Dee-1 doesn’t feel that N.W.A should be considered a legendary group because of their glorification of violence, among other things.
Talking to The Art of Dialogue in a new interview published on Wednesday (January 17), the Christian rapper was asked about Special Ed‘s September Drink Champs interview where he said the famed rap group brought “destruction” to Hip Hop.
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While he noted he wasn’t old enough to have witnessed their impact in real time, he did say they should be stripped of their legendary status.
“What do we do with that?” he began. “Once we acknowledge what you have contributed to the genre, your whole career, and if we acknowledge that you’ve contributed a bunch of negativity, a bunch of violence, a bunch of disrespect of women, what do we do?”
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He continued: “Do we call you a legend or is it like – wait, we don’t need to call you no legend. I think that calling people legends in Hip Hop is also a force of what helps to perpetuate negativity and that’s a trick of the enemy. That’s the devil’s work at his finest.
“We’re going to make it to where y’all start to call people legends and immortalize people inside of Hip Hop, and the main thing they’ve contributed is the glorification of violence, the disrespect of women, the glorification of drug dealing and drug use. Like, that’s crazy. We need to take the legend status off of a lot of the people who we call legends in Hip Hop and that’s going to hurt their ego, but that’s going to help our community.”
Regardless of how Dee-1 feels, N.W.A are set to be honored with a lifetime achievement award during Grammy Week. The Recording Academy, the organization that organizes the Grammys, announced earlier this month that the group would be among the recipients of the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award.
The award will be presented on February 3 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles.
According to the Academy, the Lifetime Achievement Award is “presented by vote of the Recording Academy’s National Trustees to performers who, during their lifetimes, have made creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording.”
The other 2024 recipients are Gladys Knight, Donna Summer, Tammy Wynette, Laurie Anderson and the Clark Sisters. Past Hip Hop recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award include Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Slick Rick, and Run-DMC.
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N.W.A was a pioneering Los Angeles rap group that consisted of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, the late Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella, alongside affiliates like the D.O.C and founding member Arabian Prince, the latter of whom left the group prior to their breakout success.
