Ice Cube recently sat down with Complex Magazine to discuss the current state of Hip-Hop among other things:
On your last album you kind of poked fun at kids coming out of pocket and acting hard in the rap game, do you think things have gotten worse since then?
I feel like you got a different kind of rap. You got real serious rap and you got comic-book rap. And, you know most of them dudes just fall in the comic-book section of this whole thing.What do you mean by that?
You have people that are way over the top with it, and fake with it no matter what they do, and you got people that are real with it. I’m not saying that gangster rap is real, and ring-tone rap ain’t, because both rap is real. I don’t want you to be fake and just trying to do anything you need to to get over. Those are the rappers I don’t like the ones that do anything to get over. They got to be popcorn they’ll be popcorn, they got to be hard they’ll be hard. That’s fake. My style ain’t never change.You said your new album would be more political than usual, what was the reasoning for heading in that direction?
I just hate the commercialized game, I hate being worried about what the program director’s thinking. All that kind of stuff doesn’t make any difference. What makes the difference is what the fans think, what the intelligent hardcore, mature Hip-Hop fan wants to hear. Get it to them and let’s make music. I’m at a point where I’m not just grinding at this record, like “Yo, I got to eat off this,” so I could have more fun with it, and do what I feel and not do it for other reasons. When you’re on the record label, they are worried about that kind of stuff. You know, like where’s the single? Where’s the single? You just want to give them a single kick in the ass, and tell them to get the fuck out of the studio [laughs]. I’m just going back to the essence, doing it from the heart, doing it from the gut, and being happy with the results.On your last album you went kind of hard at George W. Bush, what caused you the frustration?
He doesn’t give a fuck about anybody. That’s my main frustration. He cares about making his families rich and his friends. That’s how his daddy is, and that’s how he is. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. They don’t care about nobody, they just want to be rich, and use their position to get richer. They know they have four or eight years to snatch and grab all they can and they did. And people are going to say “worst president ever,” and he’ll say “who gives a shit? I’m rich.”In NWA, you guys said what you wanted to say and you never held back-how different is it today?
I don’t know if it’s different. I don’t know if rappers are holding back. I think the rappers are going with the audience. At some point mainstream media decided to promote hardcore gangster rap to the masses on a big level, and you can’t blame the rappers for that, it was something that [the media] did in the mid ’90s. Now they want to blame us for them taking it and blowing it up. The Viacoms and all these people in the world got to take the blame too. They ain’t no innocent bystanders in this shit either. So if it got out of control or whatever, it ain’t just because of the artist.Interesting…
What it is is that they kind of pushed escapism rap, and they pushed the political rap to the back. Political rap is more of a threat than shake-ya-ass, titties, get drunk, take an X pill, whatever the hell type of music-so that’s what they wanted people to be focused on. They didn’t like things were said in the early ’90s, late ’80s,that have been lost until now. In the late ’90s there was no market for this kind of rap. Now through YouTube and people getting their own information through the computer and things like that, people are getting what they really want and they’re not being programmed. This kind of music that’s coming back is real. There was a wave to stomp it out. But it never went all the way out.
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Tags: Complex-Magazine, Ice Cube
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