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3,756 words · no email, no account
No. 045 · Music · Hip-Hop
The Compton Tycoon
a biography of Eric Lynn Wright
What the book is
Compton, 1986. A small-time dealer with a high voice and a head for numbers walks out of the trade with a duffel bag of cash and a single conviction: the street has a sound, and someone is going to sell it.
Eric Wright — barely five-foot-five, twenty-two years old — would become Eazy-E. With the lawyer-turned-manager Jerry Heller at his elbow and a roster that included Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, he built Ruthless Records out of a Norwalk apartment and pressed the record that rewrote American popular music. Straight Outta Compton did not ask for permission. It arrived, and the country argued about it for the next decade.
Bryson Lyle follows the arc with a reporter's patience: the defections that turned former partners into rivals on wax, the contracts that would outlive everyone who signed them, the solo years in which Eazy held the company together with one hand and his reputation with the other. In March of 1995 he checked into Cedars-Sinai with what he believed was asthma. He was dead within a month.
What Lyle has written is a portrait of an entrepreneur first and a rapper second — a man who invented a commercial template the industry is still working from, and who left behind a widow, seven children, and an estate that has been litigated longer than he was alive.
At a glance
- Subject
- Eric Lynn Wright
- Shelf
- Music · Hip-Hop
- Written by
- Bryson Lyle
- Chapters
- 18 across 184 pages
- Narrated by
- Imogen Vey
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The FamilyRead free
- 02Compton in the 1980s3,126 words
- 03The Hustle3,090 words
- 04The Idea3,263 words
- 05Boyz-N-the-Hood2,772 words
- 06Straight Outta Compton3,187 words
- 07Fuck tha Police3,480 words
- 08Jerry Heller3,819 words
- 09Ice Cube Leaves3,226 words
- 10Dr. Dre Leaves2,975 words
- 11Eazy-E Solo3,435 words
- 12The Bush Dinner and the Contradictions3,539 words
- 13Bone Thugs-n-Harmony2,844 words
- 14The Diagnosis3,067 words
- 15The Public Statement2,815 words
- 16March 26, 19953,233 words
- 17The Estate3,128 words
- 18The Myth and the Man3,680 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-031-7 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey
ISBN 979-8-90623-012-6
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Compton Tycoon about?
Eric Lynn Wright. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Compton Tycoon — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,756 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 184 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
