Eazy-E

Eric Lynn Wright was born on the seventh of September 1963 at Compton, California, the son of Richard Wright — a Compton postal worker — and Kathie Wright, a Compton primary-school administrator. The Wright household was working-class Black in the Compton-Lynwood corridor. He attended the Lynwood High School through the tenth grade and left in 1980 at sixteen. He earned across the following four years approximately two hundred fifty thousand dollars in the Compton street-level drug economy — a sum he would in 1986 convert to seed capital for the Ruthless Records label he founded at the Compton garage of his cousin.

He founded the Ruthless label at his Atlantic Avenue home in Compton in 1986 and signed the local rappers Andre Young — Dr. Dre — and O'Shea Jackson — Ice Cube — to the label in 1986. He brought into the Ruthless circle the additional figures MC Ren and DJ Yella in early 1987. The five-man group constituted as N.W.A — Niggaz Wit Attitudes — recorded the album Straight Outta Compton at the Audio Achievements Studio in Torrance, California, across the autumn and winter of 1988 and released it in January 1989.

Straight Outta Compton sold over three million copies in its first eighteen months without commercial radio airplay or music-video network rotation. It established N.W.A as the principal commercial voice of West Coast gangsta rap and Ruthless Records as one of the principal independent labels of late-1980s hip-hop. The FBI Office of Public Affairs Director Milt Ahlerich wrote a letter to Ruthless in August 1989 objecting to the album's content — the first such letter the FBI had written to any American record label.

N.W.A dissolved across 1990 to 1991 under accumulated disputes over royalty accounting. Eazy-E continued the Ruthless operation through the early 1990s and signed Bone Thugs-n-Harmony in 1993.

He was diagnosed with AIDS in February 1995 and disclosed the diagnosis publicly on the sixteenth of March 1995. He died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on the twenty-sixth of March 1995, at thirty-one.

He is honored here as the founder of Ruthless Records.