It’s official. N.W.A will join Cheap Trick, Deep Purple, Chicago and Steve Miller as the 2016 inductees of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Read Ice Cube’s reaction with Rolling Stone after the jump.
RS: What does this mean to you personally?
IC: It’s hard to sum up exactly what it means. It means a lot of things. It means that the group’s mark is kind of solidified. It’s all legitimized in a way because the whole music industry has to honor the group in a way. It’s just hard to sum up in words, really.RS: It’s the culmination of a pretty insane year for you guys.
IC: Yeah. It’s everything that kind of eluded us in a lot of ways when we were coming up. So many people were opinionated about N.W.A. I think everyone now at this point, no matter how you feel about us, understands what the group actually did and what it means to modern music. I think the movie helped to get people to remember that.RS: I think the movie also gave a context to the music. People that maybe weren’t paying attention to what was happening in Los Angles back then can see it and understand what led to your music.
IC: That’s the thing that we were trying to show the audiences. Everyone knows the where and when, but a lot of people didn’t know the why. The movie was able to connect some of those dots for people. Why were five youngsters out of Compton, California, rapping about this kind of stuff? It was basically trying to make sense of the world around us, in a lot of ways.RS: The more time that passes, the more it becomes apparent how impactful you guys were.
IC: I believe so. It’s funny. History could blur the lines and dull people’s memories, but since me and Dre are really still smack dab in the middle of pop culture on a lot of different levels, it hasn’t. I think that helps to keep the memory alive of what really went down back then. This movie and us being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is really a way to remember and set it in stone. It’s great.
