Why NWA never released their reunion album: ‘Not These N*ggaz Again’
In the immediate aftermath of Tupac Shakur’s murder, West Coast hip-hop was struggling. But once Dr Dre had helped to propel Eminem into the mainstream, not to mention releasing his own 2001 album to great acclaim, attention was once again placed upon the region and its rap. Dre had reestablished the West as an important centre of hip-hop, but people wanted more. They wanted NWA to reunite.
There was a buzz surrounding NWA around the turn of the new millennium. The legendary group had partially reunited as part of the Up In Smoke Tour in the year 2000, which had brought together a bunch of West Coast legends and affiliated artists like Eminem and D12. Dr Dre, Ice Cube and MC Ren had all been involved, with DJ Yella being the sole surviving NWA member not to feature. Eazy-E, of course, had died five years previous.
The success of the Up In Smoke Tour had plainly illustrated a renewed taste for West Coast hip-hop, which NWA took note of. Plans formed for a new album, and even DJ Yella agreed to get involved with it. Things were happening, and excitement levels only grew when Dre announced the person that would be stepping in for Eazy-E as a new member of the group: Snoop Dogg.
The new album looked set to happen, and it even had a name. It was going to be called Not These N*ggaz Again, and some recording sessions for it actually took place. But the project duly ran into problems—it turns out that pulling together the surviving NWA members, plus Snoop, and expecting them to produce a record of high enough quality is, as Ice Cube himself put it to Rolling Stone in 2001, “easier said than done.”
“We’re up against two things,” Cube said, laying out the problems that the group was facing. “We don’t have a lot of time, and we have to do a great record. That doesn’t compute. There are a lot of expectations with that record, and if we don’t have time to meet those expectations, it’s better not to do it than to go in and half-ass it.”
Cube was tempering expectations, but, still, there was a sense that the project would, eventually, bear fruit. “We made a lot of progress on the Up in Smoke Tour, gettin’ back together and understanding how we’ve grown,” he said. “But you know, I’m doin’ a movie here, they’re doin’ their movies.”
Clearly the group wasn’t totally fixed on getting this album finished, with other projects getting in the way. Plus, Cube admitted that he wouldn’t feel hugely enthusiastic about the project if one of his bandmates in particular didn’t find the time and space to work as he needed to. “It’s really on Dre,” Cube said. “If he ain’t puttin’ the tracks together, I really ain’t down to rap on nobody else’s tracks. He’s the quarterback.”
In the end, the project failed and never saw the light of day in its entirety. Only two songs from their reunion sessions were ever released: ‘Chin Check,’ which featured on the soundtrack for Ice Cube’s movie Next Friday, and ‘Hello,’ which ended up on Cube’s sixth solo album War & Peace Vol 2 (The Peace Disc).
A series of partial reunions followed over the course of the next decade and a half, peaking with the group reuniting on stage at Coachella in 2016. But Not These N*ggaz Again, sadly, never happened. A third studio album looks unlikely to ever materialise now.