One of the most influential figures in west coast hip-hop, Ice Cube, has been giving props to Australian rapper Iggy Azalea in an interview with the Australian Daily Mail.
“She makes dope songs, that’s what it is all about,” said the Los Angeles rapper (real name O’Shea Jackson) who is in Australia to promote the film Straight Outta Compton, which depicts the rise and subsequent combustion of his hip-hop group NWA during the late 80s.
He appeared in interview alongside his son, O’Shea Jackson Jr, 24, who plays his father in his first feature film role, and who also gave Azalea a nod of approval. “She’s dating a Laker so,” he said in reference to her fiancé, Nick Young, a basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Azalea’s rise to global fame has been accompanied by criticism for her perceived exploitation of black culture. Fellow rapper Azealia Banks has been particularly vocal in her disapproval of Azalea’s musical success, calling the Australian’s appropriation of hip-hop tropes “cultural smudging”.
Ice Cube was nonplussed by such accusations. “It’s not about how the song gets made, it’s about what comes out of the speaker,” he said. “If she can be hot coming out of the speaker, who cares what it took to make it.”
He also spoke about the difference between a rapper and an MC. “Some are battle rappers and need to write their own lyrics. But if you’re just rapping out there, songs-by-committee have been the history of music ... Every great song, probably, was put together by a few people and not just one soul.”
Straight Outta Compton, which premiered on 14 August in the US, depicts a teenage Ice Cube with fellow NWA artists Eazy-E and Dr Dre growing up in the underprivileged Los Angeles neighbourhood of Compton.
The biopic shows how, following the critical and popular success of their debut album, the group attracted intense media scrutiny for the record’s violent lyrics, profanities, and condemnation of police brutality.
