#41, “It Was a Good Day,” Ice Cube (1992)

150 Favorite Songs: #41, “It Was a Good Day,” Ice Cube (1992)

What makes a good day? The answer depends on your personality, your age, your circumstances, your expectations. Here is a good day: When I was twenty-three, I went to Barton Springs with a woman who, while neither of us had any idea this would possibly be the case, I ended up living with a year and a half later, married to a few years after that. We swam around and afterwards ate pizza at a place downtown that’s long-since closed down that we both liked very much. Our relationship to that point had at times been confusing, probably for both of us in different ways, but all of that was mostly behind us by then, and we just swam around, enjoyed the weather, ate good food, talked forever the way we’d always been able to do and, it would turn out, always would (“chemistry,” a friend once told me, is “unearned trust,” which stuck with me). Nothing spectacular happened, but nothing bad happened either. It just felt right. I gotta say, it was a good day.

Ice Cube’s good day isn’t much different from mine. He was also twenty-three when he wrote about his. He wakes up in a good mood; he’s safe, and his mother is cooking his favorite breakfast. He hears from a young woman he fancies, who appears to reciprocate his interest, and tucks that in the back of his mind as he gets in his car, a convertible with hydraulics, which he clearly loves. He receives a message from another young lady, this one named Kim, with whom he appears to have an informal but intimate relationship. (As a parallel to my story, Cube would go on to marry her.) Then he goes to meet some friends to play basketball, and he has a good game.

And that’s mostly it. He goes about his day unhassled; the police seem uninterested in a young black man driving around in his favorite drop-top; when he goes to visit a friend, they listen to music and play games together, and he trusts that, at least on this day, his friends are safe too. He even wins some money. By the time he leaves his friend’s house, he’s won some money, and the young woman who’d called him that morning, whom he’s long been interested in, has reiterated her interest; ironically, when he arrives to pick her up, she’s the one with weed and he’s the one with beer. (The irony of this setup is never directly addressed, but one can surmise that Cube has a reputation for being the weed guy and this woman perhaps works at a liquor store or maybe had an older sibling who would buy beer for them when they were in high school together.) Their encounter is an amorous one, and they part affectionately. He learns that the Los Angeles Lakers, his favorite team, beat the Seattle Supersonics that night. The streets of Compton still safe, Cube stops by Fatburger for a sandwich, and, in his inebriated state, smiles as he looks up at the sky, imagines that even the Goodyear Blimp is singing his praises that night. In contrast to all of the other days Ice Cube has rapped about, full of violence and injustice and trauma, on this day, he didn’t even have to use his AK. It, too, was a good day.

I adore this song. There are two versions—one, the original that appeared on The Predator, Cube’s third in a run of four perfect and undeniable albums that opened his solo career (a feat few artists have matched), is an explicit song with a tense, minor-key beat produced by DJ Pooh that fills his Good Day with a sense of below-the-surface menace; he gets a beep from Kim, “and she can fuck all night.” The other, a remix built around a sample of “Let’s Do It Again” by the Staple Singers, is almost a pure sugar high; it’s all boppy P-Funk instrumentals and Cube, in a rare move for him at this point in his career, decides to keep it clean, lending this version of the song a wholesome air that’s less layered than the original, but more joyful. The Predator version is probably more interesting and complex, but there’s a pure pleasure to the remix that means that, when I think about this song—which I often do—that’s the version I think about most, where he raps about “brothers” and “homies” and how Kim can “do it” all night, all over a beat that sounds like the sort of thing Kanye made his career off of, but almost a decade before Kanye showed up.

I don’t think you need the tension and simmering menace of the Predator version of the song, though, because all of that is implied anyway. It’s implied mostly because by 1992, we knew who Ice Cube was. He was one of the most vibrant voices in music at that time, a larger-than-life persona whose charisma was earned because of a warmth and humanity he often tried to bury under a persona of street toughness, but couldn’t. The very fact that Ice Cube is rapping about one good day fills in the blanks that say—they’re not all like this.

That’s true for all of us, whether we’re in South Central L.A. or whatever suburb you grew up in. That’s just life. But Cube’s interest, as an artist, in representing that side of his life, lent credence to his whole persona. Even the baddest man on the planet circa 1992 sometimes gets excited about a day when he can play with his friends and eat a hamburger. There’s an idea among a certain type of guy right now, the sort who pays for a blue checkmark on Twitter and wants Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson to think he’s cool, that to be a man is to tie yourself up in knots trying to perform a particularly joyless form of masculinity. These are folks who post nonsensical maxims like “a man should never be seen in a swimming pool” or some shit, because finding joy is, I dunno, gay? or something, and a real man wakes up at four AM to “hustle,” whatever that means, which he does nonstop except for brief breaks for chin-ups and staring stone-faced at a woman he’s trapped behind a table for a miserable dinner date. This, they’d like you to believe, is what it is to be a man.

But really, if you had to identify exactly what kind of man they’re trying to emulate, a good shorthand might be 1992 Ice Cube. He’s serious and intense and passionate, he makes all the right enemies and has values that—while fucked up (no need to check what 1992 Ice Cube had to say about women)—he is nonetheless committed to. He’s wealthy and powerful within his world, on the verge of ascending to greater heights (by this point he’d already starred in Boyz n the Hood, would hav Higher Learning and Friday and Anaconda and more soon enough), had stood up to enemies and won, was fiercely independent, said whatever it was he believed he needed to say, was in full command of his talent.

And what did he do with that talent? On “It Was a Good Day,” he rapped, simply, about the simple pleasures he could encounter on a day off. I like to listen to it, and remind myself that many of my days are simple and good, too.

Years ago, some comedian on social media attempted to pinpoint the exact date of Ice Cube’s good day, based on clues like the weather, the Lakers/Sonics scores, and whether it was likely Ice Cube would have had access to a pager by then. Somehow it went viral enough that Ice Cube was asked about it, at which point he explained that it was just, like, a day he made up. You would think the fact that there is no record of the Goodyear Blimp reading “Ice Cube’s a Pimp” at any point in recorded history would have been a clue, but some people have to suck all the joy out of things.