Rapper Ice Cube spoke on Bill Maher’s "Club Random" podcast and alleged there is a financial connection between the rap music industry and private prisons.
Rapper O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson was one of the members of N.W.A, a group that pioneered the "gangsta rap" genre with songs like "F--- Tha Police" in 1988. In recent years, the rapper has made headlines for questioning left-wing dogma and working with former President Trump.
Maher spoke with the rapper about the excesses of woke ideology in everyday conversation. Maher observed there is a "Mean Girls" mentality where people are looking to fault people for not using updated racial terms like "Latinx," even if the groups discussed do not use the term themselves.
"It's weird how the names always changing every so like 20 or 30 years somebody wants to put a new label on the same thing," Ice Cube said. He went on to suggest that petty debates like this are forced on society to divide people and prevent them from questioning the problems they all should unite to address.
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"It's just done to really keep us bickering and chasing these words, so they're not really getting to the root of the issues which are most of the time very common, if we really go down to the root of it," Ice Cube said.
Maher asked Ice Cube to identify some of these people who are dividing society by design.
"Who benefits and profits off our bickering and division?" Ice Cube asked rhetorically. "Follow the money."
"I don't know their names Bill, but if you follow the money, you go high enough, you start to see," he added. He then used the record industry as a "broad example of how people at the top can manipulate what's going on with the people who are bickering and fighting."
Ice Cube alleged that the "same people who own the [record labels] own the prisons," noting that, "It seems really kind of suspicious, if you want to say that word, that the records that come out are really geared to push people towards that prison industry."
Maher appeared to express skepticism at Ice Cubes claim.
"But they didn't make you write those lyrics," he said.
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"It's not about making somebody write the lyrics, it's about being there as guardrails to make sure certain songs make it through and certain songs don’t," Ice Cube responded.
He later claimed, "some records are made by committee," where a record company micromanages the lyrics and ideas used in an album, to the point a record company is "pushing a narrative." Ice Cube suggested this is an illustrative example of "social engineering," in this case ensuring "prisons stay full."
Maher checked to make sure he understood Ice Cube’s theory implying that the same people "who run the record companies may have stock" or "financial interests" in the private prison industry.
Ice Cube then said they are not directly running the record labels but have financial interests in them.
Maher analyzed Ice Cube’s theory further that "the kind of stuff in rap lyrics works as a funnel to get people inspired to do the kind of things that would get them in prison." Maher noted that one lyric such as "F--- the police" might qualify as lyrics that could inspire criminal behavior.
Ice Cube claimed those lyrics were not inspired by the record company, but were "pure artistry" on his part, touting himself as having been an "independent artist."
