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"I just remember playing it a lot on the radio - like it was a huge, huge hit," Leach said.

In Australia, national youth network triple j was one of the first radio stations to play it.įrancis Leach, a triple j presenter at the time, recalled it being one of the few hip-hop songs on high rotation. Slowly but surely, Gangsta's Paradise began to take over the world. "With its ghostly choir and lyrics about a gun-toting 23-year-old who kneels in the streetlight wondering if he'll live to see 24, it examines the abyss with journalistic coolness," he wrote in his B+ review of Coolio's album. The film, despite getting mostly negative reviews, was a box office smash and the soundtrack flew off the shelves, driven by lead single Gangsta's Paradise and its Antoine Fuqua-directed film clip, which became an MTV staple.Įntertainment Weekly's David Browne wrote it "may be the bleakest tune ever to top the pop singles chart". To complete the symbiosis, Pfeiffer agreed to star in the film clip with Coolio - an unheard-of collaboration at the time between white Hollywood and gangsta rap.Ī still from the award-winning film clip for Gangsta's Paradise. They got a taker in Dangerous Minds, an upcoming Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle based on former US Marine LouAnne Johnson's experiences teaching black and Latino kids. Wonder's approval, which apparently came with a sizeable share of any future profits, was timely.Ĭoolio's manager was already shopping the song to filmmakers in the hopes of landing a potentially lucrative soundtrack spot. Someone got the track to Wonder, who was unhappy about his work being "used in some gangster song," as Coolio put it.īut a meeting was arranged and Wonder eventually gave permission, so long as Coolio removed a couple of n-words and f-words from the original lyrics.Ĭoolio complied, making it one of the few "clean" tracks in his back catalogue. Only problem was, no one had cleared the sample or the chorus interpolation with Stevie Wonder.Ĭoolio never had another hit on the scale of Gangsta's Paradise. "Gangsta's Paradise wanted to be born it wanted to come to life, and it chose me as the vessel." A thing of WonderĪs the song took shape, everyone involved in its creation thought it was a winner. "I like to believe that it was divine intervention," Coolio told Rolling Stone of the song's quick birth. adding his flavour to the hook, as well as being every voice in the choir "from soprano down to tenor to the bass", as he told Rolling Stone in 2015.Īs is often the case in these kinds of stories, Coolio happened to be passing by and instantly recognised it as something special.Īfter freestyling the opening lines, he sat down and wrote all three verses in a single sitting, detailing a young man weighing up his gangster lifestyle and wondering if there is any way out of it. The song was whipped up quickly at a studio in an LA house shared by producer Doug Rasheed and Coolio's manager Paul Stewart, with L.V. It was not the only thing Gangsta's Paradise borrowed from Wonder's Pastime Paradise - both share a chorus, with some minor but important lyrical adjustments by singer Larry Sanders, known by stage name L.V., of Los Angeles gangsta rap group South Central Cartel. Stevie Wonder, pictured performing in October, would only let Gangsta's Paradise sample his song if it had no swearing in it. In reality it was Wonder himself, tapping on the GX-1 in Crystal Sounds studio in Hollywood. When anyone asked Wonder what string section he hired to play the part, Wonder would tell them it was the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing the part.

The sample is from the opening of Stevie Wonder's track Pastime Paradise, off his revered 1976 double album Songs In The Key Of Life. Like most good hip-hop songs, Gangsta's Paradise started with a great sample - in this case the sound of a string section as replicated by a Yamaha GX-1 synthesizer a keyboard so advanced and rare that in 1975, when the riff was recorded, it cost US$60,000 - about AU$407,000 today. In Australia, it stayed at number 1 for 13 weeks - a long-standing record in the ARIA Charts-era that was only broken in 2017 by Ed Sheeran's Shape Of You (who was in turn superseded by Tones & I's Dance Monkey in 2019) - and was 1995's biggest-selling single here.īut where did this song come from, and what happened to the artist, born Artis Leon Ivey Jr, better known as Coolio? Welcome to paradise Its title track remains one of the biggest selling songs of all time. The album cover of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.