O’Shea Jackson wasn’t always destined to be Ice Cube. As a teenager, he’d flipped between ambitions of drawing buildings and writing rap lyrics, before eventually studying architectural drafting at the Phoenix Institute of Technology in Arizona. In the summer of 1987, he was loading his car in South Central Los Angeles, prepping for the 400-mile drive out to Phoenix, when Dr Dre, then a budding producer with the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, rolled up with a box of records that looked something like the future.
“He had our first single from NWA, which was ‘Dope Man’, with ‘8 Ball’ on the other side,” remembers Cube today. “He pulled up with the cover” – there’s Cube, Eazy-E, Dr Dre, MC Ren, and a posse of others dressed in jeans, baggy tees, and baseball caps, all backed into an alleyway splattered with graffiti tags. Goofy, Flavor Flav-aping clock necklaces swing from a few of the crew’s necks; the ground is strewn with spent bottles of malt liquor. “This is my first time seeing the actual record. And Dre was like, ‘Are you sure you want to go to school? Because this s*** about to pop.’”
