Eazy-E Honoured In Renaming of Compton Street, Where Lil Eazy-E Considers AI and His Father’s Hidden Tracks
A street in the Los Angeles city of Compton has been renamed to honour the late rapper Eazy-E. Formerly the 100 block of Auto Drive South, Eazy Street stretches from the Compton DMV on Sante Fe Avenue to the Gateway Towne shopping plaza on Alameda Street.
The street’s new sign was unveiled earlier this week in a public ceremony of which numerous city council members – including Mayor Emma Shariff – were in attendance.
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The name change was proposed by Compton Entertainment Chamber of Commerce CEO Alonzo Williams. “Compton has a lot of history,” said Williams at the ceremony, “but nobody knows about it.
I figured the most recent history is hip-hop history. Being this the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop, I thought it’d be a great idea to approach the city council to talk about possibly doing this – and they loved the idea.”
As leader of the seminal hip-hop clique N.W.A., Eazy-E is known as “the godfather of gangsta rap” for his influence upon the scene.
He founded the label Ruthless Records in 1987, and had eleven children before he died of AIDS-related complications in 1995.
At the renaming, Eazy’s son Eric Wright (also known as Lil Eazy-E) was approached by TMZ. Most intriguingly, Wright was asked about the future of his father’s music with the advent of AI, and whether he would consider employing such technologies to – on the record – resurrect him.
“We’ll see how that’s coming, you know what I mean?” responded Wright, “There is, y’know, some hidden tracks out there, so we’ll see how that goes.”
Unreleased material was alluded to earlier this year when Arnold “Bigg A” White revealed in an April interview that Eazy-E had “two or three or four reels in his car” containing tracks that included “songs with Slash from Guns N’ Roses”.
He doesn’t “know if the estate got [the tapes]” but knows “for a fact” that DJ Yella, one of Eazy’s fellow N.W.A., is in possession of some of his unreleased music.
Yella, who attended the street-naming ceremony, assisted in the completion of Eazy-E’s Str8 off tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton, which was released posthumously in 1996.
A further posthumous release came in 2002 with the extended play Impact of a Legend, which was promoted by bandmate Ice Cube.
It is, at this point, hard to tell if more Eazy-E music is on the way, but interest in the prospect from fans and associates alike is considerable.
For the time being, Eric “Lil Eazy-E” Wright is most concerned with getting his father a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Words By Harrison Jones
