O’Shea Jackson, born June 15, 1969, in Los Angeles, made his name as Ice Cube in N.W.A alongside Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren and DJ Yella. He wrote much of Straight Outta Compton and left the group at the end of 1989 in a dispute over money. As a solo artist (AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Death Certificate) and actor (Boyz n the Hood) he became one of the defining figures of West Coast rap, and a benchmark Tupac had to measure himself against.
“Last Wordz”
Tupac’s second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993), includes Last Wordz, on which Tupac, Ice Cube and Ice-T rap together, three generations of political gangsta rap on one track. The song is sometimes wrongly placed on 2Pacalypse Now; it belongs to Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z..
The part Cube didn’t want
Director John Singleton, who had cast Cube in Boyz n the Hood, first offered him the male lead in Poetic Justice (1993). Cube said no: the character kicks his friend out of the car for a woman he has just met, which in Cube’s words “kinda made the character a sucker.” The role of Lucky the mailman went to Tupac, opposite Janet Jackson.
Singleton’s next film, Higher Learning (1995), went the other way: the lead had originally been meant for Tupac but went to Omar Epps, while Ice Cube took a supporting role.
After 1996
Ice Cube was among the artists who met at Louis Farrakhan’s base in Chicago in April 1997 to end the East-West hostility that had cost Tupac and, shortly after, The Notorious B.I.G. their lives (see East Coast vs. West Coast). In 2016 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of N.W.A.
It is sometimes claimed that Ice Cube was “now with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records.” That was never the case: Cube did work with Dre again, for example on Natural Born Killaz in 1994, but released his albums through his own labels and partners. The vague claim that he met Tupac “around 1992” has no evidence behind it either.