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 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 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 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, 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,
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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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
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
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
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 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 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
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 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 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, 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 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 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
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 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 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 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. 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, 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,
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 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, 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 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 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 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,
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 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.
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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,
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 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, 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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
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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,
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 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 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 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
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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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,
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 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 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 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 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 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
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, 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 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,
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. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcast for My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.