"Been spending most of our lives..."

Film Rolling Stone Magazine has an oral history of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise including the filming of the promo:

"Michelle was kind of nervous, because I don't think that, up to that point, she'd ever been around that many black people in her life [laughs]. And, you know, my boys were 'hood! But we had a good time. She came out and did her thing, and she killed it; it took her two takes to do her parts, and she was outta there. When I got the first edit back, I was like, "Wow, this could be big!" But let me tell you something — I had no idea that it was gonna take on the kind of life that it took. I totally was still thinking, in my mind, that it was gonna be a 'hood song. I was thinking to myself, "Man, with what's going on in the video and what I'm saying, there's no way white people are gonna get into this song. No way." But I was wrong.

There's also some interesting material about the preview process for Dangerous Minds, and how the film's numbers were incredibly low until the introduction of the song which presumably changed people's perceptions of the film before seeing it.