Rappers hoping to age gracefully don't have many established career-paths to follow. Rap moves fast, and it doesn't have a whole lot of reverence for its pioneers. That's why you hear rappers as young as Bow Wow talking about retirement-- they know that their audience will retire them if they don't first gracefully bow out. A few career paths are already in place: Rappers can become actors (Ice-T, Queen Latifah), they can associate themselves with reality shows (Flavor Flav, DJ Run), or they can launch sad attempts at comeback albums (LL Cool J, Brand Nubian). That's about it. Ice Cube has done all three.
After Anaconda and XXX: State of the Nation and Are We There Yet?, it's hard to remember a time when Ice Cube was the scariest man in the United States, but there's a reason he's a hip-hop legend. On NWA's Straight Outta Compton and his first three solo albums, Cube represented loads of people's repressed feelings. He combined a violent gangsta nihilism with a fiercely militant take on Public Enemy's politicized black nationalism, and he somehow managed to find a way to transpose all this rage and righteousness into the persona of a young black everyman. Between 1988 and 1992, Cube was maybe the most important rapper alive, and when the L.A. riots exploded in 1992, it seemed like a vindication of his bleak worldview.
But that was a long time ago. Ice Cube hasn't released an album in six years; he's spent the past decade much more involved in film than music. Onstage at BB King's in New York a few months ago, he said that he'd stayed in music not for the money but because he's "a goddam B-boy for life." It's an admirable sentiment, and Laugh Now, Cry Later is dripping with the seething rage he's always had, but it's not enough. When Cube tries to switch between political fury and gangsta cliché, he ends up with a line like this: "When niggas get tribal/ It's all about survival/ And ain't nobody liable."
It's the same stuff he's always done, except clumsier and less specific. And his lucid moments come weighed down with non-sequitur shoutouts to celebrity colleagues ("Robert Downey hit the bong") and allegations that Martha Stewart ate pussy in prison. He's been living in a celebrity bubble for so long that half of his lyrics have become totally inexplicable, and his battle-rap skills have deteriorated to the point where he's dropping WTF howlers half the time: "I know a lot of dancers/ They call me Jolly Ranchers/ Because I shine like Rudolph, nigga, fuck Prancer," "I heard you lost on Fear Factor/ Cuz you couldn't swallow these nuts, big as a tractor." Cube is at his best when he grounds himself in his own past, reflecting on his come-up over the sunny beat of "Growin Up". The rest of the time, who the fuck even knows what he's talking about.
In the past, Cube has had vivid soundscapes to rely on: Dr. Dre's skeletal lope, the Bomb Squad's hectic noise-clusters. But here, he's saddled with sleek, expensive, thoroughly generic tracks from the likes of Lil Jon and Scott Storch. Cube never once drops the sneer from his voice, and he enunciates hard enough that every one of his god-awful lines comes through clearly-- not a good thing. A stuck-on-autopilot Snoop Dogg wanders through a couple of times. Everything about Laugh Now, Cry Later feels utterly tapped of inspiration and vitality, and Cube's former greatness only makes this exhausting slog that much more depressing. Someone should hurry up and greenlight Barbershop 3 so we don't have to deal with another of these any time soon.
