By: Sheena Lester

RP: To me, though, it seems like the fundamental element of trust is missing from this equation. If Dre had all he needed and or/or wanted at Ruthless, why would he find it necessary to deal with people who, you say, have a bad record? Was there a trust that fell apart between you two?

Eazy-E: No. Somebody fucked his head up. Brainwashed. It’s like the same people that he’s dealin’ with over here had a lot of major groups at one time but they didn’t know it. They had Quik, they had Penthouse. Something went wrong. Penthouse left. Quik and Penthouse, somebody brought me a demo tape of them. I listened to it. This is a bad business move right here, though: I said, “No, I don’t want this. It sounds like shit I do.” The person I turned down was Quik. It’s ’92 now, and I had nothin’ between that. They put him out and the shit blew up. And I was goin’, “Damn, that’s the same shit they was bringin’ to me before that.” Somebody else said, “Oh, that’s cool.” Then Penthouse came around and I got them. What I’m sayin’ is that the same person that Dre is with right now is fucked. Something was wrong there for them to come to me. I didn’t want to deal with it, so they went somewhere else, but they never went back to the first person. I’ll say the muthafucka was the devil.

RP: Do you think the breakup of NWA is almost something people didn’t want to do but were like, fuck it?

Eazy-E: Because they let people in their heads. Everybody say the white man is the devil, but some niggas are devils their goddamn selves, and a lot of us don’t see that. The devil might be a guy that’s Black over at his company, but he’s fuckin you. So I figure he’s the devil the devil too. You don’t have to be white to be a devil. “Jerry is this, he’s that.” People callin me, askin’ me, “Why you got a white man as your manager?” ‘Cause half the niggas that wanna get in steal from you or something. If you on the road, you makin’ big money, and someone send half your advance, you send $50,000 home to your manager. He say, “This is the most money I ever made. I could just take off, hop on a plane and move to Brazil.” I’m like, “Damn.” Half the time, with kid actors or singers, whatever, their parents even fuck them. They see all this [money]. And he only six, see, he don’t know nothin’ bout no million dollars. “We can take this money and go buy us a house.” Us meanin’ him and her, not him, her and the kid. The kid just live there. And they figure, “We’ll trust this nigga before we trust this white man.” It’s like, when I was lookin’ for a manager, okay, I closed my fuckin’ eyes and I said, “I want the best.” Jerry happened to be the best. When I go to the fuckin’ doctor and I got a problem, I’m not gonna go to Martin Luther King [Hospital], I wanna go to the best hospital. I want the best physician-Black or White.

RP: What do you think is the future of gangsta rap?

Eazy-E: It’s on the way out because we lettin’ it be on the way out. You got people who come out not really doin’ good, hardcore rap, and half of that shit that they sellin’ is the shit that’s makin’ they company money. You got Too $hort-platinum. Ice Cube makin a lot of money. You got NWA, Eazy-E, you got Geto Boys, 2 Live Crew. And a lot of other groups that sellin’ records makin’ their record company money, when they probably only gave them 15 cents when they was probably wirth $10. ‘Cause they gave them this little advance, and they blew up and made all this money, you know. Shootin’, killin’,sex.

RP: If it turns out that the companies don’t want distribute gangsta rap, then that’s the opportunity for another company to come in, don’t you think?

Eazy-E: Another company will accept that gangsta rap, then it will blow the fuck up.

RP: Especially if it’s a Black company. It’s a situation where we could take our shit back.

Eazy-E: All that. Ice-T, whether he rappin’ or doin’ his rock ‘n’ roll, is dealing with his record sayin’, “Okay we don’t wanna do this shit. You go to that company.” And I hope I be the owner and president of that mufucka, ‘cause I will take him and all those gangsta rappers that’s out or comin’ out. Let’s go make some money. Let them go fuck up everything and stop puttin’ out Ice-T or whatever else, ‘cause us over here, we gonna continue to put this shit out on the street. It’s gonna be somethin’ everybody’s gonna miss if it’s gone, so it’ll be like a collector shit over here. You don’t fuck with rap that’s hardcore? I’ll take it over here and I’ll put my address in this book, and I’ll say that I’m acceptin’ all shit like this, to send me a demo. They can send me all the shit. Warner (Bros.) and Charlton Heston got a piece of their stock, and I’m talkin’ and sellin’ my stock anyway. It’s the same shit you bought from us. Somebody’s gonna buy it. Take your fuckin stock, your money, and take your ass, ‘cause Ice-T has a record called “Cop Killer.” If Ice-T got a fucking song called “Cop Killer,” let Ice-T keep that fucking song on his damn album, ‘cause you still making money. You still own part of the stock. Dumb mufuckas.

RP: How did you get an understanding of the business?

Eazy-E: I was like, “Damn, I wanna do shit their way.” I wanna do shit because I had jobs and got fired and shit, and I hate workin’ for somebody else. So I figure if I work for my damn self, I could lay my own fucking rules. If I wanna come in my office and shit in the middle of the floor, I shit in the middle of the floor. It’s my shit. You can’t tell me how to run shit. We first went over to Priority. Priority distributes some of our stuff, and they do a hell of a good job; they do better than fuckin’ majors do. We went over there and I told them, “This is how we gonna do shit.” That was the biggest thing for them. All they had then was Egyptian Lover and the California Raisins. We took out ideas-meaning me, Dre, Ice Cube, Ren and Yella-along with our white manager, who happens to be the best- over to this company, which is owned by Bryan Turner, and we made the mufucka. Priority Records. We went over there and the mufuckas started getting’ gold and platinum rap records, other than for some compilations that they had. Then other groups heard about this label and started comin’ over.

RP: If Priority were a Black-owned company and in the same situation, it would have been that much doper.

Eazy-E: We would make it up-me and other people that think like me. Michael Bivens. Look. Boyz 2 Men. He’s thinking. He’s out there. I’m out there. Russell Simmons is out there. Luke is out there. Everybody over there has power; they can run shit like this. Michael Jackson. He got the power. And then you got these other entertainers, sports stars like Magic Johnson, Michael Jordon. The whites say. “Goddamn, what’s goin’ on?” And they makin’ money.

RP: How do you open people’s eyes to see shit we need to do?

Eazy-E: Sometimes you can’t open nobody’s eyes. Sometimes you can’t ‘cause they don’t wanna see. They happen to be blind.

RP: How do you think people perceive you?

Eazy-E: People might put me down, good or bad or whatever, and they don’t even know who the fuck I am. They go by other shit that other people say. They don’t know me. They think they know me. But they really don’t know me. Before you came here, you probably thought I was gonna be an asshole. You’d never met me, and if you just believed what people said, at the end of this you might go, “Damn, he wasn’t like I thought he was gonna be.” You’re thinking, He’s that cop-killin’, fuck-the-police nigga, bitch-slayin’ person. But I sat down with him, and he wasn’t like that.