The moment Ice Cube knew he had to leave NWA: “I refused to take my cheque”
NWA’s beef with Ice Cube has become one of hip-hop’s most notorious feuds because it culminated in one of hip-hop’s most savage diss tracks — ‘No Vaseline’. The song effectively led to the collective’s destruction and still stands as one of the best diss tracks ever made.
NWA was a legendary group, and the gangsta rap movement it sparked was epic. However, despite being a proud member of the collective, Ice Cube had a tenuous relationship with his fellow members. Alongside Dr Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren, Cube reached the top of the charts in the 1980s, but one individual drove a wedge between the Death Certificate creator and the rest of his group —Jerry Heller.
The group, which was formed in 1986, had massive commercial success. Still, Ice Cube decided to break away from the collective after becoming frustrated with Jerry Heller, the crew’s manager and founder of Ruthless Records.
Eazy-E put much of his faith in Heller, but Ice Cube knew the collective was getting ripped off by the executive and not being given what they were worth. In his diss track, the emcee aimed at all of his former friends and highlighted their blind loyalty. Furthermore, he believed that Eazy-E (as the group’s frontman) was taking a more significant cut than he deserved for songs they had all contributed to.
During an interview with NME, Ice Cube explained the exact turning point in his career that led him to leave NWA. Speaking about the unfair payment he received for Straight Outta Compton and the dodgy cheque he was pressured to take from Heller, the Lethal Injection creator recalled, “I refused to take my cheque because I felt that I would be admitting that I agreed with what I was bein’ paid.”
However, the sum of money he was turning down seemed like a lot to his peers. Speaking about how his counterparts were aghast at his decision not to take the money from Jerry Heller, the emcee continued, “They [the other group members] thought I was crazy! I heard comments like, ‘For $75,000, I don’t care what that contract says. I would sign that shit two times.’ They were like, ‘What’s wrong with you? This is more money than we’ve ever seen, and you wanna be the dark cloud in the shit?'”
Still, it wasn’t just Straight Outta Compton that Ice Cube was unhappy with; he also believed that he had contributed much to Eazy-E’s debut project, Eazy-Duz-It. Unfortunately for him, Eazy-E wasn’t looking to give any money for his work.
Opening up about the release of Eazy-Duz-It shortly after the group’s debut, Ice Cube told NME, “The cheque was just for Straight Outta Compton, but we’d worked on both records equally! I felt like we deserved more of both pies. We put as much time and effort into Eazy-Duz-It as into Straight Outta Compton – all of us. But Eazy wanted to keep all the Eazy-Duz-It money and just pay us the NWA money and take his share out of the NWA money!”
In the long term, Ice Cube knew it wouldn’t be sustainable to have one NWA member getting paid more than the rest regularly without some sort of unrest, so he decided to put his feelings on ‘No Vaseline’ and leave. That said, his decision wasn’t that controversial because the year his diss track was released, Dr Dre also left the collective to form Death Row Records, meaning even The Chronic creator knew the NWA movement had reached an end.
After leaving NWA, Ice Cube was very successful as a solo artist and even entered Hollywood. However, he was the first to see that NWA was no longer able to survive as a group.