5 questions for … Ice Cube

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From one of the trailblazers of rap music to an A-list movie star, Ice Cube has just about done it all. As he celebrates some two decades in music, he says that he is far from done. After releasing the movie First Sunday and a CD, Raw Footage, he is working on another film and continuing to expand his own record label. While age (he's 38) and fatherhood have mellowed him a bit since his days with N.W.A., Ice Cube continues to be one of the most vocal entertainers around.

EBONY: What is the biggest difference between hip-hop today and hip-hop in 1988 when N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton?

IC: Back then, the founders of hip-hop were in positions of power. They were still doing radio. They had spots at record companies. They were entrenched in the industry of hip-hop. But since then, we've had this kind of wave of suburban, college hip-hop heads running everything. It's their interpretation of what hip hop should be. You go to some of these radio stations, and look at the program director, and say "Damn, you're the one picking what's get That's why I think that hip-hop has lost its substance, the gatekeepers are now basically college kids [playing around] until they figure out what they really want to do with their lives.

EBONY: How do you feel about possibly being known more for your movies than your music?

IC: Most of those people are probably not hardcore hip-hop fans anyway. If the get them, I would have lost them a long time ago. So I don't really trip off that. I still enjoy doing music. I'm not going to stop doing it, and doing it the way that I feel it should be done.

EBONY: As a 38-year-old father, do you now have any regrets about some of the lyrics in your songs, or being a part of N.W.A., the group that has been credited with ushering in the gangsta rap genre of music?

IC: Not at all. Doing records is a positive thing, because if I wasn't doing records, it would have been so easy to get into something negative. The thing is, N.W.A. didn't make gangsta rap popular. You have to look at the [record companies and radio stations]. Our music, when it first came out, was underground. And that's where we expected it to stay. We didn't think that we would get our records played on the radio, and our stuff would be popular to the masses.

EBONY: You marched in Louisiana with the Jena 6 protesters. Why were you there?

IC: There's a lot of compounded racism in Jena. It got my pressure up. It made me want to go down there and show some support. America has a long way to go. It's no different than when I growing up in L.A.... It was all about giving people no hope, and then giving them an easy way to break the law so they could lock them up.

EBONY: what are your upcoming projects?

IC: I'm working on a movie called The Comeback. (It's an underdog sports movie about the first female player in Pop Warner league history).

ABOUT ICE CUBE

Birthday: June 15, 1969

Birth Name: O'Shea Jackson

Music Accomplishment: First solo song "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted," sold more than 1 million copies.

Fatherhood: He and his wife Kimberly have four children.

Influences: Director John Singleton convinced him to write his first screenplay, which was for the hit movie Friday the first of the three--movie franchise.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning