The reason why DJ Yella never listened to Dr Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ album
DJ Yella, as a member of NWA, is a musical legend. But despite that fact, he drifted away from making beats following the group’s end—and his life took another turn entirely.
During his NWA days, Yella apparently had an almost telepathic understanding with Dre. NWA’s manager, Jerry Heller, noted in his memoir, Ruthless, that the pair wouldn’t even need to speak with each other when they were making beats together. Their musical understanding went beyond words, but, when NWA ended, their paths diverged.
As Dre was leaving the group, he called Yella to ask him if he’d come with him. Yella, as he revealed in a conversation with Forbes in 2022, didn’t quite understand the implications of what Dre was asking of him. “It’s early in the morning, I’m like, ‘You’re going where?’ I’m thinking the studio,” he recalled. “But yeah, I was caught. I didn’t answer.”
In reality, Yella was being asked to make a difficult choice: side with Dre in NWA’s dispute, thus sticking with him and maintaining their musical bond. Or side with Eazy-E, with whom he was extremely close. “I was good with both sides, that’s the problem,” he said. “I was young, naïve. I didn’t answer [Dre]. And then by the time I could have answered, too late.”
Almost by default, Yella remained on Eazy’s side, and the pair enjoyed a good friendship and working relationship, with Yella producing for Eazy’s Ruthless Records. But, when Eazy unexpectedly died, Yella decided to call it quits in music—and move into another industry altogether.
“I remember when they buried [Eazy] and they put the dirt on top of him and then everybody left, I said, ‘I’m done with music,’” Yella recalled. “The music just went out of my body. That’s it. I’m gonna do the adult films all the way, 100%.”
Yella stayed in the music business for long enough to help put together Eazy’s posthumous album Str8 off tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton, while he also released a solo album of his own in 1996, which he dedicated to Eazy, but, beyond that, he was done with hip-hop—he didn’t even listen to it. “If I listened to music,” he noted, “it was old stuff that’s already been out from the early ’90s and ’80s. I didn’t listen to the new stuff.”
Yella concentrated on his own work, without paying attention to what the other NWA members were doing. “Once I was in that lane of [adult] movies, I didn’t look at music or hip-hop, nothing. I never seen Boyz n the Hood. I never seen none of that stuff. I never heard Dre’s first album [The Chronic]. I never heard it.”
Yella blocked out what his former bandmates were doing—which, considering some of their wild successes, was perhaps for the best. “I never looked at what they were doing,” he said. “I didn’t even think about it. I was thinking what I’m doing or where I’m going. It’s just like everybody just went their way doing their own thing. So, I went my way.”
Yella experienced some tough years following the break-up of NWA, and he didn’t return to music for a long, long time. But, after finding religion and getting back on his feet, he started DJing again and has even reunited with NWA. He apparently hasn’t made porn since 2011.