Ice Cube and N.W.A were honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award ahead of the Grammys which saw all living members of the group show up and show out — with the exception of Dr. Dre.
The seminal group was recognized as part of the Special Merit Awards Grammys, which according to the Recording Academy, are given to those artists who the Academy believes have made “significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording.”
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N.W.A is the fifth Hip Hop group in the past eight years to receive the honor, following in the footsteps of Run-DMC, Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, and Salt-N-Pepa.
Group member Eazy-E received the honor posthumously, alongside the likes of Donna Summer and Tammy Wynette.
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Rolling Stone was on hand when Ice Cube accepted the award on behalf of the rest of his colleagues on Saturday (February 3). While at the podium, Cube explained why The Chronic rapper and producer wasn’t on hand — and sent a special message to all in attendance.
“My man, Dr. Dre, is not here. He wanted to make sure I let you know he’s not hating. He a billionaire. He got shit to do,” he said. “This is actually Eazy-E’s vision. He’s the one who allowed us to do this type of music.”
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He continued: “We knew when we started to do music in 1985, ’86, ’87 that a Grammy was not in the cards for us, with the type of music we was doing. We actually didn’t think we would ever even get on the radio. We was cool with that.
“We can’t sing like Gladys. None of us can hold a note like the Clark sisters. But we still wanted to express ourselves and try to make sense of the world around us, in L.A., Compton, South Central, Long Beach, Watts. It was a different world out there, and we were trying to make sense of it. And what we did is, we did music. We did music from our hearts.”.
In recent years, N.W.A has earned their place in the Hip Hop pantheon as venerated elders — as they found out when Nick Cannon introduced Moroccan and Monroe (his children with Mariah Carey) to their artistry.
Video of the twins and their Wild ‘n Out-host dad in a car made its way to social media. It featured Cannon blasting, and enthusiastically rapping along to, Ice Cube‘s opening verse of N.W.A‘s classic song “Gangsta Gangsta.”
“Bro someone send help what is wrong with my dad,” Monroe captioned the video, before moving the camera up to show her bemused twin brother.
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“Gangsta Gangsta” was a standout cut on N.W.A’s 1988 album Straight Outta Compton.
It was the project’s second single and peaked at No. 11 on Billboard‘s Hot Rap Songs chart in March 1989.
