Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

Bone Thugs-N-Harmony began on the streets of Cleveland's East Side around 1991, a group of teenagers from East 99th Street and St. Clair who formed under the name B.O.N.E. Enterpri$e before anyone outside Ohio had heard of them. In late 1993, with no record deal, no money, and no plan beyond belief in themselves, they pooled their last resources and bought one-way Greyhound tickets to Los Angeles. They arrived homeless. They slept where they could. They called Ruthless Records every day until someone picked up.

The call that mattered came on a night when Bizzy answered the phone and passed it to Krayzie, who rapped down the line while Eazy-E put him on speakerphone in a room full of people. They were invited to perform backstage at an Eazy-E show in Cleveland on November 2, 1993. They performed. He signed them on the spot. Bizzy has described the moment in theological terms: "It just felt like something directly from God. Because we ain't have no food, we ain't have no clothes, we ain't have no parental guidance. We was all darn near under 18 years old."

Eazy renamed them Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. He became more than a label head. He picked them up every morning, brought them into the studio, fed them, and treated them as family at a time when none of them had much of one. Their debut EP Creepin on ah Come Up arrived in June 1994 and went four times Platinum. It included "Foe tha Love of $," the only song to capture Eazy and Bone in the studio together, and the last music video he ever made. Bizzy later called it their most memorable recording session with their mentor.

Eazy-E died of AIDS on March 26, 1995. He was 30 years old. The group did not know he was ill. They had been stranded in his Chatsworth mansion as his calls went unanswered, believing the silence was about money rather than death. Bizzy found out by watching MTV News. Four months after losing him, they released E. 1999 Eternal, dedicated to his memory, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 with 307,000 copies sold in its first week and eventually certified four times Platinum. Hidden within it was a trace of what they had lost: Eazy had recorded a verse for "Mr. Bill Collector" that the group erased during sessions out of frustration, not knowing he was dying. As Bizzy later explained: "When all the medical stuff was going on, he wasn't returning our phone calls and we were stuck in the mansion. We took Eazy-E off of 'Mr. Bill Collector.' We erased it."

The album's closing section contained a song that would outlast everything. "Crossroad" had originally been written for their friend Wally Laird, shot dead in Cleveland in April 1993. After Eazy's death, DJ U-Neek reworked it into the tribute now known as "Tha Crossroads." Released as a single in April 1996, it debuted at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest-charting debut by a rap single at that point in history, and climbed to number one the following week, where it stayed for eight consecutive weeks. It won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Bizzy described what the song had become: "Originally the song was about one friend named Wally Laird. It turned into an anthem and a tear for all funerals in the neighborhoods and beyond."

Their peak run produced three albums that each debuted at number one or two on the Billboard 200, all certified multiple Platinum. It also produced three collaborations that no other group in hip-hop has matched. They recorded with Eazy-E while he was alive. They recorded "Notorious Thugs" with The Notorious B.I.G. for his Life After Death album, with Biggie studying their rapid-fire style and matching it so convincingly that the Los Angeles Times wrote he could have been the group's sixth member. They recorded "Thug Luv" with 2Pac in a single afternoon session, with Pac writing his entire verse in under two minutes and laying it in a handful of takes before walking out. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are the only act in the history of hip-hop to have made records with all three while they were still alive.

The years that followed were defined as much by fracture as by success. Flesh-N-Bone was sentenced to eleven years in prison in 2000 after pointing an AK-47 at a man in Woodland Hills, California on December 26, 1999. The sentencing judge described it as one of the worst cases she had read in terms of the defendant's history of childhood abuse. Bizzy Bone was expelled from the group in 2003 after years of tensions over money, missed appearances, and competing loyalties. There were solo careers, partial reunions, legal disputes, and label changes. The five-man reunion album Uni5: The World's Enemy arrived in 2010, twenty years of turbulence distilled into one improbable project. More than a decade later, at a December 2021 Verzuz battle against Three 6 Mafia, Bizzy threw a microphone at Juicy J after feeling mocked onstage. He returned, performed, and apologized live. Nothing about Bone Thugs has ever been simple.

As of 2025, all five original members are signed to Greenback Records, released new music together, and performed on national television for the first time in years. They remain the only group from Cleveland to have sold over sixteen million records in the United States, the only rap act to have worked with Eazy-E, 2Pac, and Biggie, and one of the few groups whose fastest flows are still being borrowed, consciously or not, by nearly every rapper working in triplets today. Their street in Cleveland is now officially named after them. The corner of East 99th and St. Clair bears their name.