According to a new interview, Ice Cube still wanted to be cool with his friends in N.W.A after he left the legendary group in 1989 and even wanted Dr. Dre to produce his debut album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.
Cube sat down with Complex’s Idea Generation and spoke on how he tried to keep his business relationship with the group separate from his personal relationship with them. “I still tried to be friends with the guys who had nothing to do with the business,” he admitted. “Me and Eazy was shaky, and I didn’t care about [manager] Jerry Heller at all, so it wasn’t no love lost there. But I tried to keep it together with Dre. I even wanted Dre to produce my solo record, and we was talking about it, but Eazy and Jerry vetoed it.”
Instead, the West Coast rapper tapped Public Enemy’s in-house production team The Bomb Squad to produce his 1990 solo debut and eventually dropped one of the most scathing diss tracks of all time, “No Vaseline,” a year later in 1991, in which he tore into his former group and Ruthless Records co-founder Heller.
Cube and the group would eventually reconcile around the time of Eazy-E’s untimely death from AIDS complications in 1995. On Tuesday (Nov. 12), the Songwriters Hall of Fame announced N.W.A among 26 nominees up to be inducted next year.
Ice Cube is set to drop his 11th solo album Man Down, later this month on Nov. 22, and he’s going to get some help from fellow West Coast legends in Snoop Dogg, Too $hort, E-40, Xzibit, B-Real and Kurupt.
You can watch the full conversation below.
