The year: 1988. The song: "Fuck tha Police," that thunderous, angry attack on the LAPD waged by N.W.A. Given the honor of opening up the track, N.W.A. member Ice Cube didn't exactly hold back: "Fuck the police, comin' straight from the underground/A young ni**a got it bad cause I'm brown/And not the other color so police think/They have the authority to kill a minority." And variations on that sentiment continued to knock on Cube's subsequent early 1990's solo albums, from AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted (1990) through Lethal Injection (1993).
Flash forward 26 years to today, January 17, 2014. Two years removed from playing the police captain in 21 Jump Street, O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson is fictionally working for the fuzz once again in Ride Along (in theaters today), his new action-comedy co-starring comedy's man of the hour, Kevin Hart. Cube stars as Detective James, a hard-nosed, by-the-books cop who takes his younger sister's small, goofy boyfriend (Hart) out on the job for a day to see if little man has what it takes to marry his sibling. It's the reckless and hilarious Hart's movie, no doubt, but Ice Cube is there the whole time, playing a cop, without any meta references to "Fuck tha Police" or his past lyrical rants against po-po. There is, however, a rather hokey wink-wink moment where his character says, "All in all, I gotta say… Today was a good day!"
Scouring through Twitter, Complex discovered something extraordinary—somehow, the early '90s version of Ice Cube, in his Death Certificate/The Predator state of mind, managed to catch an advanced Ride Along screening. Boyz n the Hood, it was not. Naturally, he live-tweeted the whole thing on his personal account. This is what happens when a '90s gangsta meets 2014 technology and his own Hollywoodized future self.
