Ice Cube

It’s been a long time since Ice Cube was “the wrong nigga to fuck wit”—and even longer since he was that “crazy motherfucker” from a group called N.W.A.—but the years in between haven’t slowed his swagger any, no matter how many piece-of-shit movies have borne his name. While most of Cube’s (living) contemporaries are content to leave gangsta rap to the kids and cash their royalty checks—or take 10 years to make an album, like Dr. Dre—Cube has been fairly prolific of late, releasing an album every other year since 2006, up to 2010’s IAm The West, a surprisingly solid body of recent work that shows he still has his “pyroclastic flow” down.

Updated 02/16/2011