The Memoir Of Ms. Butterfly

Ice Cube was born in Los Angeles on June 15, 1969, to Doris, a hospital clerk and custodian, and Hosea Jackson, a machinist and UCLA groundskeeper. He has an older brother, and they had a half-sister who was murdered when Cube was 12. He grew up on Van Wick Street in the Westmont section of South Los Angeles.

In ninth grade at George Washington Preparatory High School in Los Angeles, Cube began writing raps after being challenged by his friend “Kiddo” in typewriting class. Kiddo lost.

 Explaining his stage name, Cube implicates his older brother: “He threatened to slam me into a freezer and pull me out when I was an ice cube. So I just started using that name, and it just caught on.

Cube also attended William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills, California. He was bused 40 miles to the suburban school from his home in a high-crime neighborhood. Soon after he wrote and recorded a few locally successful rap songs with N.W.A., he left for Arizona to enroll in the Phoenix Institute of Technology in the fall of 1987 semester. In 1988, with a diploma in architectural drafting, he returned to the Los Angeles area and rejoined N.W.But keeping a career in architecture drafting as a backup plan.

In 1990, he formed his own record label, Street Knowledge, whereby a musical associate via the rap group Public Enemy introduced him to the Nation of Islam (N.O.I.). Ice Cube converted to Islam. Although denying membership in the N.O.I., whose ideology often rebukes whites and especially Jews, he readily adopted its ideology of black nationalism, familiar to the rap community. Still, he has claimed to heed his conscience as a “natural Muslim ’cause it’s just God and me.” Questioned in 2017, he said, in part, that he thinks “religion is stupid. He estimated, “I’m gonna live a long life, and I might change religions three or four times before I die. So I’m on the Islam tip—but I’m on the Christian tip, too. I’m on the Buddhist tip as well. Everyone has something to offer to the world.

1986: C.I.A.

With their friend Sir Jinx, Ice Cube formed the rap group C.I.A. and performed at parties hosted by Dr. Dre. Since 1984, Dre has been a member of a famous D.J. crew, the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which by 1985 was also performing and recording electro-rap. Dre had Cube help write the Wreckin Cru’s hit song “Cabbage Patch.” Dre also joined Cube on a side project, a duo called Stereo Crew, which made a 12-inch record, “She’s a Skag,” released on Epic Records in 1986.

In 1987, C.I.A. released the Dr. Dre-produced single “My Posse.” Meanwhile, the Wreckin’ Cru’s home base was the Eve After Dark nightclub, about a quarter of a mile outside of the city Compton in Los Angeles county. While Dre was on the turntable, Ice Cube would rap, often parodying other artists’ songs. In one instance, Cube’s rendition was “My Penis,” parodying Run-DMC’s “My Adidas. In 2015, the nightclub’s co-owner and Wreckin’ leader Alonzo Williams would recall feeling his reputation damaged by this and asking it not to be repeated.

1986–1989: N.W.A.

Poster for one of N.W.A.’s first concerts at a Compton skating rink, 1988

At 16, Cube sold his first song to Eric Wright, soon dubbed Eazy-E, who was forming Ruthless Records and the musical team N.W.A., based in Compton, California. Himself from South Central Los Angeles, Cube would be N.W.A.’s only core member not born in Compton.

Upon the success of the song “Boyz-n-the-Hood”—written by Cube, produced by Dre, and rapped by Eazy-E, helping establish gangsta rap in California—Eazy focused on developing N.W.A., which soon gained MC Ren. Cube wrote some of Dre’s and nearly all of Eazy’s lyrics on N.W.A.’s official debut album, Straight Outta Compton, released in August 1988. Yet by late 1989, Cube questioned his compensation and N.W.A.’s management by Jerry Heller.

Cube also wrote most of Eazy-E’s debut album Eazy-Duz-It. He received a total pay of $32,000, and Heller’s contract in 1989 did not confirm that he was officially an N.W.A member. After leaving the group and its label in December, Cube sued Heller, and the lawsuit was later settled out of court. In response, N.W.Members attacked Cube on the 1990 EP 100 Miles and Runnin’ and on N.W.A.’s next and final album, Niggaz4Life, in 1991.

I conducted research on the influence of the musical group N.W.A had on society in the late 80s and their impact on today’s society. N.W.A is very well known for having changed the music industry, and they have been a controversial group since their debut album “Straight Outta Compton” was released on August 8, 1988. The album’s songs were based on the group members’ personal lives. While they did a rap about drugs and violence, they also rapped about essential issues such as police brutality and racism. While it’s been years since the group’s debut, much of what they had to say is still relevant today. The album’s songs were based on the group members’ personal lives. While they rap about drugs and violence, they also rapped about essential issues such as police brutality and racism. While it’s been years since the group’s debut, much of what they had to say is still relevant today.

Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and D.J. Yella caused a seismic shift in hip-hop when they formed N.W.An in 1986. With its hard-core image, bombastic sound, and lyrics that were equal parts poetic, lascivious, conscious, and downright in-your-face, N.W.A spoke the truth about life on the streets of Compton, then a hotbed of poverty, drugs, gangs, and unemployment. In “Parental Discretion Is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A. and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap” (Atria: 288 pp., $26), Times music reporter Gerrick D. Kennedy traces the origins of the group that birthed the first significant disruption of hip-hop during the genre’s infancy. Ice Cube once said, “Everything in the world came after this group.” In this exclusive excerpt, Kennedy details the brash arrival of N.W.A.

OF THE MANY BIG BANGS that have transformed rap over the decades, N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” is one of the loudest.

It was a sonic Molotov cocktail that ignited a firestorm when it debuted in the summer of 1988. Steered by Dr. Dre and D.J. Yella’s dark production and Ice Cube and MC Ren’s striking rhymes, then brought to life by Eazy-E’s wicked charm, the record fused the bombastic sonics of Public Enemy’s production with vicious lyrics that were revolutionary or perverse, depending on whom you asked.

The world hadn’t heard anything like it before. Radio stations and MTV refused to add the title song to their playlists. Critics didn’t get it, couldn’t see past the language, or refused to acknowledge it as music. Politicians even launched attacks, working to great lengths to condemn the music and its creators.

The Age of Hip-Hop

From the streets to cultural dominance

The 2018 Grammy nominations are an overdue acknowledgment that hip-hop has shaped music and culture worldwide for decades. In this ongoing series, we track its rise and future.

N.W.A were to hip-hop what the Sex Pistols were to rock — and really, what’s more punk than having a name that dared to be spoken or written in total and music that incensed a nation?

Red-faced and outraged Americans protested the group, police officers refused to provide security for its shows, and the F.B.I. got involved, but that didn’t stop “Straight Outta Compton,” N.W.A.’s debut album, from selling three million records without a radio single.

With “Straight Outta Compton,” N.W.A didn’t just manage to put its Hood on the map; the group forced the world to pay attention to the rap sounds coming out of the West Coast. It’s an album that provided the soundtrack for agitated and restless black youth across America with its rough and raunchy tales of violent life in the inner city, expressed through razor-sharp lyrics. It was good music,” L.A. rap radio pioneer Greg Mack said. “And the songs, they meant something.

The emergence of N.W.A — who billed itself as the World’s Most Dangerous Group — in the late eighties provided a jolt to the rap industry. Public Enemy had already helped redefine the genre by ushering in aggressively pro-Black raps that were intelligent, socially aware, and politically charged. But N.W.A opted for an angrier approach.

The group celebrated the hedonism and violence of gangs and drugs that turned neighborhoods into war zones, capturing it in brazen language soaked in explicitness. “Street reporters” is what they called themselves, and their dispatches were raw and unhinged — no matter how ugly the stories were.

Like the Beatles, N.W.A.’s lineup was stacked with all-stars: Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and MC Ren would become platinum-selling solo rappers, while D.J. Yella helped Dre break ground on a new sound in hip-hop.

They were the living embodiment of the streets where they were raised, and there were zero pretenses. And when it came to the subject matter, with N.W.A., politics took a backseat. Instead, frustrations about growing up young and black on South Central Los Angeles streets became the driving force behind their music.

Gangs, violence, poverty, and the ravishing eighties crack epidemic swept through black neighborhoods like F5 tornadoes. People were angry and restless, and without a flinch, N.W.A documented its dark and grim realities like urban newsmen.

Ice Cube once said the music took off because it was a moment in time bottled up and shaken until it burst. So it’s no surprise that the group’s most insidious track, “… the Police,” became a rallying cry in L.A. after a group of white police officers were acquitted in the savage beating of unarmed black motorist Rodney King. Those three words became a mantra, shouted and painted on walls by those who pilfered and torched the city in the days after the acquittal in what remains one of the deadliest, most violent uprisings in American history.

More than a quarter of a century before the Black Lives Matter movement, a new generation of youth turned to social-media activism to protest against police brutality, N.W.A were screaming “… the police.” Their lyrics were purposely confrontational. They shouted furiously to push back against racial profiling. They offered insight into the daily turmoil of inner-city youth through visceral storytelling, but they also promoted misogyny, homophobia, and sexual violence without abandon.

“We had lyrics. That’s what we used to combat all the forces pushing us from all angles: Whether it was money, gang-banging, crack, LAPD,” Cube said. “Everything in the world came after this group.

“N.W.A was the World’s Most Dangerous Group. We changed the pop culture on all levels. Not just music. We changed it on T.V. In movies. On radio. Everything. Everybody could be themselves. Before N.W.A., you had to pretend to be a good guy.”

N.W.A shocked middle America scared the government and sparked conflict with law enforcement. Although their run together was short, N.W.A.’s music encouraged a generation of young, black emcees to explore their rawest thoughts, no matter how obscene or radical. Today, hip-hop is seen far differently than it was during N.W.A.’s rise.

Hip-hop is credited as the single most influential genre in American pop music over the last half-century, as its artists have long gone from persona non grata to pop stars, corporate pitchmen, actors, fashion designers, tech moguls, and executives — and it wouldn’t have happened if a group of men from Compton and South Central didn’t light the fire.

Dr. Dre had become dissatisfied with his deal at Ruthless Records by Efil4zaggin’s release. So, in early 1992, he and The D.O.C. left N.W.A and Ruthless Records for Death Row Records, effectively ending N.W.A. The remaining members (Eazy-E, MC Ren, and D.J. Yella) pursued solo careers, sometimes rejoining to collaborate on new music. (Assisted by D.J. Yella, Eazy-E saw the most tremendous success of the three.) Meanwhile, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube were having luck in their solo careers, and soon Dr. Dre and Eazy-E began their own rivalry that would continue until Eazy-E’s AIDS-related death on March 26, 1995.

Dr. Dre and Ice Cube continued making music well into the 21st century, establishing their own legacies as seminal figures in hip-hop, but N.W.A retains a legacy as a vehicle for urban commentary and as a transfigurative force in hip-hop history. In 2015 a biopic about the group, Straight Outta Compton, was released in theaters to a warm commercial and critical reception. The following year, N.W.A was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

 Ice Cube had engaged in an ongoing dispute with Jerry Heller, the group’s manager, over extra royalties he believed he deserved because he had ostensibly written most of Straight Outta Compton and a significant portion of Eazy E’s 1988 solo album Eazy-Duz-It. Heller ignored Ice Cube’s demands, eventually leading to his departure. Over this time, Heller seemed to warm to Eazy E in a dangerous bid of favoritism. Ice Cube quickly set about working on his first solo album, 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, as the remaining members of N.W.A. worked on their 1990 EP 100 Miles and Runnin’. The title track from the E.P. contained a direct jab at Ice Cube that only worsened matters. The lyrics read: “We started with five, but yo / One couldn’t take it—So now it’s four / Cuz the fifth couldn’t make it.”

Ice Cube’s feud with Heller began to traverse towards the members of his old group and Eazy E in particular due to his closeness with Heller. In 1991, N.W.A. disbanded following frayed relations within the group as Eazy E grew apart from Dr. Dre.

The two swiftly insulted each other in their solo material during the early 1990s. In February 1995, Eazy E fell ill with a violent cough. Upon admission to the hospital, he was diagnosed with AIDS. On March 16, 1995, he announced the illness to the public, and just ten days later, on the 26th, he sadly passed away from AIDS-induced pneumonia.

As it transpires, the feuding trio had seemingly managed to patch up their differences in the short period while Eazy E was on his deathbed. In a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, sat beside Dr. Dre, Ice Cube recalled, “I had met with [Eazy] a few months before he died, and we had talked about getting back together. And at the time, our feud had died down, and he and Dre were still at odds, so I was like, ‘If you can get Dre to do it, I’m ready.’”

“We would probably be working together right now,” Dre added. “[We are] arguing about the work, as we did back in the past. For every project, we had a little argument about what the project should be creatively, and we would still be doing that, but at the same time, getting the work done and doing something unique.

Around his departure from N.W.A, Cube launched his movie career with a highly praised performance in the John Singleton-directed coming-of-age film Boyz n the Hood (1992). He went on to significant roles in several other successful films, including Friday (1995), Three Kings (1999), and Barbershop (2002). Recent Projects

Ice Cube cracked up audiences as the profane Captain Dickson in the 2012 movie adaptation of 21 Jump Street and reprised the role in the 2014 sequel, 22 Jump Street. In between, he released his 10th studio album, Everythang’s Corrupt.

In 2015, the story of his early days in show business was revived with the release of Straight Outta Compton, a biopic about N.W.A’s rise from the streets to become a global phenomenon. 

Still, for all his success, Cube hasn’t forgotten his roots. “I keep the fire in me,” he said. “You gotta survive in whatever environment you find yourself in. The ‘hood means everything to me. You never know when you could wind up back there.”

In 2020, Cube joined rappers Snoop Dogg, E-40, and Too Short and formed the supergroup Mt. Westmore. The group’s debut album was released on June 7, 2022. Kimberly Woodruff is an American celebrity and humanitarian.

She is better known as the wife of Hollywood superstar Ice Cube. She was born on September 23, 1970, in California, U.S.; her zodiac sign is Libra, and she follows Christianity. Woodruff and Cube got married in 1992 and have five children.

Not much is known about her parents; her father is called Hosea Woodruff, and her mother is called Doris. Her priorities are taking care of her family and supporting her husband’s career. Apart from appearances at red-carpet events, launches, and Cube’s career success events, she avoids the spotlight. She is very private and homebound and dislikes paparazzi interference in her personal space. That is why her children keep away from media attention as well.

Since she maintains a low profile, little is known about her professional background. Her husband is a famous rapper and actor, while she is a homemaker.

She met Cube while attending the William Howard Taft High School in New York City. After school, she participated at the Phoenix Institute of Technology. Even though her husband is a Hollywood star, she has never been too attached to Hollywood projects or red carpets.

Her life revolves around her family and providing the required privacy. For this reason, she is not active on common social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. Being a true philanthropist, she supports various charity organizations.

Ms. Butterfly Genesis