It was all good just a week ago

2. Dee Barnes

If you’re at all familiar with Dee Barnes, it might be from the line in Eminem’s great “Guilty Conscience” about how you shouldn’t take advice from someone who slapped Dee Barnes.

I realized this when I was trying to find the video of Dee Barnes and Ice Cube dissing N.W.A. on her show Pump It Up, on YouTube. I typed in Dee Barnes, and it auto-suggested “Dee Barnes slapped by Dr. Dre,” or something to that effect. Kids who heard “Guilty Conscience,” who probably hadn’t yet been born during the Dee Barnes incident, must be trying to find video of Dre slapping Dee Barnes on YouTube—for gender studies research purposes, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, that’s one of the few thing Dr. Dre didn’t do to Dee Barnes.

Dee Barnes has her own YouTube channel, to which she’s uploaded 50 some-odd videos of herself interviewing rappers back when I was in grade school. The video of her and Ice Cube dissing N.W.A. is nowhere to be found and is literally the only one anyone would want to see, which would lead me to believe that—like my article on Dre—it’s being suppressed on purpose.

I remember seeing it on VH1 or somewhere back in the ‘90s. It’s not the most egregious thing in the world, but it’s the kind of shit you hate to see from interviewers. If Dee Barnes didn’t agree with Ice Cube dissing N.W.A., it raises the question: Is there anyone he could have dissed that she wouldn’t have just grinned and chuckled along with?

If so, I can kinda see why N.W.A. was upset. There was an element of disrespect to the way N.W.A. were treated on her show and the way she appeared to go along with it, and apparently she’s yet to come to grips with it to this day. Not that I blame her. If I got my assed kicked like that. I can’t tell you I wouldn’t continue to shirk responsibility for any part I played in it.

Shit, I’ve been out of college for over 10 years now, and I’m still blaming white people for my employment status. Cracka-ass crackas!

Dr. Dre confronted Dee Barnes at a record release party in LA, where he proceeded to beat the living shit out of her. Here’s how Rolling Stone reporter Alan Light described it in an article called “Beating Up the Charts.”

He picked her up by her hair and “began slamming her head and the right side of her body repeatedly against a brick wall near the stairway” as his bodyguard held off the crowd with a gun. After Dre tried to throw her down the stairs and failed, he began kicking her in the ribs and hands. She escaped and ran into the women’s rest room. Dre followed her and “grabbed her from behind by the hair again and proceeded to punch her in the back of the head.”

Members of N.W.A. discussed the attack in subsequent interviews. And I quote.

MC Ren: “She deserved it—bitch deserved it.”

Eazy-E: “Yeah, bitch had it coming.”

Dr. Dre himself: “People talk all this shit, but you know, somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. I just did it, you know. Ain’t nothing you can do now by talking about it. Besides, it ain’t no big thing—I just threw her through a door.”

Believe it or not, those quotes aren’t fabricated! Check the following MTV News segment, which I found on Dee Barnes’ YouTube channel.

Dee Barnes tried to sue Dr. Dre for $22.75 million. It ended up being settled out of court. The wiki doesn’t say for how much. According to an article in Newsweek, she only sued him in the first place after she offered to not press charges if he agreed to produce a rap album she was working on and he refused.

Not that any of this excuses what he did. I’m just laying out the facts.