Police officers in the United States are hell-bent on brutalizing minorities, accuses Ice Cube in the latest single off of his Death Certificate: 25th Anniversary album.
The song “Good Cop Bad Cop” sees the California rapper paint the picture of present-day America as being filled with crooked cops targeting minorities, falsifying police reports, planting evidence, and doing anything they can to “send another young brother” to jail.
“Black Lives Matter, it’s not chit chatter. Cause all they wanna do is scatter brain matter. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. A nine is terrible in your face,” Cube raps.
The political track sees Cube question if a “good cop” is “just a fantasy.”
The song’s hook also presents a racially charged scenario that sees the “black police showin’ out for the white cop” and the “white police showin’ out for the black cop.”
In an interview this week with Apple’s Beats 1 Radio host Zane Lowe, Cube described “Good Cop Bad Cop” as a sort-of “F*ck tha Police 2017,” and explained why he decided to release the updated take on the controversial 1988 song.
“We had done ‘F*ck tha Police’ so many years ago,” he said of the N.W.A. song. “With the emergence of Straight Outta Compton the movie, we realized that it’s still the same thing that’s going on. We needed a more up-to-date version of the community talking to the police and to the authorities.”
Despite how the song seems to broadly brand law enforcement officers as racist, Cube says it is an appeal “to the good cops to turn in the bad cops.”
“That’s the first line of defense for us is for good cops to get the bad apples out of the bunch. Because they’re sucking all the respect that police used to have is being sucked away by these bad apples,” he said.
Last year, however, Cube said he would not stop performing the anti-law enforcement song “F*ck tha Police.”
In that same Beats 1 Radio interview, Cube also said President Donald Trump’s policies are hurting poor people the same way George W. Bush’s did.
“The same weight under a Trump Administration is starting to feel the same way as it did when daddy Bush was in the White House,” the rapper said. “It was the weight of all those policies geared against poor people who were trying to pull themselves up. I feel like that same attack is happening against the most poor and vulnerable people. That same ugliness is starting to rear its head again.”
Ice Cube is scheduled to appear on Friday’s episode of HBO’s Real Time as a replacement for Sen. Al Franken, who cancelled his appearance after host Bill Maher’s use of a racial slur on the show last week.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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