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Ice Cube's High School yearbook photo from Taft High School. Other alumni include Wilmer Valderrama, Everlast, Lisa Kudrow, the actresses who played Cindy and Marcia Brady and Joan Jett. Not really the type of school I pictured him going to after listening to Straight Outta Compton, to be honest.
Thanks to the forums at CocaineBlunts, I came across some pre-N.W.A. work from everyone's favorite socially conscious gangsta rapper turned wholesome family movie star, Ice Cube. At the age of 16, Ice Cube hooked up with rapper Sir Jinx and Jinx's cousin Dr. Dre to form the group C.I.A. After putting together a few tracks under C.I.A., Cube would eventually drop Sir Jinx and hook up with Eazy-E to perform the song Boyz-N-The-Hood, and the rest is history.
The C.I.A. tracks were made in 1986 and you can hear a strong influence from some of the East Coast groups that were big at the time. The beats Dre uses sound a lot like what Run DMC was putting out at the time, and the tag team raps between Cube and Sir Jinx make them sound like a Beastie Boys imitation (they even sample the Beasties' The New Style on one of the songs). Here are two of the C.I.A. tracks. For those listening closely at home, you'll notice that the second song uses an early version of N.W.A.'s Dopeman beat:
My Posse
Just 4 The Cash $
9/7/2006 10:07:10 AM posted by Fresh