To hip-hop heads of a certain age, Ice Cube represents the peak of the rap mountain; The sharpest rapper of 1991, he matched the hardness of the street with a brutal political rage aimed directly at the throatbox of upper-class America. “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” and “Death Certificate” are undeniable masterpieces, political parables showing the injustices an urban minority faces in a supposedly equal society, and those two albums alone sustained Cube’s legacy in the rap world for decades.
However, it is 2024, not 1994, and Ice Cube is not the political revolutionary he once painted himself as. Perhaps starring in the likes of “Barbershop” and “Are We There Yet?” softened the former GOAT contender’s soul, as there is no edge to the modern Ice Cube present on “Man Down.” Gone are the cutting rhymes and riotous beats of his prime self, now all that survives is a dad-rap flow that has devolved massively from his peak all the way back to the ABCs and G-funk beats thirty years past their sell-by date.
As for the individual songs themselves, they all largely tread the same ground over and over. The beats are all throwbacks of some variety, mostly to pre-Prince funk, and leave a constant reminder that Ice Cube seems perfectly tapped into the zeitgeist of the early 1990s, not the 2020s. The lead single from this album “It’s My Ego” established the tone of the album before it even started; Ice Cube raps about he is a legend who was the greatest rapper in the early ‘90s and then complains about how he is not anymore. The lowest point of the album was handily “So Sanctified,” where even by his dad rap standards, Ice Cube made himself seem more like a fossil than ever before with his asinine “commentary” on Gen Z.
But at least he has features, right? Indeed, like the “Avengers: Endgame” of 50-year-old rap fans, Ice Cube brings out all his fellow dad-rap contemporaries, who are all dead on arrival. If a line-up of Snoop Dogg, E-40, Too Short, Xzibit, Busta Rhymes, Killer Mike and Kurupt sounds appealing to an old-head, they should quit while they are ahead. The Xzibit feature “Break the Mirror” is an auditory offence, and the old-school West Coast posse-cut “She’s Santificed” blows hard, even with the Bay Area king E-40 spitting on the track.
Realistically, this album means nothing. It already sunk like a brick, and I doubt it will cause any reevaluation of Ice Cube’s tremendous reputation in the genre, so this album serves as effectively a vanity project for a borderline retired rapper in his mid-50s to waste money on. Ice Cube may have captured the zeitgeist of the early 1990s like no other rapper from the era could have, but he is simply not top rap game material anymore, and it shows. Simply put, “Man Down” is the sound of a rapper behind the mic showing he is behind the times.
