, and he
was the best position to go solo. And his first album,
America's Most Wanted, went to number one in just two weeks.
And he didn't mention the bad blood in nw A

(16:30):
directly in this album. I think it's important to note,
but that would that would happen later. Yeah, it's interesting
with Cube because there's this long gestation process that takes
place between him in n W A like after he left,
like where you know we're going to see this at
n w A is going to be much more aggressive
about attacking Cube, and Cube is like really not going
to respond for a long time until he like really responds,

(16:53):
like in the most vicious way possible. But we're getting
a little out of ourselves with that. I just want
to say for now, like ice Cube is like one
of my favorite rappers of all time, especially of this era.
I mean, he's got a great voice, he's a great writer,
and he was like a genuinely dangerous character, like I
don't know, like if you listen to albums like Death
Certificate or The Predator or America's Most Wanted, I mean

(17:14):
he could be like a really menacing presence on his
records and in his music videos and it was just riveting.
And I feel like him leading n w A, even
though you still had dre and easy in that group,
it really was like a death blow to that group artistically,
Like I don't think they were ever as good without
him as they were with him in the band. Oh no,
and I'm not on the mic and not with that

(17:34):
was writing too, especially so n w A do not
afford Cube the same courtesy. The next disc they put
out as an EP, hundred Miles and Running. The title
track includes a disk track of ice Cube we started
with five, but yo one couldn't take it, so now
it's four because the fifth couldn't make it, and the
video for the song depicted the remaining members of n
w A together in a jail cell. On ice Cube

(17:56):
look Alike is released, which is uh not particular really subtle.
There's another track on the album that refers to him
as Benedict Arnold, Uh, you know, the famous trader of
the revolutionary era. But really Cube gets his revenge on
kill it will. Well not really though, because like I
feel like he's still like fairly passive aggressive on this record,

(18:18):
like he's like a little more deliberate. Like there's that
skit at the end of the record called I Gotta
Say What Up where ice Cube is doing this like
fake radio interview where he's talking about some of the
great like rap groups of the era, like Public Enemy,
Ghetto Boys, people like that, and then there's a question
where they say, since you went solo, what's up with
the rest of your crew? And then he hangs up,
So like the application being that like you know, someone's

(18:40):
asking about n w A and he's not even gonna
answer the question, so like not really going after them
still at this point, especially considering like the direct shots
that n w A was taking at him at the time,
he was still like playing it pretty cool and maybe
continue to prod him on their second full length album,
and it really Animals and he gets even more clear.

(19:01):
I mean, there's dragatory references to Ice Cube found in
several songs, as the interlude a message to be a
Benedict Arnold echoes the beginning of Ice Cube's song turn
Off the Radio from America's Most Wanted, and he's addressed
by name in this same track, and then the band
members just throw a torrent of abuse adam in their
lyrics and say when we see your as, we're gonna

(19:22):
cut your hair off and fuck you with a broomstick
by m c wren. So yeah, yeah, that's that's again
not terribly subtle. So this is really when Cube decides
to go nuclear. Yeah, he's gonna go nuclear here. Before
we get to that, though, I just want to say,
like I realized that I learned about Benedict Arnold from
listening to rap records in like the late eighties are

(19:42):
early nineties, because like all these Benedict Arnold references like
these on a records, I was like, you know, I
would have had no idea who that was if like
this historical figure was not being brought up like on
these albums. I just love the fact that like they
brought Bennett Arnold back, like gave him some cultural relevance,
you know, at that time, exactly liking him to ice Cube,

(20:04):
So you can only call a man Benedict Arnold so
many times before he finally lashes out, and finally ice Cube,
you know, we get to the album Death Certificate and
he unleashes the song no Vaseline, which is one of
the most notorious disc tracks ever, and I feel like
ice Cube must have just been like seething for like
two or three years. You know, He's taking all this

(20:26):
crap from his former bandmates, the people that he felt
like had screwed him over, especially easy and playing it
relatively cool, and finally he's like, I've had enough. I'm
gonna unleash a torrent of just again devastating blows. And look,
I can't quote too many of the lyrics of this
song because well, for one thing, there's like a fair
amount of anti semitism and homophobia in this song. I

(20:48):
hate to say, it's like it hasn't really aged well
in that regard, although even at the time a lot
of people criticize the song for those elements of it.
But the gist of no Vassoline essentially is that the
guys in w A are soft, They look like Bozo's,
they're basically stooges for Jerry Heller, ice Cube believes that
he's a man with the guts, you know, to go

(21:08):
out on his own to make his own money, while
the guys in n w A are you know, still
stuck under the thumb of this crooked manager. He accuses
them of living in an all white neighborhood, basically just
calling them a bunch of phonies, and the overall ideas
that these guys are getting screwed with no Vasoline and
you can kind of figure out what that means. But yeah,

(21:31):
this is like just a devastating disk track. I'm it's
hard for me to think of many songs that like
are like meaner than this about like like on our show,
you know, we've had some like definitely mean moments and songs.
You know, artists talking about other artists saying disparaging things,
but like no, Vassoline just takes that to like another

(21:52):
level and sort of adding salt to in the b
way He's wounds. To me, at this point, they're almost
a spent force. They're basically finished because in the early
nineties Dr Dre become tight with with n W as
bodyguard and a one time l a RAMS player called
Sugar Knight, and Night was trying to break into the
music industry in a bigger way, and he started a
music publishing firm, and he got his first big profit,

(22:13):
according to music legend, by having Vanilla Ice sign over
royalties from his hit song Ice Ice Baby, by persuading
Ice that he used material from Sugar's own client, a
guy by the name of Mario Johnson, and allegedly he
persuaded Vanilla Ice to sign these rights over by threatening
to drop him off the fifteenth floor of his hotel.
There are several stories that my favorite involves Sugar actually

(22:35):
dangling him over the balcony by his ankles. I don't
know if that's true. I love that I've only seen
that in movies, Like I mean, I didn't know people
actually did that in real life, like dangling people off
a balcony. I want that to be true. I'm gonna
pretend that it's true, even though I feel like there's
probably an element of bullshit to that. Yeah, I mean,
this is just one of sugar knights many questionable but

(22:57):
very effective business practices. And he becomes close to Dr
Dre through n W a associate the DC around this period,
and he's hearing Drey's complaints about Easy and Jerry Heller,
and Shook says, well, you know, I'll take a look
at the ruthless records books for you, and he convinces
Drey that he is indeed getting ripped off, and furthermore,
he convinces Dre to go into business with him. So
Dre goes to Easy gives him an ultimatum, either Jerry

(23:20):
Heller goes or I go an Easy picked Jerry and
all right hand, we'll be right back with more rivals.
So at this point it's Sugar Knight's job to get
Dre out of his contract. And of course Easy isn't

(23:42):
gonna let Dre leave because Dre is a very valuable
commodity to him. So Shugar is gonna go I guess
the vanilla ice route of dangling people out of balconies,
but really he's gonna go the extra mile here in
his dealings with Easy, basically there's this incident like where
dre invited Easy to a studio to have a meeting,
presumably to talk about business. So Easy shows up and

(24:05):
turns out that Drey is not there. Guess who is there?
Sugar Knight and like a gang of goons holding baseball
bats and pipes. Now, I don't know about you, Jordan's,
but like I'm kind of a scaredy cat. I think
you could say if I walked into a room and
I saw a Sugar Knight and a bunch of guys
holding baseball bats and pipes anything, Yeah, I think I
would like fill a diaper. Uh. You know, I would

(24:28):
be very upset over that, and I think I would
probably give him whatever he wanted at that moment. But
like Easy, to his credit, did not give in. He
could see that Shug was just trying to intimidate him,
so he's like, no, I'm not gonna let Dre go.
So then Shug says, and this is crazy. He says
that he has kidnapped Jerry Heller and he has them
like tied up in a van somewhere, which, like, I

(24:50):
don't think that was true, right, like he did. It's
very easily disapprovable. Yeah, right, So again Easy he's like, no,
I'm not gonna let Drey out of his contract. Again
he we could tell that Shug was lying about that.
Then Shug says, I know where your mom stays, and
he actually writes down Easy's mom's address on a piece
of paper and hands it to him. The lowest blow

(25:11):
that you can have, really, I mean, I just can't believe.
That seems like a way a place you would not go,
just just you know, just as your personal code of
conduct that seems like a line you do not cross.
And to the idea that like dre implicitly authorized, this
just adds itself to injury. I mean, this is your
friend who has you know, employed this fully essentially into

(25:34):
threatening your mom over a business deal. I mean, this
is like really really bad stuff. But you know, this
is the thing that convinces Easy to finally let Drey
out of his contract. So that is how he was
able to leave ruthless records. Because this guy shook Knight
essentially threatened Easy's mother, and there was a story later
on Jerry Howard told the story that like Easy actually

(25:55):
wanted to kill Shook Knight, and like Jerry Hellard talked
him out of it. And then Heller said that he
regretted that he talked Easy out of killing Sugar Knight.
You know, like that's how bad this gout. I mean,
it was pretty bad, but it could have actually been
much worse. So this really ugly incident is a genesis
of death Row Records. It would eventually sign Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac.

(26:16):
They become, you know, their aim at the beginning was
to become the motown of the nineties, and they pretty
much got there. And in August and nine did any
one Easy file a state complaint against Drey and death
Row Records and Suge Knight, basically alleging that all these
defendants had used duress and menace to get Easy to
avoid Drey's contract and you know, basically said you can't
get out of a contract by like threatening my mom

(26:38):
and threatening me with a baseball bat. The suit was dismissed,
but the terms of the departure meant that Easy would
get would continue to profit off of Dr Dre maintained
the percentage of his royalties, which meant those months of
Dr Dre hated him, he still owned him to a
certain extent, and making things even worse the lawsuit Torpedo
Death rows initial plan of being acquired by Sony, they

(27:00):
ended up being acquired by Interscope through Warner Brother Records instead.
So even though he lost the battle of keeping Dr
Dred his label, he scored a really valuable victory of
still making money off of his former friends. It's interesting
to me that at this point you're really going to
start to see the scales tip towards Dre's side, and
the way that he's going to get one over on
Easy is by using his music, not street tactics. Because

(27:24):
he puts out this album called The Chronic, which is
of course one of the biggest rap records ever made,
one of the great albums of the nineteen nineties. And
you know, I remember when that album came out, like
you could not go anywhere, whether it was like a
fast food restaurant or the swimming pool or the grocery
store or on television without hearing songs from that album.

(27:46):
For like the Better part of like two Years, and
I feel like that album went a long way toward
taking this beef between Dre and Easy, which was something
that you know, like, if you were into hip hop
you knew about. If you read like rap magazines, you
were on top of bit But if you were just
like a normal music fan, you know, someone in the
middle of the country who wasn't all that well versed
in this stuff, you didn't really hear about it until

(28:07):
the Chronic came out, And especially the songs Funk with
drey Day and Everybody Celebrating and Bitches Ain't Ship. Like
those two songs I feel like defined the conflict between
these guys, and of course it painted it in a
way that was like pro Dre and very anti Easy,
and he ended up looking terrible like from this album,
and I think it really kind of defined how people

(28:29):
looked at it like from then on. Yeah, I mean,
especially Funk with dred Day. For me, I always thought
that song was like the final scene in The Godfather
for Dre. It's it's the moment when he takes out
all of his major enemies. He fired shots at the
East Coast rapper Tim Dog, Uncle Luke of two Live Crew,
Ice Cube, and of course Easy and the extremely unpc
lyrics mostly involved attacking E with various homosexual slurs and accusations. Uh,

(28:53):
used to be my homie, used to be my ace.
Now I want to slap the taste out your mouth,
make you bow down to the road, throw fucking me
now I'm sucking you little home. It's just a small
selection of of the the extremely brutal lyrics. And you know,
the song is like bad enough, but I feel like
the video like really took it to another level. Like

(29:14):
I don't know if you've seen this video, but like
there's this character named Sleazy E who like has like
the Jerry Ko hair, and he has like the sunglasses
on very clearly supposed to be easy. And there's also
like a manager in there who, like, I mean, I
don't know how to say this delicately, he's basically like
a caricature of like a Jewish manager. Like it's borders

(29:35):
on anti Semitism, like the depiction of this manager in
the video, And the idea is just to depict Sleazy
Z as this like clown who will do anything that
his manager wants him to do. And the idea is
to basically just make Easy look like a buffoon, you know,
and like by the end of the video, he's like
living under an overpass carrying a sign that says will

(29:56):
wrap for food. You know, just like a pathetic figure
in this video. And again I think you know people,
you know, if you love in w A. The big
thing about Easy was that he was like this cool,
tough guy and you watched this video and like Dre
has totally flipped the script on him to make him
look weak and pathetic and you know, like a guy

(30:17):
who was on his way out. Essentially, he just like
robbed Easy of like all the coolness and the power
that he had in w way and did it on
like a grand scale. Like again, this is a song
on like one of the biggest records of the era,
and this music video was like on all the time.
I mean it was, you know, one of those videos
in the only nineties that you like literally saw every

(30:38):
fifteen minutes on MTV. And I think this song ended
up being like a top ten hit like on the
pop charts. So again, it wasn't just something that like
if you were seriously into hip hop that you cared about.
This was something that like pop fans now knew about
but they had a very kind of skewed perspective on it.
It was about Dre making Easy look terrible, and I

(30:59):
think for a lot of people, well, they didn't really
go beyond that, like that's all they really knew about it,
And that was devastating for Easy, and Drey wasn't even done.
This double barrel assault continues with bitches ain't ship and
that he bitch in the title for Dre refers to Easy,
or he refers to him by his birth name in
the song directly by Eric Wright, which is again just
kind of strips him of any kind of persona that

(31:21):
Easy he had made for himself. He's just completely laid
bare with his birth name. I thought that was a
really telling choice. Uh, And it was a brief rundown
of their friendship history. And he hurls a number of
other homophobic slurs at him, and Uh again goes back
to basically making him sound like a stooge for Jerry Heller,
and he mentions the Ruthless Records lawsuits, saying and now
he's suing because the ship he's doing ain't ship. Bitches

(31:43):
can't hang with the street found herself short, he always
refers to himself by the female pronoun in the song
now She's taking Me to Court, so yes, and that
is what another hit song from the album too So again,
as he said, completely devastating for easy reputation, both musically
and just his repute patian as you know, a guy
from the streets. Now, of course, when Easy hears this stuff,

(32:05):
he's not happy. And you can see how unhappy he
is with his next release, which is an EP called
It's on Dr Dreem Killer, And this album is basically
just about how much he hates Dr Dre and how
he wants to kill Dr Dre. Like, there's eight songs
on this record, five of them are about Dre. The
song that stands out to me is the song real

(32:25):
Motherfucking Geez, which, like, in a way, I kind of
like this song. It's like a pretty good parody of
like the g Funk era sound of like the chronic
Like you could tell that he's basically just like trying
to like make fun of that sound and like in
the aesthetic of that record, and you know, the core
message of that song basically again is that Dr Dre

(32:46):
is a phony. You know, Easy is saying I'm the
real gangster and Dre is this like wimpy guy and
all he does is talk. And in the music video
for the song, this is where he dug out those
photos we were talking about before, like the world Class
Wrecking Crew where you know rais where in the again
the gold may suit, he has the makeup on, he's
playing a key tar. The idea is to make him
look foolish essentially in this video. The problem for Easy

(33:09):
is that the chronic was so big and Dre at
this time really was like a superstar, probably the most
famous rapper on the planet really at this point, and
like no one really cared about, you know, showing embarrassing
photos of Dre, Like I think in reality, like you know,
people love that record because the music was really good.
They didn't really, I think, believe that like Drey was

(33:30):
actually like a criminal or something. So to show him
in this embarrassing light, I think people ultimately shrugged their
shoulders because they're like, well, okay, fine, he looked like
that back then, but his record is still really great,
so we're gonna go with Dre. And I mean I
feel like that EP still like did like fairly well,
like sold like a couple hundred thousand copies in its
first week, which would have been fine on its own,
but it just like paled in comparison to what Drey

(33:53):
did on the Chronic And really, at the end of
the day, like the record sales were like the most
devastating message of all Drake could just like basically point
and say scoreboard, you know, at the end of the day,
and show that he had won, you know, this part
of the battle. Yeah, I think the EP made him
look hetty. I mean, you make a really great comparison
in your book about how easy he was basically like

(34:14):
Dave Mustaine in the Metallica Mega Death feud, or it's
just like you're trying way too hard, Like how about
you make a good record and like Drey's doing and
not make you know, two thirds of it be about
how much you hate this dude. And I think that
that was really at the core of Easy Eves, that
his reputation as a musician was not great at this period.

(34:34):
I mean, he needed the lyrical wit of ice Cube,
and he needed Drey's beats, and you know, he wasn't
really challenging himself. He wasn't teaming up with producers that
would push him. A lot of his records in this
era were sounding like stuff that n w A had
done four or five years earlier. And also his reputation
just in the hip hop community wasn't good because apparently
he was at this point deemed very difficult to work with,

(34:56):
and he alienated himself from many of his friends and
former friends and artists. Even his longtime friend mc ran
voiced his dislike for Easy n He said he had
a big head and was a want to be mega
star and even suggested the w A should reunite without Easy.
So really, at this point, his reputation is kind of
in the toilet. I think there was an article in

(35:17):
Vibe magazine that kind of said, like, you know, is
there anyone lower in the hip hop community right now
than Easy? And the inference was no. And just the
fact that he had released this EP that was just
filled with uh, just this obsession with Dr Dre just
kind of made him seem weak. You know, It's interesting

(35:37):
to contemplate, like what would have happened if this rivalry
would have taken its course throughout the decade, Like if
Eazy E would have lived and if there would have
still been a back and forth or if him and
Dre would have found a way to reconcile. Of course,
we don't know the answer to that, because Easy ended
up getting checked into the hospital in early he had

(35:57):
a really bad cough and he was pretty quickly after
that diagnosed as having AIDS and really, like I think
it was like a month later that he passed away.
This was like an incredibly like just rapid turn of
events for Easy, and he ended up, you know, dying
at the age of thirty, which is just like an
incredibly sad story, you know, just to pass away at

(36:18):
that age, just incredibly tragic. What emerges out of Easy's
death is this story about basically Drey and Easy having
this like deathbed reconciliation. And this is a story that
Dre himself has told on numerous occasions, though the details
I kept change depending on when he's telling it. Like,
you know, there's one interview where he actually says that
like him and Easy had a phone conversation like two

(36:39):
weeks before he went into the hospital where they you know,
talked about old times and even discussed the possibility of
like reuniting and w A. And then there's like another
story that like, you know that they saw each other
in the hospital and they were able to have this
moment where you know, they buried the hatchet and made
peace before Easy passed. But also, I mean, it seems
like Easy was in a coma for like most of

(36:59):
the time that he was in the hospital, and it
appears that like when Dre was there, that like Easy
wouldn't have been conscious. That it just reminds me of
like another episode we did about the Band where you
had Robbie Robertson and Leave on Helm, a very similar
situation where you have these two guys who had a
bitter feud going on for years and then one of
them gets sick in this case, Leave on Helm and

(37:21):
then Robbie Robertson goes to the hospital and according to Robbie,
they have this reconciliation. But was it really a reconciliation
if the other guy isn't conscious, Like that's the mystery
of this. Like, I don't know if we'll ever quite
know the truth of this, because in a way, you know,
I feel like it's a little too convenient for Dre
to like have this story that like they somehow patched

(37:42):
it up, because I feel there's like evidence of the
contrary that like Easy was still pretty mad at Dre,
like at the end of his life. Yeah, I mean
one of the big points of this is the posthumous
album Straight Off the Streets of Motherfucking Compton, And there
are several songs on the album that takes shots to
death row Old school Ship and would You Do And
the music video for just to Let You Know features

(38:03):
a rapper named Eric Easy's real name, beating with another
rapper who believes that Eric ripped him off and uh,
and then this other rapper gets shot, so the other
rapper clearly being Dr Dre. It kind of seems like
if they had reconciled at least Easy, he's a state,
would have maybe gone a little easier on the Death
Road Team. I don't know, Yeah, that seems questionable to me.

(38:26):
It's weird. It's definitely weird. Dre definitely forgave him. I
think it remains to be seen whether or not E
actually forgave Dre. And it's worth noting over the years,
many people in Easy Ease circle have come forward to
say that they don't believe his death was accidental. Jerry
Hellers said as much. He said he thinks that it
was foul play. One of Easy Ease protegees B G.

(38:46):
Knockout had a song in My Prime Inleven which he
wraps the way my big homie went down. He didn't
deserve it to say he died of AIDS, but Easy
was cold murdered. Another Easy Ease Ruthless Records mentees M. C.
Frau believes he was given tainted acupuncture needles, which is
something I've never heard of. But the general consensus is

(39:08):
that people feel that Sugar Knight, that human lightning rod
for murder conspiracies, was involved, and Sugar didn't really help
his case when he gave an appearance after getting out
of jail in two thousand three on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Have you seen this? Yeah, I mean he goes on
and like, by the way, like this conspiracy theory just
seems ridiculous. Like he's being shot with HIV with like

(39:28):
a tainted it's pretty hypodermic needle. It doesn't make any sense.
But then you have Sugar Knight going on Jimmy Kimmel
Live and like basically confirming it. I mean he says
they have a new thing out they get blood from
somebody with AIDS and they shoot you with it. That's
a slow death, the easy thing, you know what I mean?
God Like, what a good dude, by the way, what

(39:50):
what what? What a gentleman? I mean, Look, I I'm
inclined to believe that he was trolling with that. I
don't really think that he killed Easy, um, And if
he had, I don't think he would have like joked
about it on Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel that the
smartest thing to do if that were actually true. I
think what is definitely beyond doubt here is that I

(40:11):
think for Dre it became very important after Easy he died,
that he essentially changed the narrative of their relationship because again,
you had this moment in the early nineties where Drey
and Easy were really defined by this bitter public conflict
that they had, and again really by those songs on
the Chronic I really think that those songs did more
than anything to sort of like fix the public's perception

(40:33):
of like what was going on between these two guys.
So just as Dre defined Easy in his records, he
also tried to kind of redefine Easy on his subsequent
records and music videos, like there's that video for I
Need a Doctor from eleven where he's like it shows
Dr Dre like standing at Easy's grave and like the
idea basically of the videos that like Easy Ease, Like

(40:54):
this Saint and Dr Dre has just been struggling for
so many years with grief over Easy Ease death, and look,
I don't want to call into question his grief. I'm
sure that he felt a lot of different emotions about
Easy after he died, and losing a friend, especially at
such a young age, must have been difficult. But maybe
this is just the cynic in me. There did seem

(41:14):
to be sort of a self serving aspect to this,
where by using this specter of Easy e that Drey
in some way was also making himself look noble in
this music video, which, by the way, that music video
is ridiculous, Like that is such a silly music video,
and like that song also, I think it's like pretty trash.
But yeah, it just seemed almost like he was using
Easy as like a convenient symbol to express his own

(41:38):
sort of like angst and milk that for dramatic effect
in this video. I still feel weird about the m
W A film straight out of Compton. I know you
and I feel differently about this. I feel like it
was almost another way that Drey tried to rewrite the narrative,
because I thought the Easy was portrayed as likable but
kind of naive, and in the film Dre kind of

(41:59):
he's the one motivating a lot of choices. I mean,
Dre gives him the idea to for Ruthless Records in
the movie, and the record boys in the hood themselves.
I don't know. Everything in the movie to me seems
like it was Drey's idea, and I think in real
life that wasn't true. I mean, Easy was the one
driving the ship, So I don't know. It's hard because
Drey and Q both produced straight out of Compton, and
Easy isn't there to tell his sides, you know. In

(42:19):
a way, I thought it was kind of their way
of rewriting the narrative a bit. Yeah. I mean again,
this idea of Drey, and I guess in this instance
Cube being self serving. I definitely think there's an issue there.
Although I think my issue with the movie in terms
of the relationship with Easy is just like how I
think it kind of whitewashes again the genuine conflict that
was going on, because I think in the movie, yeah,

(42:40):
Drey has perceived as the protagonist, and maybe that can
be perceived as like a slight on Easy, But again
I think Easy for the most part is like a
pretty likable guy in the film. And it also, I
think really shows the friendship that existed between these guys
and really puts the emphasis on that, and you don't
really see all the negative stuff that happened. And you know, again,

(43:00):
is that a self serving whitewash or is it someone
who is trying to put his past behind him and
focus on the good things and not try to sort
of exacerbate and and the conflicts and picking out old scars.
You know, I mean it's probably a little bit of both.
And while you know, the music historian and me the
lover of feuds, you know, doesn't like it when people
whitewash the real conflicts that happened. I can understand how,

(43:23):
you know, decades after the fact, you just want to
remember your friend in a positive way and not well
on all that old negativity. We're gonna take a quick
break to get a word from our sponsor before we
get two more rivals. All right, we've reached a part

(43:45):
of our episode where we give the pro side of
each part of the rivalry. Will do the pro Doctor
Dre side first? I mean, look, Dr Dre, he needs
no introduction. He is one of the great hip hop
producers of all time, maybe the greatest. He was the
sonic architect of those class and w A records, and
of course he's the guy behind the Chronic, one of
the great albums of the nineteen nineties. Also, you know,

(44:06):
I think he was right on some level to be
mad at Easy for how he was unfairly compensated early on,
though I think in the end he definitely got his
revenge from a pr standpoint. You know, again, I think
that like when we think about this revelry, first and foremost,
we think of the Funk with Dre da video. I mean,
to me, that is like the defining document of what

(44:26):
this revelry was. Even though it's incredibly unfair to Easy.
Dre had the loudest microphone, so he got to write
history and basically make his friend look like up a phone,
even though again in retrospect, after Easy he died, he
tried to rewrite that history I mean, like you said,
Dr Dre pretty much invented the West Coast hip hop
sound genius level producer who excels at making beats through

(44:48):
live instrumentation, which allows for greater musical flexibility that translates
his artists message and meaning better. He's elevated the likes
of Snoop Dogg and Eminem, the Game, Kendrick and fifty
Cent through his mentorship, and he's bazillionaire through his media
empire and headphones. Just incredible. Figure. What he lacks in
ice Cube's lyricism, he makes up for in his sonic scope.

(45:10):
Absolute genius. Yeah, I wonder if he's going to be
ultimately remembered more as a headphone magnate than a music producer,
since that's been his gig for the past many years.
Going over the pro Easy East Side. You know, while
Dre was the musical force behind n w A and
Ice Cube was the lyrical force, I think Easy for
Me represented the idea of n w A. You know,

(45:31):
he was the guy who actually lived the life. And
I still feel like he had like one of the
coolest voices in hip hop at that time, and he
had like a really charismatic persona where he had a
danger to him, but I also feel like he had
kind of like a lovable aspect, maybe because he was
like this short guy with a Jerry Curl hair cut.
You know, there was something about him that like he

(45:52):
could be menacing, but he was also like kind of
like the cute gangster next door. So as a child
of like the late eighties and early nineties, I'm always
gonna have love for Easy, I always feel, like you know,
with the Beach Boys, they always said Dennis Wilson was
sort of the soul of the band because he was
the one who served, like even if he wasn't the
most musically gifted, he was sort of the one who
lived that life. Like you said, I think that's easy
ease role in this group. And you know, I mean

(46:14):
without easy putting the other ruthless records and enlisting Jerry
Heller to help them navigate the music industry, I don't
think n w A would have had the cultural impact
that they did. And I mean sure he wasn't the
mastermind of the sound or the words, but I think
he was the one who ran the ship and kept
everything in line. And like I said earlier, he was
essentially a businessman who rapped, and those solo artistic output
isn't very impressive. He discovered acts like bone thugs and

(46:36):
harmony and dressed up and in his lifetime he was
I think arguably the most successful of the nw A
members from a financial standpoint, starting his own company with
his own money and owning a sizeable chunk of Dr
Dre's output. Uh and you know, plus and we're being
extremely petty, he never cave to Dre, you know, I
mean he was his own hand to the end. That's
the thing about this is that you know, if we

(46:58):
assume that, you know, for whatever sas and that they
didn't actually reconcile, you know that Dre is just telling
this story about them reconciling. But Easy was actually like
that he was still angry and even when he was
in a coma, he was angry at Dr Dre. Then like, yeah,
he did win because he never gave in to Dre,
and Dre ended up saying all these nice things about
him after he died. So maybe that was like the

(47:19):
ultimate like winner move for like Easy, like I'm gonna
actually die in order to win this rivalry. So that's
one theory here maybe that puts Easy out ahead. If
we look at these two guys together, I think, you know,
on this show, I think we've seen a lot of
examples of two rivals who existed in the same group
who for all of their fighting, they ended up complimenting
each other really well. And I think this is another

(47:40):
example of that. Like where obviously with Dre, he was
a great producer, but you know, maybe he was kind
of like a nerdy guy early on, and he wouldn't
have been able to make it in a gangster rap
group if it weren't for someone like easy E who
had the drive and he also had the backstory that
could give that group the authenticity that it needed. So yeah,
I just seemed like they had a great partnership for
the short time they were together. Yeah, without Drey's talent,

(48:01):
Easy when they made it without Easy focus, I don't
think Drey would have made it either. You know, Jordan
have to say that, like, as we reach another end
of of a Rival's episode that I think this is
such a great opportunity for you to express yourself. I
never know when it's coming. I wait, I wait with
bated breath for the entire episode that that felt a
little more hackney than usual. I feel like I do

(48:23):
like a long set up for it, and I'm not
sure if the payoff was worth it, but you know,
it's part of what we do on this show now.
I feel like there's the fans out there that want
the pun at the end. Even though I don't want
to do the pun, I'm doing it for the fans.
So hopefully you all enjoyed that terrible pun. You are
a chronic punner, Stephen. Oh there we go, We got that. Okay,

(48:44):
thank you for listening to this episode of Rivals. We
will be back with more beefs and feuds and long
swimming resentments next week. Rivals is a production of My
Heart Radio. The executive producers are Shawn Titone and Noel Brown.
Supervising producers are Taylor Chicogne and Tristan McNeil. The producer
is Joel hat Stat. I'm Jordan run Tug. I'm Stephen Hyden.

(49:07):
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