Ice Cube’s favourite Ice Cube song: “It really messed me up”
During a conversation with the writer Tim Noakes in 2006, NWA legend Ice Cube was asked to reflect on his life and career, and things duly got personal.
It was a wide-ranging interview, with Cube touching on subjects from his one-time bandmate Eazy-E’s death, to then-President George W Bush’s lack of concern for the lives of people in the hood, to his own relationship with weed, but things got truly deep when Cube was asked about his own back catalogue. Which of his own songs, from across a long, fruitful career in the rap game, really meant the world to him?
Cube, apparently without a struggle, highlighted his track ‘Dead Homiez’, which had featured on his Kill at Will EP from the end of 1990. That EP dropped only months after his debut solo album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, came out, and it helped to secure his position as a fine solo artist in his own right, away from the baggage of his NWA days.
One of the things that made that EP so good was ‘Dead Homiez’, the most personal song Cube had recorded by that point in time. This was a track about a friend that Cube had lost, and he didn’t shy away from the pain that the loss had caused. Given the machismo of his particular style of gangsta rap, his openness and vulnerability in the track was a striking thing to behold.
“I wrote a song on the Kill at Will EP called ‘Dead Homiez’,” Cube explained during the interview with Noakes, admitting that it was the first time he’d produced something from such a raw emotional state as a result of learning about the upsetting news. “Something had happened, and I wanted to write about it, almost as soon as I heard what had happened. That song is still my favourite because it captured a moment for me more than any other rhyme or record,” he asserted.
In an entirely separate interview for the book Check The Technique Vol 2, which drilled into the history of classic hip hop, Cube elaborated a bit more on ‘Dead Homiez’ and who it was really about. “One of the homies in my neighbourhood had got killed, a guy named T-Bone,” he explained, “…he went to school with me. […] I was feeling real bad about it, because I was friends with his younger brother, Little T-Bone. It really messed me up, so I wrote the song that night.”
Penning lyrics about such a dark, painful event like that might have proven difficult for some people, but Cube actually found it pretty simple. The track almost seems to have written itself, driven, as it was, by a profound tragedy. He noted. “I think I wrote it in about 90 minutes. I was already writin’ when I heard about his death, so I put what I had been writin’ down and went into that one”.