Eazy-E dies

Why it matters

Eric Wright was 5 feet 5 inches tall. He had grown up in Compton. He had, by the late 1980s, become the most unlikely-looking businessman in the music industry, a short kid from a rough neighborhood who built a hundred-million-dollar independent rap label by trusting his ears, hiring Dr. Dre, paying for the studio time out of his own pocket, and refusing to let any major-label structure interpose itself between him and the masters. The Eazy-E persona on records (the high-pitched voice, the explicit comic-violent rhymes) was always partially performance. The Eazy-E who ran Ruthless was a serious operator. The contradiction between the two was a feature, not a bug; it is one of the reasons the early NWA records work the way they do. He died young, of a disease that AIDS-stigmatized America was still mostly afraid to name in 1995. He named it ten days before he died. He wanted his family to be able to talk about it. You should also know that the labels he had a hand in (Ruthless and downstream of it) put out, between them, an unreasonable percentage of all important West Coast rap. He was 30. He should have had decades more.