The real reason NWA didn’t respond to Ice Cube’s ‘No Vaseline’
Ice Cube left NWA in 1989 due to a monetary dispute with Eazy-E and manager Jerry Heller. As a result, Cube released a diss song against his former group, with ‘No Vaseline’ now being considered one of the best diss tracks of all time.
The record takes aim at Eazy, Dr Dre, DJ Yella, MC Ren and Heller, with accusations of sodomy and telling Dre to stop rapping and “stick to producing.” Another lyric saw Cube explicitly mentioning Ren and Eazy together, rapping, “Eazy dick is smelling like MC Ren’s shit.”
Despite all of the insults hurled by Ice Cube over the five-minute runtime, NWA never responded to ‘No Vaseline’ with their own diss track. In 2017, MC Ren stated that they didn’t ever plan to respond to him on wax.
“We never was like, ‘We gonna do a record on him,’” he told Unique Access. “We was doing the N-ggaz 4 Life album and Dre came up with the idea to do a commercial, like a skit or whatever. We did that skit or whatever and that was it. But it was like, nah, we wasn’t in there like, ‘We finna do a diss record.’”
He continued, “After Cube left, we did 100 Miles and Runnin’ and everybody was like wondering if we could still do a record or whatever without Cube. 100 Miles and Runnin’ was alright, but we did N-ggaz 4 Life, it was like, ‘Yeah, they can do an album without him.'”
Despite their issues, MC Ren explained that it was water under the bridge when they eventually reunited. Their relationships picked up where they left off, with each member of NWA not feeling the need to address anything that happened in the past.
“When we got back together, it’s like we didn’t even talk about it,” he said. “It wasn’t like we was in a room like, ‘Man you said this.’ ‘Nah, but you said that.’ It was like we just didn’t talk about it. Nobody talked about it. It was like, ‘Yo, let’s get back together and do this.’ When we got back together, it was just like we just went in there and did it. Nobody talked about the past.”
He added, “It’s like a family argument where everybody’s throwing stuff, fighting, then the next day, it’s like we all going out to kick it or something, then nobody mentioning the day before. So that’s how it went down. We never really tripped off of it.”
Ice Cube previously admitted that he struggles to listen to ‘No Vaseline’ now that he has no bad feelings towards any of them. “There’s always been this and, you know, me and NWA got into it, so I had to let ’em know,” he said on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “It’s hard to listen to those songs now, ’cause we cool, I love Dre and Ren and Eazy… you know they’re my guys!”