Chapter 15: “It was a Good Day” by Ice Cube

Hip Hop is a lot of things, and often times it is autobiographical. When a graffiti writer paints a throw-up on a wall to represent her moniker, it is a visual inscription of self, the world’s most succinct autobiography. When a b-girl creates and dances a set—with top rock, footwork, spin moves, and a freeze—it is a statement to all others in the cypher about who she is, what she represents. When a DJ, in the limited amount of time between records, selects a song to play, he is doing so based upon his personal experience with each song and a judgment about how it might move the crowd. And perhaps most explicitly, emcees speak autobiographically when they reflect upon and document the events in their lives in their rhymes.