Every hip-hop fan has dreamed of having a day as perfect as Ice Cube’s on “It Was a Good Day”. Even Cube himself had to shake off the song at the end, asking producer DJ Pooh, “What the f**k am I thinkin’ about?” But it’s idyllic in every sense of the word. Breakfast was cooked in the morning; he played basketball with his friends and watched Yo! MTV Raps. He won at dominoes and dice, the cops didn’t harass him, the Lakers beat the Supersonics. Eventually, it all ended with a hookup and seeing his name on the Goodyear Blimp.
“It Was a Good Day” is glued together by the gorgeous Isley Brothers sample “Footsteps in The Dark“. At the time, Ice Cube had already heard the song reworked by MC Eiht and Compton’s Most Wanted on “Can I Kill It?“. But instead of slicing off a small portion of the sample, he and DJ Pooh decided to rely on it.
“I grew up listening to the Isleys,” Ice Cube told Blender. “There were some good feelings associated right there. But I’m not claiming originality. I’d heard that track sampled before, on ‘Can I Kill It?’ by Compton’s Most Wanted, but they only used a small section for a loop. I listened to the track and the whole story came to me. I thought, ‘It’s all here. Let’s just use the whole eight bars.’”
Ice Cube Revealed How He Made Arguably His Most Iconic Song
DJ Pooh admitted that he didn’t want to touch the Isleys’ classic in the slightest. Instead, he wanted to build on the strong foundation the iconic R&B and soul group had already established.
“To be honest, there wasn’t a hell of a lot for me to do to it,” Pooh said. “I enhanced the Isleys’ music with bass and vocals to give it even more of an easy-listening vibe. There wasn’t the usual dense feeling to the music, and I wondered what he would do with it. Then Cube just went into the booth with this whole story mapped out.”
For Ice Cube, the inspiration behind “It Was a Good Day” was reflecting on the blessings of his life. Sure, he liked to make tough gangsta rap. But that wasn’t his day-to-day reality. He was at the top of hip-hop, and there were more good days than bad. Why not rap about that?
“The inspiration was my life at the time,” Ice Cube explained. “I was at the top of the rap game. It was the summer of 92, and I was in a hotel room, really in a state of euphoria. I had all the money I had dreamed of. I was in a good frame of mind. And I remember thinking, ‘Okay, there’s been the riots; people know I will deal with that. That’s a given. But I rap all this gangsta stuff—what about all the good days I had?’”
Photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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