Jeremiah Lazo
Audio By Carbonatix
Hip-hop isn’t necessarily a young man’s game anymore. The older you get, the better you become. Just ask any active MCs above 40 (Clipse, Lil Wayne) who are still rapping in their prime. The genre is maturing, with many of these acts touring extensively and delivering classic performances of legacy hits. Longevity is no longer devalued, pitting the old school against the new school, but rather celebrated as hip-hop enters its 52nd year.
On “Act My Age,” off Ice Cube’s latest album Man Up, he and Scarface disregard any negative talk about growing older. As Cube tells us over Zoom, they were inspired to make a song to go against the “bullshit ageism in rap.”
“I mean, rap has been around for over 50 years, and in some cases, it was 30-year-olds that helped it get going,” Cube said. “They [were born] in the ‘80s and they created something that’s incredible and they still gonna be a part of it. It’s like the blues, you don’t care how old a blues singer is, you shouldn’t care how old a rapper is. It’s not about what they look like, it’s about what’s coming out the speakers. Speakers don’t have an age. What comes out of the speaker is all that matters.”
For over four decades, Ice Cube, the rapper, songwriter, actor and producer, earned his respect for being uncensored and raw in his social commentary. The tour, Truth to Power: Four Decades of Attitude, is named after Cube’s willingness to say what’s on his mind. “It has a double meaning because speaking your truth gives you power,” he said. “So this is why I got so much power, because of being able to speak my truth throughout my career. It’s art, you can’t tell a painter how to paint.”
Cube takes fans through a retrospective of his songs from writing his first hit in 1985 for Eazy-E’s “Boyz-N-The-Hood,” to releasing his twelfth studio album Man Up in a over two-hour setlist. Cube is reflective as he mentions things that happened in his career: the L.A. Riots, Eazy-E’s death, his big break into movies, and the East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry. It’s more than just a show, he says, but a journey through how he remains a pioneer in the game 40 years later. He boasts that the “epic performance” is his biggest since the Up in Smoke Tour, the landmark hip-hop tour featuring himself with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Eminem.
Man Up is the continuation of his 2024 album Man Down, spitting some street knowledge on what it really means to stand up when you’re tested. As an artist who loves to produce, shepherding a creative project from start to finish, Cube wants to continue manifesting things and being creative, taking in the good or the bad of people’s judgments. “We can be constructive or we can be destructive, so it’s just being able to kind of take this mud pie of a world and make cool things out of it,” he said. “I advocate for everybody to be creative. Whatever you can do, spread yourself through it. It’ll relieve a lot of anxiety and tension that people have about not being heard, seen or remembered in this world. If you create a piece of art, they gonna remember you.”
Jeremiah Lazo
On the album, Cube owns his OG status by schooling listeners on the violence, pain, and broken systems that were already here in “Before Hip-Hop” and telling young guys who not to date in “Ratchet Ass Mouth.” As an elder statesman in rap, he welcomes the praise. “I’d rather embrace the respect than reject the respect,” he said.
Then he shares what his OGs gave to him that he still passes down. “Respect the ones that came before you and you’ll last a long time in the game,” he said. “The minute you start disrespecting the ones that came before you is the minute you start to decline in the game. It’s just the law of doing the right thing.”
On “Freedumb,” he’s addressing algorithms and A.I. “A.I. is going to make you disrespect everything good,” he said. “It’s going to make you not give it its proper respect because you’re going to just think A.I. threw it together. They gonna put your movies together, they gonna put your TV together, they gonna tell you who to like, who not to like. So it’s not gonna be a soul or a spirit behind it. It’s only gonna be an algorithm, a big ass cesspool of creativity that’s all mucked together. And people gonna eat it, they gonna feed it and it ain’t gonna give you nothing inside, just something to look at. No substance.”
As our time with Cube wraps up, we discuss some comments made by Erykah Badu and The Alchemist on their Drink Champs interview about our homegrown The D.O.C. The duo said he was a visionary who helped shape the West Coast sound, penning songs for Eazy-E and Dr. Dre. We asked Cube what made The D.O.C.’s pen so special.
He says The D.O.C. was a student and great at “understanding the assignment” when he came to Los Angeles, trying to capture the atmosphere to put it in their music. “He was great at elevating our vocabulary as far as lyrically, ya dig? We was about to keep it super grimy, and he’s like, ‘No, we need to be lyrical as well.’” he said.
Cube mentions that The D.O.C. was one of the songwriters along with MC Ren and Dre for Eazy-E’s debut album Eazy-Duz-It. While they were writing songs for him, Eazy was involved in the whole process of producing the album and approving what was being presented. “So D.O.C. to me, he helped us because he was a great lyrical rapper, who added that to the gangster flavor we was doing,” Cube continued. “We was all setting standards that everybody had to come up to. I think I set the tone with ‘Boyz-n-the-Hood,’ ‘8 Ball,’ songs like that. And then he came in and really took it to the next level with songs like ‘Eazy-Duz-It’ and ‘We Want Eazy.’ So he’s prolific. He deserved to be in N.W.A. to be honest.”
Did Cube and D.O.C. ever battle in the studio? He debunks the lore a bit. “We ain’t never battle like my rap against your rap, but we was definitely trying to make sure Dre used our verses,” he said. “It wasn’t no guarantees that you was gonna make the record. So you had to have a hot ass verse to even make the record. I was competing against everybody in there cause I wanted my records to get made. I wanted to be on records. I wasn’t playing with nobody. ‘Dopeman,’ ‘Gangsta Gangsta,’ I wasn’t playing. I had ‘A Bitch Iz a Bitch,’ ‘I Ain’t tha 1.’ I wrote ‘Express Yourself.’ We was all going in. He had a solo album that he was doing that was an immaculate record. The D.O.C., he gets a lot of credit for the journey of N.W.A. and Eazy-E.”
Because it’s Ice Cube the Great, we had to ask: Was today a good day?
“Today is a good day, without a doubt.”
Ice Cube will perform on Thursday, Oct. 2 at 8 p.m. at Dickies Arena, 1911 Montgomery St, Fort Worth. Tickets are available starting at $51.50 on Ticketmaster.
