Ice Cube Laugh Now Cry Later Turns 20 — When Cube Got Mean Again

June 6, 2006 — twenty years ago today, Ice Cube dropped Laugh Now, Cry Later, his seventh solo album and his first since the family-movie pivot of Are We There Yet? made suburbia forget who was holding the AK on the cover of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. The album debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200 with 144,000 first-week copies — a chart spike that surprised exactly nobody who’d been waiting for Cube to remember what his face looked like when he wasn’t smiling next to a minivan.

The lead single, “Why We Thugs”, was a Scott Storch beat that pulled Cube’s voice back into 1991 South Central — air-raid synths, low-end weight, and Cube cataloging the reasons crack flooded his block before he picked up a pen: the CIA, Reaganomics, Daryl Gates, the LAPD’s CRASH unit. It was the same lecture he’d been giving since Death Certificate, but at 36 he’d earned the right to repeat himself — and Storch’s beat made the lecture sound like a threat, not a history class.

The follow-up “Go to Church” — Cube with Snoop and Lil Jon, produced by Lil Jon at peak crunk — was the commercial play, and it worked. But the album’s real spine is in the deep cuts. “Doin’ What It ‘Pose 2da” is Cube in pure mosque-and-pulpit mode. “Smoke Some Weed” is the Lench Mob reunion in everything but name. And “Click, Clack — Get Back!” is just Cube reminding you that the man who wrote “F— tha Police” at 19 hadn’t mellowed; he’d just learned how to invoice. Released on his own Lench Mob Records imprint after a decade of label fights, Laugh Now was the sound of Cube finally owning the masters — and using that ownership to make the meanest record he’d made since The Predator.

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Also today in hip-hop

Jurassic 5 — Quality Control (2000) turns 26. Cut Chemist and DJ Nu-Mark’s turntables, four-MC harmonies, Interscope budget. The album that proved the Good Life Café lineage could survive the major-label leap without losing its bookworm soul. Still the cleanest mix-and-cut record of the early 2000s.
DJ Khaled — Listennn… the Album (2006) turns 20. Twenty years ago today, Khaled stopped being just the voice on 99 Jamz and became the brand. Debuted #12 Billboard 200. “Holla at Me” (Khaled with Lil Wayne, Paul Wall, Fat Joe, Rick Ross, Pitbull) was the proof-of-concept for every All-The-Major-Players posse cut he’s built since.
Yung Joc — New Joc City (2006) turns 20. “It’s Goin’ Down” hit #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 the same week Cube hit #4 on the Billboard 200 — Atlanta and South Central sharing the chart, just like they had in 1996. Joc’s motorcycle dance lap is still the unofficial summer-cookout cue ten years past its expiration date.
Vic Mensa is 33 today (b. 1993). Chicago kid who came up through Kids These Days, signed to Roc Nation off “Down on My Luck,” and stayed political when it wasn’t profitable. The Autobiography still bumps.
Billy Preston died June 6, 2006. Not strictly hip-hop, but the Fifth Beatle’s catalog has been sampled by Madlib, Kanye, Common, Pete Rock, and a hundred boom-bap producers you haven’t heard of. Pour out something for the keys.