Why did you wait so long to respond to criticisms from Dre and Cube?
I’ve always felt that it wasn’t my place to speak on it. Also, I don’t know if it was naiveté on my part, or arrogance, or a combination of both, but I said, “People can’t really believe what Ice Cube is saying.” I mean, it’s so ridiculous, that nobody could believe that. What Dre said was a little more believable, but once again incorrect and Eazy’s not there to fight back. It’s not like I can go write a diss song and publish it and fight back, so this was just the opportunity to rehabilitate my reputation for what can be considered the twilight of my career, I guess. Also, [I wanted] to clear Eazy’s legacy. I felt a great responsibility to do that. In the book, you make a point to describe everybody in N.W.A. as you saw them, which was more or less just regular kids, not some crazy career criminals. You also debunked the whole myth about Ruthless being started with drug money. What do you want people to take away from these descriptions? When I wrote this book, here was my philosophy
