Some note of grace went out of the world when O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson traded in his thug bandana and AK-47 for some clippers and a barber shop shirt with the name “Calvin” stitched in its breast pocket. Calvin can cut a mean fade, and Calvin can make his shop the heart of a working class black community in Chicago that also welcomes well-meaning white people as black hair-cutting barbers and forms reciprocal relationships of good will with the south Asian convenient store owner down the street, but for humpin’ ho’s and for pumpin’ the police full of lead, Calvin’s not your man. That’s a job for O’Shea “The Nigga Ya Love To Hate” Jackson.
So there is sadness. But before we add the Cube’s name to the cosmic sell-out ledger, one has to consider the age-old conundrum: What do you do with an aging rapper, what do you do with an aging rapper, what do you do with an aging rapper, earl-eye in the morning?
It’s hard enough for aging rockers to figure out what to do with themselves when the testosterone is on the wane and the groupies sneaking backstage are wearing concert T-shirts from before they were born which they got on ebay and which, after the ceremonial celebrity bang, they’ll wear ironically. At least the aging rockers, though, have a few opportunities for reinvention—recording a double CD of Woody Guthrie covers, releasing an album of anti-Bush songs, being the Rolling Stones, educating the world about debt relief and poverty in Africa, etc. But where’s there to go for aging rapper like Ice Cube, who’s now in his late 30s? With the possible exception of Dr. Dre, who’s managed to extend the life of his rapper-dom beyond its natural lifespan through the vampiric exploitation of Eminem (and, through him 50 Cent), it’s hard to think of anyone who’s done it.
What has been done, by Cube and others, is to go over to the movies, which is a transition, interestingly, that white rock stars almost always fail to make (though they try). As to why the rappers can do it when the rockers can’t, I have a theory (of course), but the point for our current purposes is that Cube’s alternatives to making movies were either to bow out of the public eye gracefully and use his money to open a nation-wide chain of local black barber shops, or to become a different, less gangsta kind of rapper.
And can we really say, looking at his filmic ouevre, that he made the wrong choice? There are some clunkers, but Cube has now starred in five movies of real cultural significance: Boyz ‘n’ the Hood, Friday, Anaconda, Three Kings and Barbershop. One of those movies is the best war movie of the last 20 years. Three of them have been seminal in deepening and complexifying the American image of the modern black man. And one of them is about a really, really big snake. That’s not my definition of selling out.
