A street in Compton, California has been renamed in honour of N.W.A.’s Eazy-E.
The street, on the 100 block of Auto Drive South, has been officially named Eazy Street, with some of the late rapper’s family in attendance, as well as Compton mayor Emma Sharif.
Eazy-E, real name Eric Wright, was a member of the groundbreaking group N.W.A., along with Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, MC Ren, DJ Yella and Arabian Prince. He founded Ruthless Records and went on to have a successful solo career, before dying in 1995 at age 30 from AIDS-induced pneumonia.
“My father finally got what he deserves, a monumental street in the city he put on the map,” Eazy-E’s son Eric Darnell Wright said. “It’s a long time coming, but again, I always say it’s God’s timing.”
It is the second time this month that a street in California has been renamed after a legendary figure in hip-hop, after a street in Oakland was christened Tupac Shakur Way.
The road is close to where Tupac lived in the 1990s, and several high profile Bay Area hip-hop figures showed up to the naming ceremony, including MC Hammer, E-40, Money-B and Too Short.
Earlier this week, Suge Knight called out Eazy-E‘s widow for allegedly ending a “billion-dollar” lifetime deal where she’d earn money from Dr Dre‘s every career move.
Knight explained that he made a deal with Eazy-E “where he gets a dollar off of anything that Dre does”. He continued: “In other words, if he do a movie, if he do a beat, if he promote some type of merchandise, if he do a commercial, if he produce — off of his part, [Eazy] gets a dollar.
When Eazy-E died, the rapper’s widow Tomica Woods-Wright took over his estate. Knight claimed that Interscope Records – which Dre’s Aftermath Records is a subsidiary of – made Woods-Wright an offer that effectively cheated her out of a 10-figure payout.
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