So the big news this week (apart from Fairfax firing pretty much every important writer on their roster) is that the almighty Snoop Dogg will be returning once more to our shores, this time with Ice Cube in tow. People are already salivating at the chance to be able to sing along in the Doggfather’s ridiculous take on English (shizzle my nizzle? come the fuck on..) which they clearly didn’t get enough of at Good Vibrations a few years back where he proceeded to get very stoned on stage, do a few lazy call-outs and go and pass out on his piles of money. What’s my point? That Ice Cube should be headlining this motherfucker. Ice Cube was rapping when little Calvin Broadaus Jr. was still scrambling to get a gig in the late 80s/early 90s. In fact, N.’W.A (Niggers With Attitude) who recorded the smash hit Fuck The Police and proceeded to get themselves put on every FBi Most Wanted’ List for five years was not only LED by Ice Cube, but featured the beats of a very angry Dr Dre, who then helped propel Snoop to success later on. Forgive me for passing judgements on an era when I was likely still listening to the Spice Girls in suburban Sydney as an eight year old. But having studied this stuff in depth for African American History, I can safely say that Ice Cube, unlike Snoop, or Fiddy, has contributed volumes to both black and white culture. Snoop’s only real claims to fame are his laughable movie cameos, ridiculous hairdos and ability to make smoking chronic a team sport. But hey, he was on trial for murder at one point. So I’m not going to rip into him anymore, lest one of his bodyguards shoot my ass down in the street.
Ice Cube’s fellow subzero hero, Ice-T, is famous to a whole new generation of white kids as the bloody angry civil attorney on Law & Order, one of those dramas which will continue long after you and your children have died. This show succeeds on many front; most notably, the creators manage to think up even more twisted serial killers every episode, which T has the pleasure of bringing to justice. Of course the glaring irony here is that Ices Cube/T made their careers telling the police that they would kill every last one of them; ‘Ice Cube will swarm/On any motherfucker in a blue uniform’, ‘Cop Killer (that pretty much says it all)’ and now T’s the unheralded star of a show which preaches due process and fair treatment. NWA, on the other hand, had huge issues with police brutality, unfair targeting of black youth and black-on-black crime, especially Easy-E, the most outspoken rapper of the group who died of AIDS in 1996. Shit just got infinitely worse when Tupac and Biggie started shooting the crap out of each other, fracturing an already divided Afro-American society and managing to get both themselves killed in the process.
Ice Cube got out alive, for a number of reasons. Firstly, he converted to Islam, which probably taught him a lesson or two about how to deal with the ‘enemy’. Secondly, he started releasing solo albums, where he got to take out all his frustration on the state of black USA such as on ‘AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted’, which is a Five Percent Nation term, which harks back to Nation Of Islam, and I mean I’ve only got so much space on this blog, right? Safe to say, Ice Cube was an angry, skinny little kid who used to hustle crack, bait cops and flip the bird to the establishment. Looking at his stocky, almost regal frame now, most people will find it hard to associate these two manifestations of the same person. I did.
Anyway, here’s his hilarious take on fairytales [LANGUAGE WARNING - SERIOUSLY]
Ice Cube – ‘A Gangsta’s Fairy Tale’
And NWA’s classic:
N.W.A – ‘Gangsta Gangsta’
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