As a hip-hop journalist, I sometimes get asked, “Who are your top emcees of all time?” It’s a fair question but a complicated one. Many factors can determine someone’s opinion. Props go to rapper Kool Moe Dee for his “Rapper Report Cards1” and how he based the grades he gave on ten specific pieces of criteria. However, hip-hop is an art, and art is subjective. Therefore, it still leaves much room for debate.
Additionally, I think when people answer a question like that, whether it be in a meeting among record company executives, the comments section on a website, or in the school hallway around the lockers, answers sometimes intertwine “favorite,” “best,” “most influential,” and “most successful.” There can be some overlap, but those are four separate categories, making it difficult, at times, to grasp the precise interpretation of the question.
To clarify my answer, I adopted the same approach that one of my friends and mentors, Mr. Chuck Creekmur (co-founder of AllHipHop.com), used when he wrote about his “Top 5: Dead or Alive” over fifteen years ago. He said, ” I took the top rappers that have affected me in ways that extended beyond music. Obviously, the music is the cornerstone, but this list consists [of] my personal Top 5 rappers that have affected my life.”
That said, Ice Cube is one emcee who has profoundly affected me and whose work has helped shape me personally and professionally. His work as a member of the seminal rap group N.W.A was special. For many reasons, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton is fantastic and one of the most essential albums in music history. But when Cube went solo, his material really spoke to me. And so, in conjunction with the release of his new album, Man Down (due out tomorrow), I pay tribute to Ice Cube for his contributions to the last several decades of popular culture as well as for how his material played a role in taking my voice as a writer from the insecurity of a pencil on a tracing pad to the confidence of a marker on a crossword puzzle.
One of my favorite Ice Cube records is the title track to his solo debut, 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. The closing lyrics to the song are, “I said it before, and I’ll still taunt it / Every motherfucker with a color is most wanted.” I remember listening to this song after being harassed by law enforcement as a teenager while walking my dog. Again, it was a shoulder to lean on a second time when police pulled me over a few years later for driving a nice car in a nice area and even proceeded to search me and my vehicle unlawfully.
I am Indian, and a single Caucasian woman adopted me when I was 7 months old. Therefore, even as excellent as my mother was, there were certain things that she would never have to face, which I inevitably would as a person of color in the United States. Hip-hop then became the vessel that articulated my feelings even better than I could about some of these issues.
In the aftermath of my interactions with the police, I remember playing N.W.A’s “Fuck the Police,” the second track on Straight Outta Compton, and “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” for my mom and her stating she preferred the latter. When I asked her why she liked that one more, she said she appreciated what N.W.A was saying, but she didn’t like how they said it. However, with Cube, some of his rhymes more accurately reflected the reality she saw based on how law enforcement treated me. I couldn’t agree more.
Like Ice-T, another amazing rap artist whose work described life’s harsh realities, Cube’s songs were often cautionary tales, not ones that reinforced harmful stereotypes. N.W.A was ground-breaking and made terrific music (courtesy of Dr. Dre and DJ Yella). Still, Cube brought a socially conscious element to the group, and when he left, the collective devolved from a lyrical standpoint. Cube did the opposite, and The Bomb Squad provided the perfect soundscapes for his raps about ghetto life, young adulthood, and the plight of the disenfranchised.
For example, in N.W.A’s “One Less Bitch,” Dr. Dre tells a tall tale about suspecting a prostitute trying to steal from him and raps, “Yo, I tied her to the bed, I was thinking the worst / But yo, I had to let my niggas fuck her first yeah / Loaded up the .44, yo / Then I straight smoked the hoe / Cause I’m a real nigga, but I guess she figured / I was soft and she paid the cost to the boss and got tossed.” The shock value element couldn’t be more obvious, but it’s also so unbelievable that it’s unrelatable.
On the contrary, in “You Can’t Fade Me,” from Cube’s debut, he spits a fictional story where he says, “Cause all I saw was Ice Cube in court / Paying a gang on child support / Then I thought deep about giving up the money / What I need to do is kick the bitch in the tummy / Naw cause then I’d really get faded / That’s murder one cause it was premeditated / So what I’m a do? I don’t have a clue / How many months left? Damn, only two.”
It is a terrible thing to say, let alone do {understand me on that!}, but, understandably, young men could momentarily have that thought and then immediately come to their senses, just like Cube does in the rhyme, when they are made aware that they played a part in an unplanned pregnancy. On his record, Cube is rapping about fighting to make way for himself in the world, whereas N.W.A’s is more of an over-the-top spectacle, not unlike professional wrestling.
Other highlights from Cube’s solo debut include “Once Upon a Time in the Projects,” another record demonstrating his knack for storytelling. Then there’s “Endangered Species [Tales from the Dark Side],” where Cube and Public Enemy frontman Chuck D provide top-tier social commentary. And “Who’s the Mack?” is a song about three people (a pimp, a beggar, and a ladies’ man) set on manipulating a situation. It’s interesting because Dr. Dre said, “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge” at the beginning of “Straight Outta Compton,” but this record represents that idea better than anything N.W.A ever did.
“But when it comes to me, save the drama for your mama / It’s Ice Cube, and you know that I’m a / Mack in my own right, when it comes to rhyme and rap / Cause all I do is kick facts / Unlike Iceberg Slim, and all of them be claimin’ P-I-M-P / No, I’m not going out that way / I’m just a straight-up N-I-double-G-A.”
While AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is my favorite Ice Cube album, many would argue that his follow-up album, Death Certificate, is his best. And I can’t be mad at that. (Not to mention the outstanding EP, Kill At Will, released between the two with the classic “Jackin’ For Beats.”). Sonically, Death Certificate relies more on funk than the chaotic beats that The Bomb Squad provided previously. This go-round production was handled primarily by Sir Jinx, DJ Pooh, and Ice Cube.
But the brilliance of this album, in addition to phenomenal beats and rhymes, is its sequencing. Not only is it separated into “Death” [“a mirror image of where we are today”] and “Life” [“a vision of where we need to go”] sides, but the song arrangement makes the album play like an experience instead of just a collection of records. The way the uncompromising and lust-filled “Givin’ Up the Nappy Dug Out” is immediately followed by “Look Who’s Burnin’,” a 3:53 cut about sexually transmitted diseases, is timeless. Interestingly enough, Ice Cube released Death Certificate in late October 1991, and on November 7, 1991, Earvin “Magic” Johnson famously announced he tested positive for HIV and would retire from the NBA.
“A Bird in the Hand” explains how options to make enough money to make a living are limited, realistically depicting how a desperate person could fall into the trap of drug dealing. It’s less about empathy and more about understanding. The music that follows then is about guns (“Man’s Best Friend”) and the failing medical system that was in place at the time (“Alive on Arrival”) to help people, especially victims of gun violence. How these three things connect is implied, and then the “Death” side concludes with a poem from Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a notable figure in the Nation of Islam.
The “Life” side has lots of righteous anger, very notably in “I Wanna Kill Sam,” wherein he wants to kill Uncle Sam literally, and Cube uses Sam as a metaphor for the United States government and holds it accountable for its historically heinous acts against African-Americans. “Now in ’91, he wanna tax me / I remember the son of a bitch used to axe me / And hang me by a rope ’til my neck snapped / Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap / And put me under dirt or concrete, but God can see through a white sheet / ‘Cause you the devil in drag / You can burn your cross, well I’ll burn your flag.“
Another track, which received even more attention, was “Black Korea,” which many perceived as a response to the death of Latasha Harlins as it commented on the tension between Korean shop owners and the African-American communities their businesses serve. But it also got Cube labeled “racist” for lines like, “So don’t follow me up and down your market / Or your little chop suey ass will be a target / Of a nationwide boycott / Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got / So pay respect to the black fist / Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.“
Whether someone thinks it’s racist or not lies in the eye of the beholder. I see both sides of it. However, I don’t think it is racist in this case. It is a cry of frustration and awareness about the community. While I don’t condone violence of any kind, I think it’s ridiculous that the woman who shot Latasha Harlins on March 16, 1991, Soon Ja Du, only punishments ended up being on probation, community service, a fine, and funeral costs for Harlins when she fatally shot Harlins (a 15-year-old African-American girl) in the head over her allegedly trying to steal a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, a claim which two eyewitnesses debunked.
While Du faced conviction for involuntary manslaughter, she still served no prison time. Harlins’ death also occurred less than two weeks after the videotaped beating of an African-American man, Rodney King, at the hands of four Caucasian LAPD officers. Shockingly, they were all acquitted when it first went to trial over a year later. All the tensions boiled over, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots ensued.
Ice Cube didn’t incite the riots either; he predicted them. And the fact that his music (along with Body Count’s “Cop Killer”) somehow posed more of a threat than the actual loss of life that these songs were responding to makes me sick to my stomach. In the September 2006 issue of FHM magazine, Cube said he didn’t regret those lyrics. Good for him. He shouldn’t. For better or worse, it effectively captures a moment in time, and that’s one of the things that great music has the power to do.
And near the end of Death Certificate, Cube made a point of holding young people and his community accountable too with “Doing Dumb Shit” and “Us.” “Us” is especially powerful; comedian Chris Rock even thanked Cube for writing it in the liner notes for his Roll With the New album. The influence of it on Rock’s ground-breaking “Niggas Vs. Black People” routine is quite apparent.
As expected, Cube’s third solo album, 1992’s The Predator, addressed the Rodney King verdict and all that followed. Ironically, however, this collection also contained the mellower DJ Pooh-produced “It Was a Good Day.” It is also arguably Ice Cube’s most famous song.
The other thing that happened around this time, as Cube recently discussed in an interview with Bootleg Kev, is that he got a slot in the Lollapalooza lineup, which put him in front of a rock audience more than ever. So, while he did continue to release rap music through the 90’s, it was Cube’s work with nu-metal on wax (see his various collaborations with Korn) and on stage (the Family Values Tour) where he made the most significant impact. That stuff was incredible, especially the “Fuck Dying” video, but it was different. Songs seemed more like scenes from Hollywood screenplays than a reflection of the streets.
Albums like AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and Death Certificate made me want to write about hip-hop because they used this powerful and influential art form to comment on society and confront its issues. While I was only three and four years old, respectively, when they were initially released, I saw how their impact and influence were still prominent a decade later as I entered my teenage years and followed hip-hop in real time.
I remember the first time that I ever heard “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate” (the first song on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted). It was on a VHS tape of a concert film of the Up In Smoke Tour. The energy, aggression, and insight were all perfectly balanced in his performance of the song. Between that and his War and Peace Vol. 2 (The Peace Disc) album with stellar cuts like, but not limited to, “Hello” with Dr. Dre and MC Ren and “Until We Rich” with Krayzie Bone, Ice Cube became one of my top rappers. And he has remained as such for almost a quarter of a century.
Cube’s ability on the mic to tackle heavy subjects such as race, sex, and politics was very influential to me. It helped me find my voice to address some of these same issues on paper as a racial and social minority in real-world America. Fortunately, Cube did return to his roots a bit in the 00s with great political records like “The Nigga Trapp” off of 2006’s Laugh Now, Cry Later and “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It” [my second published review in Billboard magazine] and “Hood Mentality” from 2008’s Raw Footage.
Now fast forward to October 26, 2024, Game 2 of the World Series, and the Los Angeles Dodgers are playing the New York Yankees in Dodger Stadium. Before the start of the game, Ice Cube took the field and performed two tracks from his legendary catalog.
One was “Bow Down” (a hit single he did with his supergroup, Westside Connection, in 1996), and the other was his classic, “It Was a Good Day.” However, Cube altered some of the lyrics to diss the visiting team, making the performance incredibly dope. And some of the Yankee players were still vibing along with him. In a nutshell, that is how effective Ice Cube is as an artist and performer. And the fact he got a stadium of over 50,000 people from all walks of life to engage with his performance is a testament to his skills and legacy.
Ice Cube recently posted on X [formerly Twitter], “For those who think it flatters me, please don’t call me a fucking goat. Carry-on.” He later elaborated on the same platform, “Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the respect, but don’t call me that.” I will honor that request, but will say that hip-hop culture is in a better place because of his contributions to it (in both music and film), and I am a stronger person because of them, too.
We are both eternally grateful. Respect due.
- https://rockthebells.com/articles/kool-moe-dee-explains-rap-report-card/ ↩︎
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2024/11/04/ice-cube-scores-the-biggest-solo-hit-of-his-career-on-multiple-charts/ ↩︎
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1990/05/20/los-angeles-gangsters-of-rap-escalating-the-attitude/946400da-81af-482c-9e14-a0e37f7e4be1/ ↩︎
- https://medium.com/cuepoint/ice-cube-check-the-technique-202d2a794008 ↩︎
- https://www.complex.com/music/a/insanul-ahmed/nas-25-favorite-albums ↩︎