Plenty of Stars Have Gravitated to Trump. Why Did This One Hurt the Most? (2024)

By the time I found a seat on the floor of the SAP Center in San Jose, California, for what was billed as a celebration of how hip-hop had transformed the Bay Area, the arena was thick with the familiar smell of marijuana. It was a fitting welcome for the Luniz, the Oakland rap group then hopping onstage, whose irrepressible single “I Got 5 on It” was a weed smokers’ anthem from the mid-to-late ’90s.

I settled in next to a multiracial group of fortysomething girlfriends from Sonoma County who were kind enough to offer me a hit off their blunt. (I passed; this was for work, after all.) Like most of the people who packed out the surprisingly cozy hockey arena that November night, we were hip-hop fans now in or approaching middle age who wanted to recapture the feeling we had had when rap music was ascendant—and in its final days as the soundtrack of the counterculture. Over the next couple of hours, a procession of ’90s rap legends like Warren G and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony rocked the crowd with those old hits. E-40, the Bay Area hip-hop legend who introduced hyphy culture to the rest of the country, was the final act before the headliner. Two weeks shy of 56 years old that night, he still retained the aura and kooky cool of his youth. I imagined that watching him perform in 2023 must’ve felt pretty close to how it did in 1993.

If only that were true of the headliner—who, once upon a time, was my very favorite rapper. By 11p.m., when Ice Cube finally took the stage, some of the crowd had already started heading for the exits. Cube tried to engage the dwindling audience, gamely pretending he’d once experienced some truly memorable nights in San Jose. “We used to have some good times up here,” he said, pacing around the stage. His exhortations were met mostly with weak applause.

He started with “Natural Born Killaz,” his anticlimactic but still crackling collaboration with old NWA group member Dr.Dre, but with his longtime music partner WC (pronounced “Dub C”) playing the role of Dre. From there, Cube alternated between midcareer party filler like “Friday” and “You Can Do It” and goofier middle-age gangsta rap like “Why We Thugs.” By the time he ended the night with his classic ode to languid inner-city L.A. life, “It Was a Good Day,” the arena was half-full, and Cube could seemingly feel the crowd slipping away. “We not done yet, San Jose,” he shouted, a futile attempt to rally a group of fans who were probably already up past their bedtimes.

I regret to say I understood why they were leaving. Few of the things I loved about Ice Cube when I was younger were evident in this performance. I knew he wasn’t going to perform anything as aggressively antagonistic as “I Wanna Kill Sam” or “Horny Lil’ Devil,” but I was disappointed that we didn’t even get “What Can I Do?,” which, for my money, is maybe the best song ever made about America’s prison-industrial complex.

Instead, there was no politics, no searing social critiques, not even an offhand reference to his weird right-wing media tour in the previous months, which included stops on Tucker Carlson’s online show and Joe Rogan’s podcast. (At least an “I just wanted to remind Rogan’s fans that I too have things to sell” would have been honest.) But no, it was just partying and gangb*nging. I should have been happy enough with the secondhand high. But as I walked back to the parking lot that night, I felt like a fool for expecting Cube to reach 30 years back into his fiery past, back when he had converted to Islam and had made a strong case for being one of the most controversial artists in the country, back when I was a teenager looking to make sense of the isolation I felt at my mostly white schools.

Alas, times have changed. Those of us who grew up with hip-hop have fretted about the genre’s direction in recent years, with its increasing distance from its birth among Black and Latino street kids in the Bronx and hyperfocus on crass commercialization and digital streams that crack social media algorithms. Until very recently, the bestselling rapper in the game was a vapid biracial former child actor who has never scared anyone or commented on anything of real-world consequence. Those of us who grew up with Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur or even a quirky bohemian like Mos Def have watched hip-hop invert through its middle-aged crisis; it’s been frustrating to see our most popular artists become interested more in getting into the White House for a photo op rather than in painting it black.

Ice Cube was supposed to be one of the old heads willing to maintain that tradition. It has not turned out that way. Last summer, Defector published a scathing critique of hip-hop on the occasion of its 50^th anniversary that took on latter-day Cube, who seems to have turned his values inside out. In the piece, the analysis was not kind: “He levies harsh critiques against the Democratic Party while conducting business with Steve Bannon. The rapper who once warned us not to aspire to be ‘just like Jack—’cause Jack is calling you a nigg*r behind your back’ is in cahoots with the whitest of white dudes who seem likely to call someone like me a nigg*r to my face,” wrote Jason England, an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

So Ice Cube isn’t the same Jheri-curled kid who told cool stories about the ghetto and hectored Black folks into skepticism of the American political project. For one thing, he no longer has a Jheri curl. I’d already been wondering if Cube, whose real name is O’Shea Jackson, had moved on from his commitments to Black fans: Would someone who really cared about Black people or hip-hop cozy up to the likes of Carlson and Rogan? Would that person knowingly stoke doubts about the vaccine for a virus that disproportionately killed Black people? Could the man who once excoriated rappers for selling out and crossing over (sample lyric from “True to the Game”: “They just sent they boss over/ Put a bug in your ear and now you crossed over/ On MTV, but they don’t care/ They’ll have a new nigg* next year”) really be in business with a man inextricably tied to Steve Bannon?

When I set out to understand more about what has happened to Ice Cube—his journey from boundary-pushing artist and polemicist to dorm-room party rapper to Hollywood star to vaguely right-wing celebrity gadfly—I came to think that maybe I had been confused about him from the very beginning. Maybe hip-hop too. By the time I spoke to Cube myself, after years of trying, that never felt clearer.

In early 1990, after Ice Cube had left NWA over a contract dispute, he went to New York City to set up a meeting with producers he wanted to work with on his first solo album. He tried to call the studio where Public Enemy usually worked. The person who picked up the phone was Hank Shocklee, a co-founder of the legendary Bomb Squad production team that worked with Public Enemy. Cube knew he had to get in with him.

“He came all the way to Long Island on a one-way ticket—that impressed me,” Shocklee told me. “What I saw in him was the intensity he had for this project.”

Shocklee remembered that Ice Cube came to New York with his trademark Jheri curl. Then returned to Los Angeles for a few days, and came back with a well-coiffed Afro. “We couldn’t believe it,” he said. “The beautiful thing about it, he did that himself because we showed him and Jinx [Cube’s producer from L.A.] love and respect. I treated them like they were my younger brothers. He felt the energy of that.”

Working with Shocklee and the Bomb Squad, Ice Cube crafted a classic debut in AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. It was a critical and commercial smash, reaching platinum status in five months and later earning recognition from Spin magazine as the album of the year. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted established Ice Cube as a serious artist with important things to say about the world.

In the song “Endangered Species (Tales From the Darkside),” Cube even predicted the inner-city rage over the police beating of Rodney King that later exploded in the 1992 L.A. riots. “Every cop killer goes ignored/ They just send another nigg* to the morgue/ A point scored—they could give a f*ck about us.”

Because of that track record, I desperately wanted to land an interview with Ice Cube when I was hosting a season of Slate’s history podcast Slow Burn on the riots. His voice seemed essential to capturing the causes and consequences of the deterioration of L.A.’s Black communities in the ’80s and ’90s. Cube never responded to those interview requests, but I turned to his work again and again while working on those podcast scripts. His 1992 song “We Had to Tear This Mothaf*cka Up” (sample lyric: “Tearing up sh*t with fire, shooters, looters/ Now I got a laptop computer”) was the soundtrack to so many late-night writing sessions.

Like that of countless other kids who came of age in the 1980s, my early exposure to hip-hop had been mostly through cable TV programs like Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City; my hometown wouldn’t have a radio station that played rap music regularly until 1991. And much of the earliest rap didn’t hold my attention or interest, with its simple rhyme schemes and goofy pop ambitions, like “Walk This Way” and “All You Can Eat.”

But a few short years later, in a time of revived interest in MalcolmX, a new class of rappers emerged. They possessed stoic street cool and the political and social consciousness of the Five-Percent Nation, a splinter group of the Nation of Islam that believes that Black people are a race of gods. Among them were artists like Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, Chuck D of Public Enemy, and Guru of Gang Starr. Their understanding of the world spoke to me: Only a few of us—5percent of the world’s population—were smart enough to resist the white man’s lies, and we were righteous enough to believe that our people could arm ourselves with the truth and prevail in this ancient war of civilizations.

Enter Ice Cube, who seemed clear-eyed about the ills of the world and who was responsible for them. It’s no surprise Ice Cube found inspiration in Chuck D and Public Enemy, and collaborated with their production team to make music that stands out as the best of his career. “What Ice Cube showed me was that he was a student,” Shocklee said.

Over the four-album, four-year run from 1990 to 1993, Cube surpassed all my earlier favorites. That Cube was confrontational, profane, wise, and often funny. (My cousin and I always dissolved into hysterics at “You shoulda put a sock on the pickle/ And your puss* wouldn’t be blowin’ smoke signals” in “Look Who’s Burnin’,” Cube’s hostile response to the women who once shunned him.)

But during my late-night listening sessions years later, I was reminded that there was always a darker side to Cube’s aggression, which sometimes ventured into misogyny (“Giving Up the Nappy Dug Out”), racism (“Black Korea”), and antisemitism that turned up in his music (“No Vaseline”) and in his admiration for and affiliation with longtime Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. As recently as 2020, Ice Cube was facing renewed accusations of antisemitism for posting social media memes blaming Jewish people for the global oppression of Black people. Cube responded to those accusations by posting, and later deleting, “What if I was just pro-Black? This is the truth brother. I didn’t lie on anyone. I didn’t say I was anti anybody. DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE. I’ve been telling my truth.”

In retrospect, Cube had been subtly passing along the kind of bigoted stuff that has found a home in right-wing political movements. But now I realize that people like me overlooked it because he so often gave the right white people hell. As a teenager, I saw a man with a blueprint for Black freedom. Now I see someone who was interested mostly in protecting his own.

England, who wrote so scathingly of him in Defector and spoke to me for this piece, reminded me that Ice Cube, who converted to Islam not long after working with Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, was also a prominent pitchman for the malt liquor St.Ides in the mid-’90s. (Alcohol, of course, is forbidden for Muslims.) Even then, I was confused about why Ice Cube would be one of the faces of cheap alcohol that, by then, had been identified as anathema to the health of Black neighborhoods. If he truly believed what he said about Black people and what we needed to do to free ourselves from oppression, why side with the folks poisoning us?

Nonetheless, Cube shot several commercials for the upstart malt liquor brand. He even recorded a mixtape of songs promoting St.Ides: “Rollin’ through the hood like a wicked mack/ What you got on a six-pack?” he rapped on “St. I.D.E.” Cube later explained in the song “Steady Mobbin’” that he was motivated by, well, the money. “Told all my friends,” he rapped, “Don’t drink 8 Ball, ’cause St.Ides is givin’ ends.”

For England, this is when Ice Cube truly stepped away from his brief reign as a sort of ghetto oracle. “That was the death knell,” England said. “You just can’t make the songs he made and then make that.”

For what it’s worth, Ice Cube himself seemed to understand that. After releasing his fourth solo album, Lethal Injection, in 1993, he didn’t drop a music project for another five years. It’s possible that he’d run out of things to say, especially once he started making Hollywood money.

I still loved him in that era: I cherished his first movie, the South Central stoner classic Friday. A friend slid me a bootleg VHS copy of the movie before the summer of my senior year of high school, and I watched it literally every day for several months.

For the next 25 years, he figured out ways to stay paid. It took me many more years to realize that Ice Cube was always about his money, whether it was penning raps about shooting cops or selling cheap malt liquor to the broken communities he rapped so furiously about. Once I realized that, so much about his career arc made more sense.

When I requested an interview with Ice Cube again in the fall of 2023, I hoped to revisit the years when he was a complicated agitator on behalf of Black people, as a springboard to trace the evolution of his politics. As someone who’d been mesmerized by Cube and his work since I was a preteen, I hoped my awe and sincerity would gradually cause him to let down his guard. Then, at the very least, we could touch some of the issues he had discussed in great detail with Carlson and Rogan. Maybe he’d make it all make sense once and for all.

The roots of Ice Cube’s most recent evolution—and in the evolution of many hip-hop stars—came in the months before the 2020 presidential election, when he started publicly touting what he called the Contract With Black America.

His 13-point blueprint included an ambitious, and politically unviable, set of policy goals meant to improve the economic prospects of Black Americans. Some of the items from Cube’s wish list included inscribing affirmative action into law (no such luck there!), mandating that banks lend to Black people at a percentage equivalent to their share of the local population, abolishing privately run prisons and freeing all prisoners convicted of marijuana possession, and requiring broadcast networks to set aside 20percent of their airtime for “Black produced content.”

“It is time for a complete paradigm shift in how we run our institutions and operate our country,” Cube wrote in the introduction to the plan. In an accompanying video, Cube said he had been watching the Democratic National Convention, and “from the way it look, they don’t have a plan.” He was effectively letting Republicans know that he was open for business.

That set into motion a series of conversations between Cube and the Trump White House, which had long been eager to peel off Black celebrities as a show of strength among Black voters. According to Politico, Cube’s representatives met with Trump aides at the White House and Trump’s Bedminster golf club. They also had several conference calls, including one with Cube himself.

A few weeks later, when Trump released his “Platinum Plan” for Black America, he included Cube’s chief priority: a $500billion package of promises. Later, Trump adviser Katrina Pierson announced that Ice Cube had played a role in developing the administration’s plan. “Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate,” she wrote on Twitter. “Thank you for leading!”

Not surprisingly, Ice Cube faced a lot of blowback. Ibram X. Kendi, a professor known for his work on anti-racism, said the rapper was “lying to himself.” Longtime music journalist Touré said Cube was “being used.” But Cube didn’t back down—he doubled down, saying that he wasn’t supporting either candidate and just wanted whoever was in the White House to prioritize Black interests. In an interview with TMZ Live, he said: “I know people have their thoughts … I’m being used … I’m not being used. We can’t depend on one party to bring this through. It’s too broad. Both parties is gonna have to get with it.”

Whatever Ice Cube offered in terms of credibility with Black people, it didn’t translate into votes. In 2020 AP VoteCast found that Trump won just 8percent of Black voters, versus 91percent who supported Biden.

Nonetheless, more rappers have followed Ice Cube’s lead, with some even offering explicit support for another Trump presidency. Endorsem*nts came from Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, who were both included in Trump’s list of pardons and commutations in the final hours of his term in 2021.

In July, Waka Flocka Flame told those at his concert who were Joe Biden supporters to leave so that everyone else could “party right now for motherf*cking president T24.” In February, Benny the Butcher claimed that he’d turned down a meeting with Trump after announcing himself as a supporter last August. Sexyy Red, a breakout star known for her profane lyrics and raunchy style, talked up Trump’s appeal in an October interview. “We need him back in office,” she said.

Kanye West has been Trump’s most prominent ally in hip-hop. West first revealed he was a supporter in 2016, even taking a meeting at Trump Tower. West touted the virtues of Trump again in 2020 and even suggested to Trump that he be given consideration for vice president in 2022. West has also made it clear that he’s backing Trump this year.

More big-name rap artists seem poised to hop on the MAGA bandwagon. Snoop Dogg, a one-time Apprentice guest star who later became an outspoken critic of Trump, said in January, “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.”

During a May visit to Capitol Hill, 50 Cent echoed one of the more poisonous myths being pushed by Republicans during this election cycle: that Black men might better relate to Trump because of his experience with criminal investigations. “I see them identifying with Trump,” 50 Cent said. Pressed on why he believed that, he said, “Because they got RICO charges.” 50 Cent, Mr.Get Rich or Die Tryin’ himself, hasn’t revealed whom he’ll be voting for in November, but he has previously expressed interest in supporting Trump.

In many ways, this embarrassing cultural capitulation came to a head at a Trump rally in the Bronx in June, when the former president invited two rappers onstage who face a number of criminal charges, with one of them charged with attempted murder. “Does everybody know Sheff G?” Trump asked his supporters, before getting Sleepy Hallow to join him on the stage.

“One thing I want to say: They are always going to whisper your accomplishments and shout your failures. Trump is going to shout the wins for all of us,” Sheff G told the crowd. Sleepy Hallow repeated Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” into the microphone.

You don’t have to be a political partisan to think that the whole thing was shameful. It was a gross display of hip-hop’s worst impulses: a couple of amoral, talentless grifters grasping at relevance by allowing Trump to use them for cultural currency.

But this is nothing new. For decades now, hip-hop has been welcoming in people who don’t mean Black people well, as long as they pay for the access.

“I’m a little worried that we’ve become mirror images of the right, in that we’re very orthodox and very doctrinaire. I see a commercial grift,” said England, the professor. England grew up in Harlem in the ’80s, when hip-hop was still a budding art form. One of his cousins is Kool Keith from Ultramagnetic MCs, one of the early rap groups.

“I got dignity from hip-hop. I got freedom,” he told me. “I don’t know where this art form is going. The potential was vast, but the heartbreaking thing is, it got caught in a corporate headlock.”

No one brought that home harder for me than Ice Cube.

A month after I saw him perform that night in San Jose, I was a little startled to find myself speaking with Ice Cube via Zoom, hours before he was set to perform in London.

It was surreal: He had finally agreed to talk, but only if it was scheduled for release around the time he announced a partnership with the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in January. Ice Cube was on my laptop screen, wearing a black Dodgers hat and black Ice Cube hoodie, looking not unlike how he had when I was first introduced to him in NWA’s “Express Yourself” video. He had been a cherubic-faced teenager wearing black shades and a black L.A. Raiders cap atop his glossy curls. Only the teenager part had changed.

I wanted to talk with Cube about his evolution over the past 40 years, how he got himself from South Central to Hollywood, and what he took with him and what he left behind. How could someone who once clowned former NWA member Eazy-E for attending a lunch hosted by then-President George H.W. Bush (“I’ll never have dinner with the president,” he said in “No Vaseline”) accept an invitation to meet with Donald Trump’s administration? Why does he seem to be cozying up to the idea of a second Trump term?

We spoke for about 45 minutes and covered a lot of ground. He told me stories of growing up in L.A. and nurturing his gift for storytelling. He told me about the teenage O’Shea, the thoughtful kid who liked to write and was bused to a white suburban high school in the San Fernando Valley. “I just knew what was edgy, what was corny, what was cool,” he said. “I was just in tune with all of that.”

And we talked about how he made the transition from rap to film. Cube said director John Singleton had pushed him to write his own scripts while working on the set of his debut film Boyz n the Hood. “If you can write an album, you can write a movie,” Cube said Singleton told him. “And he was right.”

I told him that story about my obsession with his movie Friday. He smiled and said, “Hey, man. I just appreciate the love.”

His publicist had warned me before the interview that I was not to broach any questions about politics or religion. That’s no longer an uncommon request from celebrities, and I figured I could eventually slip a few in. But by the time I was comfortable enough to dig in a little, the publicist moved to end the call.

I asked Cube if he had noticed a change in his reception from old fans, some like me, who hadn’t ever expected to see him so chummy with someone like Tucker Carlson. He deflected the question with a vague answer about having always been shut out, about basically being an outsider in the entertainment business. “I guess the gatekeepers just don’t like what I have to say,” he said.

“Really, you? Ice Cube?” I responded. The rapper who once teamed up with Public Enemy and Big Daddy Kane for a song called “Burn Hollywood Burn” now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Oh, yeah. Definitely,” he said.

As we wrapped up, I made it clear to Ice Cube that I still had more questions for him. He grinned. “We can get to those the next time,” he said. Later, after Cube was off the call, his publicist called me back to tease me about how nervous I had been at the start of the interview. But she said he actually seemed to enjoy the conversation. I was slack-jawed at the idea that Ice Cube might want to talk with me again. For a moment, I was 13 years old again and he was my favorite rapper.

Then his publicist accused me of trying to slickly violate her earlier request. “I saw you tried to sneak that in,” she said. She was being playful, but that was partly because she had won so handily, I think.

I could see their media strategy taking shape, in which Cube would talk only about the good old times and the business of hip-hop with me but drive Carlson around South Central L.A. to discuss why he didn’t get the COVID-19 vaccine. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.

When platinum-selling cultural-darling-of-the-moment Kendrick Lamar staged his momentous homecoming concert—“The Pop Out,” which was livestreamed on Amazon Prime—in Inglewood on Juneteenth, it seemed to only highlight the distance between Ice Cube and this generation of rap stars and fans.

Chief among the star-studded list of guests there that night was Cube’s former NWA groupmate Dr.Dre, who showed up to perform “Still D.R.E.” and “California Love” before setting up the rousing closing act of “Not Like Us.” It just seemed like the kind of place Cube should’ve been, a joyous celebration of West Coast hip-hop and its impact on the culture. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. One of the co-hosts of The Joe Budden Podcast put it this way: “I would’ve liked for Cube to be there. … I think Cube is so far removed from music.”

“I don’t think anybody was really concerned about Cube not showing up, even though it would have been dope if he did,” said Ronald TurnerII, better known as DJ R-Tistic, one of L.A.’s most popular DJs. “At the same time, it feels like there’s still kind of a disconnect with Cube and this generation.”

Turner said that distance is likely because of the generational gap and Cube’s move into movies, but he also doesn’t discount the idea that cozying up to Trump might have hurt his standing. “Cube is way too educated to have even fallen for the bait to even think Trump would possibly be on his side,” he said. “Even if Biden didn’t want to talk to him, it seemed like he was riding for Trump, and that definitely hurt his legacy.”

And Cube hasn’t shown any inclination to walk back those earlier flirtations with Trump and his campaign, even if he hasn’t doubled down this time. During a recent interview on Fox Business, Cube declined to make an endorsem*nt and said he’d been “out of the loop” while promoting the Big 3 and touring in Canada. “People know who Trump is. People know who Biden is. They’re going to make their decision no matter who gets up there and pushes whatever agenda they want,” he said.

I wasn’t used to this Cube, someone who would play coy when given the chance to tell us what he actually thinks. But of course, he was there to sell something.

When I think back to the Ice Cube I idolized as a teenager, he seemed so clear about where he stood and whom he considered a threat. He would never have had dinner with the president. He was suspicious of Black artists who sought white approval. He would never have worked with someone who would harm Black people or our communities. I once thought that of all the rappers at risk of selling out to get a seat at the table with Republicans, Ice Cube was the least likely to do it.

And when I think about the Ice Cube I’ve been following as a middle-aged rap fan, I know now that I have to let go of those teenage delusions. I’m no longer able to overlook the things that don’t fit with my old impression of him, a swaggering, unapologetically Black prophet who was repulsed by the idea of betraying his people. A rapper who boldly proclaimed himself “The nigg* Ya Love to Hate,” an epithet that almost seemed a direct challenge.

That Ice Cube wouldn’t have sat across from Tucker Carlson, who has defended the cop who killed George Floyd. He wouldn’t have visited with Joe Rogan, who once had to apologize for his repeated use of the N-word on his podcast. And he certainly wouldn’t have considered joining forces with Donald Trump, who has compiled a public record of racism so long that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

He’s selling something much worse than malt liquor now, and it doesn’t even taste good.