This past week, a seemingly innocent Q&A session for Ice Cube turned into a heated discussion about drugs and crime. On Monday (September 25), Ice Cube took to Twitter to start a dialogue with his fans about anything they had on their minds.
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“Hit me in the comments with a question…” Cube wrote.
However, one of the replies ended up launching an avalanche of arguments, all thanks to a suggestion that N.W.A. may have been responsible for crime and violence among the youth in the 20th century.
“Was NWA part of the agenda to destroy conscious rap which was growing in popularity at the time, and promote sex violence and gangster behaviour amongst the youth?” a user named @light_bex asked Cube.
In the thread under this comment, another user named @DocNice70 felt like the answer to this question was “yes,” saying hip-hop music negatively influenced minorities, while also playing a part in drugs like crack entering their communities.
“Unfortunately music did play a part with the crack being pumped into our black and latino neighborhoods,” they wrote.
[RELATED: Remember When: Eazy-E and Dr. Dre’s NWA-Ending Feud]
Ice Cube would finally issue a response to this assertion on Wednesday, strongly disagreeing with what @DocNice70 had to say.
“Bullshit. Crack was in the neighborhoods a decade before gangsta rap,” Cube wrote. “In the 70s they called it freebase. So was heroine, weed, Mollys, gangbanging, drive bys, pimping and hoing, dropping out of school, young girls getting pregnant, cussing and the using the word N***a. It was all here before NWA.”
Though Cube left N.W.A. shortly after their debut album Straight Outta Compton in 1988 and unleashed a fiery diss track towards them in the process, it should come as no surprise that he is willing to defend the group with such vigor. After their ultimate breakup stemming from Dr. Dre’s 1991 departure, all the members would eventually reconcile revolving around frontman Eazy-E’s HIV/AIDS diagnosis, which was portrayed in the 2015 biopic, aptly titled Straight Outta Compton.
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