Rap’s Streetwise Trailblazer

Eric “Eazy-E” Wright came from Compton, stood 5-foot-2 and had a Jheri curl. The Dominguez High dropout was a hustler who believed half of what he saw, some of what he heard. He was an autodidact and a petty criminal, and he brought street smarts to the mainstream like few before or since.

Eazy-E was crack-era Southern California’s Selena, arguably the most purely gutter black man ever to sell tens of millions of records, and a real-time hero.

Prior to his classic 1988 single “Boyz-N-the-Hood,” it was unusual to see sagging denim pants on non-incarcerated teenage boys. In 1995, six years after his group N.W.A’s independently financed and distributed album “Straight Outta Compton” remade not only rap music but also a number of industries surrounding it, the musician and businessman died at age 31 of AIDS-related illness.

“Eric did know the streets and he did have game. His game was being real,” says Tomika Woods-Wright, chief executive of Ruthless Records and the rapper’s widow. “He showed that there are so many different ways to get to that point everyone is trying to get to.”

Success through street knowledge. That was his mantra, and marketing people now attest to this path’s power. By demonstrating the importance of owning your own label, Eazy-E was an inspiration for such record companies as Death Row, Rap-A-Lot, Bad Boy and No Limit. His influence is reflected in the mainstream success of Jay-Z’s Roc-a-Fella label and New Orleans’ Cash Money Clique, as well as offshoots that extend into textiles, new media and real estate.

“In Eazy-E, people like Master P saw somebody who was like them, who made the blueprint,” says Frank Williams, editor-at-large for The Source magazine. KRS-One, Ice-T and Schoolly D, among others, had explored “gangsta” hip-hop textures before E, but it was the Compton kid who indelibly branded his approach. Says Williams, “Ruthless was a seminal moment in black music.”

Despite all this, Eazy-E remains little known outside the hard-core rap world. His widow hopes to change that.

Ruthless, which Eazy-E founded with music industry veteran Jerry Heller, marked the seventh anniversary of the rapper’s death this week by releasing a DVD/CD package called “The Impact of a Legend.” The collection, which includes an EP of previously unreleased music, video clips and a computer game set in many of Eazy-E’s stamping grounds, attempts to make his legacy tangible.

It’s a complicated mission. In technical terms, Eazy-E was far from accomplished as an MC. He famously did not pen his own material. What he did do was assemble a team of brilliant writers, rappers and producers, including Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, that, as N.W.A, helped bring to life the sounds and street images in his imagination. It was a team that altered pop culture as dramatically as Elvis and Chuck Berry had.

Eazy-E’s own raps added a devilish yet appealing presence that gave the music an extra dimension. If hip-hop’s unwritten subtext is about lifting society up from the bottom, his career can’t be anything less than emblematic of that ethos.

The son of blue-collar parents, Eazy-E got started in music by putting on house parties with a younger neighbor, Andre Young, who worked as a DJ and called himself Dr. Dre. The cash he hustled from the streets (something he boasted about, but never defined) at first went into showy investments, such as clothes. Then Dre asked him, along with the producer Laylaw, to help finance the recording of a few rap songs. When the scheduled vocalists fell through, the money man became an unlikely MC, according to Dr. Dre.

It took six days for Eazy-E, who was, in Ice Cube’s words, “straight amateur,” to record the Ice Cube-penned “Boyz-N-the-Hood.” First through street tapes, the song became a hit. Dre produced a “clean,” vinyl version of the song for L.A. radio station KDAY, which brought an even larger audience.

Woods-Wright, a self-described “educated ‘hood rat,” was a student at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys when she first heard an Eazy-E record. No way could she know one day that she would document his career as carefully as a curator.

“You see the tributes to Tupac and the tributes to Biggie,” she says. “Cube and Dre are still writing their history. There’s so much about his career that’s been overlooked.”

It’s true. In a fashion befitting a true pioneer, Eazy-E’s career has receded from the pop consciousness, lacking as it does a much- photographed bloodied corpse and a quick, sound-bite legacy. His death didn’t provide the imagery of street violence he used to make his cash, leaving his fame vague. Just another dead rap cat, unable to tell his story.

So his widow fished through the Ruthless archives to build this personal project, which also includes karaoke based on Eazy-E solo hits, a revealing, 20-minute documentary and 10 of his Ruthless videos.

“Impact of a Legend” works as an object lesson on the careless thrills of the high-level rap life. “He said, ‘Live it to the fullest,’” Ice Cube recalls in the documentary. “That’s what he did, from the bottom to the top.”

Eazy-E fathered nine children, according to his biography, including two with Woods-Wright. They all live comfortably, she says, and she hopes the CD/DVD collection will help them understand their father’s legacy.

“It’s something I can take to Eric’s [children], and say, ‘This is what your father did,’” says Woods-Wright. “It does justice.”