Law No. 34: Be Royal in Your Own Fashion: Act Like a King to Be Treated Like One
''When I was 11 or 12, my older brother's girlfriends would call, and I'd talk to them on the phone. He'd be like, 'I don't want to talk to her!' So I'd stay on the phone trying to hit on them. I don't know if I was doing good, but they weren't hanging up, you know what I mean? And my brother kept saying, 'You're trying to be too cool. Stop trying to be so cool all the time. You ain't no damn ice cube!' And I was like, 'Yes, I am.' And that's how I got the name.''
Law No. 44: Disarm and Infuriate With the Mirror Effect
Ice Cube's given name is O'Shea Jackson. But the only people who get away with calling him O'Shea these days are his wife, Kimberly, his siblings, and his parents, Hosea and Doris. His four kids call him Daddy. To everyone else, he's just Cube. Cube grew up in South Central Los Angeles -- a neighborhood where he says the only local hero had been football star James Lofton.
Of course, that would all change soon enough. And looking back, Cube can pinpoint the moment he discovered the gift that would make him replace Lofton as South Central's favorite son. He was 14. Cube laughs, recalling the day a classmate offered a challenge: ''He asked me if I ever wrote a rap before.'' At that point, the closest he'd come was rhyming along to other people's records in front of the mirror at home.
''So this kid goes, 'You write a rap and I'll write one and we'll see which one is best.' So I started thinking of stuff. And his was little pieces of all the other records that were out at the time. Mine was original.''
Law No. 39: Stir Up Waters to Catch Fish
N.W.A's breakthrough record, ''Straight Outta Compton,'' came out in 1989. And if you look at its cover today, you'll see a huddled group of young African-American men in baseball caps staring down the camera like a collective dare. One of them, Eazy-E, points a gun at whoever the unlucky bastard was who took the photo.
Each member looks pissed off -- none more so than Ice Cube. And his voice is also the first one you hear rapping on the record, barking his arrival with the following lines: ''Straight outta Compton/Crazy muthaf---er named Ice Cube/From the gang called Niggaz With Attitude/When I'm called on/I gotta sawed-off/Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off...''
Cube sprays profanities and threats like a fusillade of bullets. They were to become the opening shots of the West Coast hip-hop revolution known as gangsta rap. ''We just wanted to be neighborhood stars,'' says Cube. ''Our neighborhood stars were usually people with names and reputations -- a guy who'd been gang-banging the longest or the guy who had a lot of money or dope. We could have been that if we wanted to, but we had a more positive avenue to vent. It's not like you gotta kill somebody or shoot somebody to rap about it.''
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