The artists Eazy-E claimed Dr Dre stole from
The relationship between one-time NWA bandmates, Eazy-E and Dr Dre, was famously strained, right up until the very end.
In an interview he gave only a month before his AIDS-related death, Eazy spoke about his former friend and collaborator, claiming that Dre, who, by this time, had become famous for his role in developing the G-funk sound, had actually stolen the style from someone else.
As the symptoms of his disease were becoming more severe in February 1995, Eazy had a conversation with someone called Phyllis Pollack, and the subject of Dre’s role in G-funk came up. “Dre,” Eazy said, “if you listen to his style of music from NWA to now, it’s totally different. Dre stole that style [G-funk] from Cold 187um, Rhythm D and a couple of other people he stole from. Dre stole stuff from that, Above The Law’s, Black Mafia Life’s ‘Never Missing a Beat.’ [coughing] They’re good songs.”
If all those references seem alien, let’s break them down. Eazy is talking about Cold 187um, aka Big Hutch, a rapper and producer who led the hip-hop group Above the Law. In 1989, Above the Law signed to Eazy-E’s own Ruthless Records, and they became a major influence on NWA and its various members. Rhythm D, meanwhile, was a producer who worked with Eazy-E, as well as others, including Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Snoop Dogg.
Above the Law released their first album, Livin’ Like Hustlers, in 1990, and it contained a notable innovation: G-funk. According to Cold 187um himself, this was the first time that the G-funk style had materialised, and it was two years before Dre’s album The Chronic was released. More to the point, NWA featured on the album, and Dre did some producing on it. This was before he ever released The Chronic, which is so often cited as a pivotal moment in G-funk’s development. Dre had clearly gotten ideas for the sound from working with Above the Law.
Not only that, but Above the Law’s second album, Black Mafia Life, exhibited an even more obvious G-funk sound than their first album had. Black Mafia Life came out in 1993, which was after The Chronic, but it had actually been recorded years beforehand, in 1991. In other words, Above the Law had made two G-funk records before Dre ever released his first one.
According to Cold 187um, who spoke to Complex about his role in developing G-funk in 2017, Dre was fascinated to hear the G-funk sound that Above the Law had been developing on the Black Mafia Life album. He claimed, “Dre was like, ‘That’s incredible, man. How’d you fit that funk into it like that? What is that?’ I said, ‘We just call that shit G-funk, man. That’s mixing gangsta shit with melodies, with classic soul/funk music.’ He’s like, ‘That’s some next-level shit right there.’ That’s how tight me and Dre were. He wasn’t saying it like he was threatened by it—he was inspired.”
The way Cold 187um speaks about it, it seems less like Dre “stole” the G-funk sound, as Eazy had put it before he died. It was more that Dre had been inspired by Cold 187um’s experiments with the style, and he later added his own touches and contributed to its overall development. There didn’t seem to be any bad blood. Cold 187um, it seems, just wants credit where credit is due.