« First« Previous·1·Next »Last »
-
Ice Cube - I Am the West
Monday 18 October 2010
Ice Cube was once gangsta rap's great chronicler of everyday brutality. Twenty years and a hugely successful family-comedy movie career later, he's content to spend his self-released ninth disc brandishing his OG rep ("Google me, bitch!") and defending his fading West Coast ("I'm down with Angelenos/Go downtown and give a bum a C-note"). But his rants get boring over track after track of bland Nineties G-funk (a promised collaboration with his estranged N.W.A homey Dr. Dre never came through). Only "Hood Robbin," a somber, seething indictment of post-housing-bubble America has that old realist magic, yoking the rage of to the experience of people who took their kids to see ?
-
Ice Cube - I Am the West
Tuesday 12 October 2010
The gangsta rap legend isn’t going down without a mouthy fight.
Not every hip hop game-changer follows the hackneyed rhyme-fast-and-leave-a-good-looking corpse route to rap immortality. Survive into middle age and suddenly losing cutting edge relevance is the chief pitfall to circumnavigate, as gangsta rap pioneer Ice Cube discovers on this infuriatingly incoherent California-repping set.
« First« Previous·1·Next »Last »