Ice Cube is shortly to release a 25th anniversary edition of his Death Certificate album, complete with three new songs. (Actually it came out in 1991, but let’s not split hairs.) One of those three new songs is the utterly astounding ‘Good Cop Bad Cop’.
Over an infectious horn loop that’s married to drums that sound…urgent, Ice takes on police corruption and brutality and how tackling this in 2017 is as urgent as when he started performing 30 years ago: “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.” This has the potential to be his biggest crossover hit since ‘It Was A Good Day’.

Ice Cube has been upfront in this being a ‘Fuck Da Police’ for 2017. Speaking to Zane Lowe, he said: “We [NWA] had done ‘Fuck tha Police’ so many years ago…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 the authorities.”

This is angry, timely, pertinent – and very good indeed.