Ice Cube says he wasn't sure Bomb Squad would be willing to produce the entire album.
Ice Cube made a name for himself after splitting from N.W.A and releasing AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, a politically-charged album that got people's attention. Spin gave the project its first ever Album of the Year award back in 1990.
For the publication's thirtieth anniversary, it sat down with the Los Angeles rapper to discuss the iconic album.
Ice Cube reveals how excited he was to work with the production team Bomb Squad. Compared to his familiarity with West Coast production titan Dr. Dre, he "didn’t know what I was getting with the Bomb Squad."
"I didn’t know if they even wanted to do my whole record," he says. "I was just hoping to get them to do two or three songs. So, when they agreed to do the whole thing, I fuckin’ did a backflip."
Because of this blending of East and West Coasts, Ice Cube says the album is still the standard for how to unite the cultures. He gives his producer and friend Sir Jinx credit for helping him guide the Bomb Squad in the direction they wanted the album to go.
"Sir Jinx was so instrumental in making this record, too," he says, "because we were going to keep the record West Coast. We were going to have the skits in between the records. We were gonna have songs and music that we would normally use anyway. But with the Bomb Squad’s superior production and their mad-scientist approach to sampling, it just gave our West Coast sound a whole dynamic that, to this day, still hasn’t really been matched as far as that dynamic of [being] so East Coast and so West Coast at the same time."
Ice Cube has also been in the news discussing the upcoming N.W.A biopic, "Straight Outta Compton." The theatrical trailer and movie posters were released last week. The movie is scheduled to open on August 14.