Los Angeles, CA · hip-hop · west-coast-rap

Ice Cube

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N.W.A's sharpest writer, then a solo catalogue that made West Coast rap political, delivered in a voice built for the back of a room.

O'Shea Jackson was born June 15, 1969, in Los Angeles to Doris, a hospital clerk, and Hosea, a UCLA groundskeeper. He grew up in South Los Angeles's Westmont neighborhood, where an older half-sister was murdered when he was twelve. He is a cousin of rappers Del tha Funky Homosapien and Kam. He started writing raps in ninth grade on a dare, taking his stage name from a brother who threatened to freeze him solid.

Jackson formed his first group, C.I.A., in 1986, then joined Eazy-E and Dr. Dre a year later to form N.W.A. As the group's lead writer he penned most of the lyrics on Straight Outta Compton, even while briefly enrolled in an architectural drafting program in Phoenix as a backup plan. He left N.W.A in 1989 after a dispute over money with manager Jerry Heller.

In New York he recorded AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted with Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad, launching a solo run that included Death Certificate and The Predator, built around "It Was a Good Day." He released eleven solo albums in all, seven of which reached the Billboard 200's top ten.

His delivery is loud, clipped and front-loaded, closer to a bark than a flow, with verses that argue a case rather than trade punchlines, a style that carried directly from his N.W.A verses into his solo records.

Cube built a second career in film, starting with Boyz n the Hood in 1991 and co-writing and starring in Friday in 1995, which spawned a franchise. His credits include the Barbershop and Ride Along series, 21 Jump Street, Three Kings and XXX, and he directed The Players Club and executive produced the 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with N.W.A in 2016 and later founded the Big3 basketball league.

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