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long-standing record in the ARIA Charts-era that was only broken in 2017 by Ed Sheeran's Shape Of You (who was in turn superseded by Tones & I's Dance Monkey in 2019) - and was 1995's biggest-selling single here.Д«ut where did this song come from, and what happened to the artist, born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.

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