Source: Larry Busacca / Getty
“We were trying to make records that can go on the radio, and when we started doing mixtapes — which we knew wasn’t going on the radio — that’s when we really started to talk about the neighborhood,” Cube said while detailing how the term “gangster rap” came into being. “Talking about what really led into the style that we ended up doing, which is now called hardcore gangster rap. Back then we was calling it ‘reality rap’; ‘gangster rap’ is the name that the media coined.
“We was just talking about sh*t that we was going through,” he continued. “Me and Dre started off making the first mixtapes: He would do the mixes, and I would rap at the beginning of them. We’d talk about sh*t you couldn’t talk about on a record, that we didn’t think you could until Eazy-E came into the picture and said, ‘No these are the kind of records I want to make, not just mixtapes, not just for the ‘hood. Let’s do these kinds of records for everybody.’”
Remembering Eazy-E, Ice Cube stated that he will miss the rapper’s “sense of humor” most, among other things as well as “his sense of marketing and just how he knew what people wanted all the time. He was just a smart cat.”
With film centering on such a revered group, the obvious question is whether or not new music from N.W.A. will show up on the movie’s soundtrack? According to Ice Cube, it all boils down to one member in particular.
Ice Cube Talks About Who Invented Gangsta Rap was originally published on wzakcleveland.com
