TS: Ice Cube vs Ice-T

Ice T is obviously the smarter lyricist. Both have great voices. Both have made classic albums. Cube once called a song "Get Off My Dick and Tell Yo Bitch To Come Here." T alwasy stayed true to the West Coast, while Cube, to quote the young lady, spent a lot of time "sucking New York dick." Westside Connection worse than Ice T as a detective on Law & Order SVU. Ice T has better sense of humor. Cube has better beats.

I'd say tie, but if forced at gunpoint I'd rather listen to Ice T, though he's never made anything as dynamic as anything on "Death Certificate" or "The Predator."

An interesting alternative question would be 'Pinpoint the precise point at which the two Ices "fell off"'.
It always seemed to me that Natural Born Killaz was the last of the truly great Ice Cube songs, and from that point on the only way was down.
For Ice-T I'd go for It's on from Home Invasion as the last call before things started to slide.

And, lest we forget: Body Count.

I HEAR IT EVERY NIGHT!
ANOTHER GUN FIGHT!
THE TENSIONS MOUNT!
ON WITH THE BODY COUNT!

The Ice-Berg vs. The Predator: tie

As solo artists, I'll go with Ice-T. I like them both, but Ice Cube was more cartoonish and fucked up ("Black Korea," "Cave Bitch," etc.). I'd also give Ice-T credit for Body Count, if only for recognizing the audience for rap music (primarily college-age white folks) and trying something new.

T's great albums are great despite his solid, 4 on the floor delivery, mainly lifted by his humour and a great voice.

Cube at his best is, as M@tt said, All Time Top 10 material. His flow is so much more varied, his rhymes cleverer, his viewpoint sharper and clearer.

but as for music i go with ice cube, the seeming consensus favorite

You can't front on *Power* and *O.G.*, though. Total and complete classics. And how come I ain't read one review of Jay-Z's *The Black Album* that recognizes "99 Problems" chorus as an Ice-T jack-- that's my favorite Home Invasion track, follwed by that Gripsta song. Putting a white kid on the cover of Home Invasion was the end of the line for ol' Ice-T, me thinks.

Shakey Mo - how can you call Cube 'consistently great?' Since The Predator he's pretty much been a joke on AND off record.

Reading the above comments, not to be contrarian or anything, but I'm leaning more towards Tracy now.

Ice T's best (Power, OG, etc) are great all the way through, making them better ALBUMS by definition

(I don't have any problem with side 2s for Cube - side 2 of Death Certificate has "Us", "Doin Dumbshit", and the funniest, cruelest, most un-PC diss track ever, "No Vaseline", on it!)

(shaky mo beat me to mentioning No Vaseline - no one has ever come harder on a dis record than that...)

Kill at Will is an EP so it doesn't count

No Vaseline, while crushing Message To BA, is nowhere near the best diss track of all time. Tho I'll admit the harshness of "Eazy's dick is smellin' like MC Ren's shit" has rarely been surpassed

x-post

Fuck, forgot about that! Got me there! Still that's the only song on that I don't like....

Express Yourself sucks? WTF? Not to me...also like lots of the album tracks...Compton's in the House is a good old Run-DMC styled one...If it Ain't Ruff is underrated....I Ain't the 1...also no way is OG better than Amerikka's Most Wanted.

If It Ain't Ruff may be a bit overlooked, but "Express Yourself" is awful, excepting Dre's classic proclamation that he "don't smoke weed or sess"

from my limited knowledge, i'm going with cube. o.g. has two stellar tracks. home of the bodybag is a great intro - very stream-of-consciousness the way he just reels of loosely connected words and phrases. it's interesting. plus i like "mind over matter" a lot - the rest doesn't thrill me much.

"amerikkkas" is incredible. very funny record - love "you can't fade me" the most (absolutely horiffic, but makes me chuckle, and you find yourself rooting for cube). but the album is basically one long piece of music - loads of short, noisy, fuzzy snippets strung together into one whole. really powerful delivery. i shall get a couple more cube albums soon.

ice-t had some entertaining songs, and i used to own body count (with "cop killer," even). i like him on "law & order svu," though more b/c i'm always imagining him laughing up his sleeve at being a TV detective after "cop killer."

(Who Would Tim Dog Choose?)

Ice Cube had Da Lench Mob.

This is really yough T/S; I completely love "Power" and "The Iceberg", but agree with a lot of whats been set about "The Predator", which is it is a much better and complete piece of art than anythinb Ice-T has done: politically and sonically.

However, who's funnier? Ice-motherfuckin'-T.

I've decided: Ice-T

OTM!!

(i think the cachet of truckstop waitresses might just have jumped a bit)

come on, darlene is a great name. Plus Darlene was the coolest character in Roseanne.

And he takes such glee in it! There's the gap after the album ends, then his Bootsy-esque "oh yeah - it ain't over, motherfuckers" before Message To B.A. fades in, the lame collage of faked criticisms from Efil4zaggin - he gives them their head, lets it run for a while then starts sneering the same words over the original's "Here's what they think about you," his voice brimming with confidence and contempt compared to Dre's playground taunts. Then starts dropping in his own, genuine, samples of voices criticising the Cube-less NWA, lets that build to a pitch and drop out before that awesome, juicy beat - the best on the album, and that's saying something - rolls in and he revels, "Goddamn, I'm glad y'all set it off!" And it's true - he took the high road (er, at least on this topic) on his first two solos, but now he's audibly overjoyed to tear their snipes apart.

In that, it's a contender for top ten answer records, too. "I kept on stomping/While y'all motherfuckers moved straight outta Compton", and especially snapping back on 100 Miles & Runnin's blustering "Started out with too much cargo/So I'm glad we got rid of Benedict Arnold" with the direct and irrefutable "Started out with too much cargo/Dropped four niggas, now I'm making all the dough." The song takes a lot of its strength from sticking to this theme for most of its content - when he left the group, he said it was because the money wasn't right. In this record, he abuses those responsible and scolds the others for not looking after themselves. And just a few months later, the group indeed split up over these very issues - well spotted, Mr Jackson. (It's also great the way he rhymes "Gang-banged by your manager feller/Gettin' money out your ass like a motherfuckin' Rediteller" without ever bothering to say "Jerry Heller" out loud.)

The attention to each target is also notable. Eazy gets a full verse to be excoriated for ripping off the others (and paying 10 grand to have dinner with Bush!), and warned that the same fate is going to happen to him, Ren gets a full verse for Cube to express his disappointment at the dissolution of their personal friendship through professional mijudgement, and DJ Yella is dismissed in one line! (The follow-up to it, incidentally, is a great example of one of Cube's stylistic tricks of the time - forcing scansion via empty vocal beats in order to emphasise a line: "Yella boy's on your team so you're losin'/Yo Dre --- stick to producin'!") And I actually like Dre as a rapper - Express Yourself is fine by me, apart from overplay on local radio in the early '90s, and his verses on California Love and No Diggity make those tracks much greater than they would otherwise be - but to accuse him of biting Cube's style while trying to fill his place in the group is a canny psychological move. "You got jealous when I got my own company" also struck a nerve, obviously - if only Dre had paid better attention to the warnings about who you let in your pockets...

And the production throughout just underlines the ferocity of the attack. He obviously studied well when working with the Bomb Squad on Amerikkka's Most Wanted, here pointing up particular lines or phrases by meshing an extra flourish, squall of noise or vocal sample into the density of sound underneath them. Or dropping most everything out for a line like "Eazy's dick is smelling like MC Ren's shit" - it's an old and obvious trick, but there's so much going on in the backing track that the real impact comes when it rolls back in. And that single scratched bass drum under the multi-tracked vocals of "I'd never have dinner with the President/I'd never have dinner with the President/I'D NEVER HAVE DINNER WITH THE PRESIDENT..."

When I was 17, the homophobic tone of the broomstick, vaseline and rape references put me really, really strongly off. But coming back to it recently, I a) take comfort from the fact that they're all metaphorical and b) don't really care anymore anyway - I've come to terms with slackness in my entertainment. But more than that, it was like I hadn't skipped listening to it for 12 years (!) - most of the lyrics and rhythms had actually stayed with me through that whole time. If someone can name another record so passionate, thought-through and well-constructed that it can have that kind of impact, please do so! I would seriously love to hear it.

And as for 'Amerikkka's..' and DC, just got them both and I'm knocked out. I thought nothing in rap could beat the impact of 'Fear of a Black Planet' when I first heard it, but this comes mighty close. Why are these albums never atop the periodical lists of all-time greatest hip-hop LPs?

Oh, yeah: Ice Cube easily, for his first three LPs and his NWA contributions. Altho I do admire Ice T, and he briefly won my heart back in '91 by praising Motorhead and dissing Bon Jovi.

'd venture to say that Straight Outta Compton is about 1/3 a good album: title cut, gangsta, fuck tha police, and dopeman. the rest blows, including express yrself.

OTM!!

― Mr. Snrub (Mr. Snrub), Thursday, April 15, 2004 12:40 AM bookmarkflaglink

FPing 15 year old posts, classic or dud?

but in all seriousness, though, being a naive kid growing up in a quiet, predominately white suburban neighborhood, sheltered from a lot of what was going on in the outside world, Cube's cds were some of the first exposure I had to some of the ideas expressed on the disc. actually inspired me to expand my worldview beyond what I'd known at the time (at age 18).

Ice-T did more for me in Body Count, though I love his rap albums too.