★★★★★
Ice Cube's appeal has always been his ability to play the right role at the right time. In the movies, his timing was perfect as the likable but criminal-minded Doughboy in Boyz-N-the-Hood, and as Craig, the hood's average Joe, in Friday. In his music, three roles have made him a hip-hop legend--I call them "Gangsta Cube", "Storyteller Cube", and "Cube the Emcee". Let's discuss. Gangsta Cube In the beginning, there was "Gangsta Cube". And he was a bad, bad man...
- www.popmatters.com
2011-01-20
★★★★★
Just 22 years old in 1991, O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson was still wise enough to know where his previous band NWA had got it wrong, and that times were a-changing in hip-hop. It wasn't enough to boast about bitches, blunts and cops any more: listeners wanted something a little more sophisticated. That came with Death Certificate, the second of the three essential Cube albums...
- www.recordcollectormag.com
2010-12-21
★★★★★
The original Westcoast baller is back and he's proving that being Hollywood doesn't necessarily mean that your street credibility goes out the window. Ice Cube may have been the star of movies such as 'Are We There Yet' and 'XXX 2' but with this his seventh solo release he's back to claim the crown that has since been passed from artist to artist...
- www.gigwise.com
2010-11-23
★★★★★
That the first rapper you hear on this, Ice Cube's ninth LP isn't Ice Cube is telling. That it's Southern trap-star Young Jeezy is even more so. 21 years deep into the game, 20 since his group NWA scared the living shit out of America, Cube chooses a man initially dismissed as just another coke rapper, now widely regarded as the most important hood-commentator of his generation to make the link between then and now. Lil Wayne would have been the populist choice. Jeezy is the right choice...
- thequietus.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
Two years after "Raw Footage" proved that Ice Cube's rap career wasn't done yet, the self-proclaimed Mega Don of hip-hop has come back to make a powerfully broad assertion: "I Am the West." When tracking Ice Cube's relationship to hip-hop, he has routinely thrown a shoutout to the "Westside" or been the rest of America's Westside Connection to what's going on in Cali-for-nigh-A, but never until now has he proclaimed himself to be the ENTIRE West coast...
- rapreviews.com
2010-10-25
★★★★★
Here's where I'm supposed to make a bunch of jokes about Are We There Yet? and Barbershop decimating whatever street cred Ice Cube carried into the 21st century, but I can assure you that I Am the West might have the purest artistic motivations of any hip-hop record this year. Cube is clearly not in it for the money; an independently released rap album is about the least financially beneficial project he could dedicate himself to at this point...
- pitchfork.com
2010-10-18
★★★★★
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. From angriest screwface in Compton trailblazers to Hollywood actor, the man born O'Shea Jackson has undergone an intriguing transformation...
- www.bbc.co.uk
2013-04-23
★★★★★
Studying the cover art of Ice Cube's latest album, I Am the West, it appears as though the hip-hop veteran is defending something. In a throwback to the Old West, he's pictured slouched in a rocking chair with a shotgun resting on his lap, guarding the sanctity of the west coast rap that he helped pioneer. His lyrics only serve to expound on this theme, as he takes shots at Jay-Z ("Without Alicia Keys, without going R&B;/This ain't Motown, this is R.A.P...
- www.slantmagazine.com
2010-09-27
★★★★★
There are two ways to sequence a greatest hits album: chronologically or by degrees of popularity. Ice Cube's new compilation ignores these methods entirely...
- pitchfork.com
2010-09-11