Twenty-five years ago, the Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds was released — and while it was a hit at the box office, the real success story was its theme song, “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Compton rapper Coolio. It became the top-selling single of 1995 (and one of the top-selling singles of all time, with 6 million copies worldwide); it was nominated for Record of the Year at the Grammy Awards and won the Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance; and it was voted as best single of the year in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics’ poll.

The dark, dramatic, orchestral track remains a bona fide hip-hop classic, and it has held up better than Dangerous Minds itself, a film whose “white savior” trope seems antiquated and actually tone-deaf in 2020. Even Coolio points out t that “those kinds of movies” — like Dangerous Minds, The Blind Side, and The Help — are “cliché as hell.”