Part of Musicians Who Act featuring Lady Gaga, Will Smith, Justin Timberlake, Frank Sinatra, and David Bowie.
Rise to Fame
Leaving N.W.A in 1989 over unpaid royalties was the best career move he ever made. Manager Jerry Heller had shorted him despite his writing most of Straight Outta Compton, including nine of its thirteen tracks. He flew to New York, linked up with Public Enemy's Bomb Squad, and recorded AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted in early 1990. The album went platinum within weeks. Before any of that, he'd spent a year in Arizona earning a diploma in architectural drafting, just in case rap didn't work out. It did.
In the Spotlight
Most rappers his age are cashing legacy checks. He's running a basketball league. The BIG3, the 3-on-3 pro league he co-founded in 2017, became the first professional sports organization to mandate mental health policies and ban opioids for pain management. In 2020, he pitched his Contract with Black America to both presidential campaigns. Trump's Platinum Plan adopted his biggest ask: $500 billion in capital for Black communities. His team publicly credited the input. The fan blowback was swift. He didn't walk it back.
Side Notes
'You can't rap forever,' he reportedly said, before he was even famous enough to need the backup plan. His father worked at UCLA as a groundskeeper, which made his gangsta persona a performance of observation rather than autobiography. When Straight Outta Compton was filmed in 2015, his son O'Shea Jackson Jr. played him, a casting choice that required the younger Jackson to learn to act like his father while his father watched from the producer's chair.