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Ice Cube
By Simon SteinhardtPhotos by: Estevan Oriol
Few artists know their audience better than Ice Cube—and even fewer artists have an audience that has at various times comprised inner-city youth, suburban teens, wannabe gangstas, real gangstas, serious moviegoers, stoned moviegoers, rap nostalgists and pre-teens and their soccer moms. It’s hard to say what’s more remarkable: that Cube has found as much success in his movie career as he has in his music career; that he has written songs that have been taken deathly seriously (“Fuck the Police”) as well as movies that are considered classic comedies (the Friday series); or that he has been able to keep a finger on the pulse of the hood and another on the tastes of the suburbs for over 20 years now.
The roots of Ice Cube’s crossover appeal, and much of his worldview, started in high school, when he was bused from his home in Compton to Woodland Hills, an upper-middle-class, and predominantly white, suburb. As a participant in the widespread desegregation effort, Cube found the experience enlightening, though perhaps not in the way that the bureaucrats behind it had intended. “At times, you could tell we was worlds apart—people that couldn’t relate to each other,” he recalls. “At other times, it was educational on both ends. It didn’t matter what was going on in the neighborhood, we would learn how the other half lived not having to deal with these issues. Growin’ up in L.A., I was able to see the best and the worst of both worlds. I know what’s good in the hood; I definitely know what’s bad in the hood. I know what’s good in the suburbs and what’s bad in the suburbs.”
From his vantage point, he also saw a need to illustrate life in the hood for those who had never seen it, and to glorify it for those who were distressed by it. “It brought up a passion in me that I didn’t really recognize was underneath. Havin’ that perspective helped me out a lot.”
Of course, Cube was still a high school student, and he and his rapping partner, Sir Jinx, wrote rhymes about their favorite pastime: partying. The duo, calling themselves CIA, performed at parties hosted by a young DJ named Dr. Dre. Through Dre, Cube met a young drug dealer named Eric Wright, aka Eazy-E, who had turned some of his drug profits into a record label, Ruthless Records. Cube gave Eazy one of his rhymes, “Boyz-n-the Hood,” for one of Eazy’s groups, HBO. When HBO rejected it, Eazy took it for himself and started a group with Cube, Dre, DJ Yella, the D.O.C. and the Arabian Prince. Behind Ice Cube’s lyrical tenacity, Eazy-E’s slick braggadocio and Dr. Dre and DJ Yella’s alternately smooth and savage beats, N.W.A. went on to change rap history.
After the 1987 release of N.W.A.’s first record, N.W.A. and the Posse, Cube made a move that some might consider slightly un-gangsta, albeit befitting his idiosyncrasy: he enrolled in the Phoenix Institute of Technology to pursue a certificate in Architecture. He returned the following year to record the group’s second album, Straight Outta Compton.
Despite receiving virtually no airplay, the record went double platinum. With every song, the group seemed to say, “Here’s who we are, here’s how we live, and whether you like it or not you better get used to it,” and they said it loud enough to be heard by just about everyone, from the FBI to teenagers across America. Says Cube, “With N.W.A., we didn’t have a fan base when we started makin’ records. We just did ‘em, and people caught on.” And how could they not? It had something for everybody: rage and rebellion for the kids; misogyny, violence and drugs for the moral watchdogs who needed whipping boys to sneer at in their campaigns; and evidence of the chaos of urban blight for the sociopolitically minded.
Cube himself takes this last tack when looking back on the circumstances that bred the group’s mentality. “The policies of Reaganomics really led to the birth of N.W.A. It came from the total disarray of our neighborhoods, in a lot of ways. The lack of social programs, drugs—crack turned our neighborhoods upside down. Reaganomics definitely was the fuel to that fire. A lot of escapism came in at that time—drink, have fun, party, go get girls, jewelry, cars, forget about your troubles.”
The air of controversy from Straight Outta Compton followed Cube into his solo career after he left N.W.A. in 1989. His first solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, was simultaneously praised and criticized, with Cube receiving compliments for his rhyming ability and condemnation for his content. His second effort, Death Certificate, took things even further across the line, and was boycotted and trashed in magazines like The New Republic and The Economist. Death Certificate also became the first and only album ever explicitly condemned by the editorial staff of Billboard.
If, as Chuck D once proclaimed, rap music is the “Black CNN,” Ice Cube was more analyst than correspondent. With a sharp tongue, he lashed out at those he felt had wronged him, from N.W.A. manager Jerry Heller (who allegedly ripped off his clients and refused to meet Cube’s demands for a fair shake, leading to Cube’s exit from the group) to those in the general public who mistreated young black men.
Through his two N.W.A. albums, two records with Westside Connection (Cube’s group with L.A. rappers Mack 10 and WC), and nine solo albums and counting, Cube’s views have often been criticized for being violent, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic, but he claims it was always just his attempt to level the playing field, filtered through his rage. “A lot of my lyrics are harsh, no doubt—but nobody’s exempt. I talk about black people, I talk about white people; I talk about women, I talk about men; everybody get it. It’s not like I’m just one-sided in my views. I believe everybody is to blame for the situation that we all in. So with that, I think people can kinda take their licks and keep on ticking, because it’s not out of hatred. To me, it’s about developin’ a better understanding. There’s people in the world who have this kind of rage that I have in myself from time to time, but it’s better to hear it on a record than have it played out in the Virginia Tech shooting or somethin’.
“I’ve bitten my tongue a few times, though. When you attack someone, you gotta be careful that you ain’t bringin’ a shotgun to kill a fly.”
Yet even when Cube has gone over the top with his barbs, the controversy he’s attracted has only led to more album sales and more exposure, lending truth to the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity (as if telling teenagers something is too rebellious for them is a deterrent). To date, Cube has sold over 10 million albums.
The fire that he’s brought to the microphone has also lent itself to his career in film. Shortly after his departure from N.W.A., Cube was cast in John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood, a dramatic take on the lives of teenagers in South Central Los Angeles. Cube played Doughboy, a tough delinquent, fresh out of prison and back in with a bad crowd, who nevertheless shows a deep devotion to his good-kid half-brother and a desire to win the approval of their mother. For once, Cube was given a chance to display the emotions that made him notorious—rage, frustration, indignation—in a context where they seemed perfectly justified, even if Doughboy’s actions were not.
Boyz N the Hood grossed nearly $60 million, almost 10 times what it cost to make, and sparked a wave of films depicting life in inner-city L.A., including Menace II Society and South Central. The biggest impact of those films, says Cube, was not at the box office but on the minds of Americans. “Those movies, at one point, were enlightenin’ America to what was goin’ on in the hood, and that to me was special. Not just showin’ the hood what’s goin’ on in the hood, but givin’ people outside the hood a chance to see someone like Doughboy and figure out why he is the way he is. Just seein’ him on the news, no explanation about the bright youngster, you just see somebody who killed somebody and went to jail; you don’t see nothin’ about his life.”
By the mid-‘90s, however, Cube began to see that audiences were burning out on the horrors of the hood and wanted something more entertaining, so he and DJ Pooh teamed up to write Friday, which, like Boyz N the Hood, depicted life in South Central, but this time from a much lighter, comedic perspective. “When I did Friday,” Cube recalls, “I wanted to show how, growin’ up, we didn’t think the hood was all that bad. If you look at Friday, there’s a lot of bad shit happening, from drive-bys to dope smokin’, but the hood was our playground too. So we wanted to show that, and people responded to it, and that’s the wave I’ve been ridin’ for a while.”
It’s a wave that Cube has ridden through two sequels (Next Friday and Friday After Next, both of which were also written by Cube), and roles in Barbershop and Barbershop 2, all of which aim to show the lighter side of urban life, which Cube explains is the key to tapping into the black moviegoing audience. “Black people and poor people watch movies for a lot different reasons than rich people. If you poor, you don’t wanna see a movie about bein’ poor and bein’ fucked up in your neighborhood. People wanna have a little escapism. People wanna get away from their problems when they go to the movies. So I try to provide at least a few movies for people to be able to do that.”
Family-oriented comedy may once have seemed an unlikely arena for the self-described “Nigga Ya Love to Hate,” yet his roles in films like Are We There Yet? have shifted perceptions about his range as an actor—and as a human being who may not be the scourge of suburban parents after all. “I know the kids love me, so that’s gotta affect the parents in some kinda way, how they treat me and view me. It’s interesting for the soccer mom crowd to be down, when they used to break and run.”