Ice Cube has a message for anyone suggesting he’s too old to rap — mind your business.
The hip-hop legend recently released “Act My Age,” a tongue-in-cheek collaboration with Scarface that celebrates veteran rappers who have no plans to retire. The playful track, paired with a hilarious video showing the duo’s faces edited onto baby bodies, fires back at critics who clown older artists for staying in the game.
“This is for the Black, white, brown, and beige / Never tell me to act my age,” Cube declares on the hook, doubling down on his longevity and confidence.
While plenty of fans praised the song’s humor and energy, not everyone was on board. One viral tweet slammed the video as “a prime example of why as a rapper you just gotta know when it’s time to hang the mic up.”
Cube quickly clapped back, writing, “I would never listen to you and hang up my mic. You’ve obviously lost your sense of humor. You need to go find it and stay out my business.”
Ice Cube’s fiery clapback perfectly echoes the message at the core of his new track, which kicks off with an unapologetic rallying cry for older rappers to keep creating no matter what anyone says.
“If you over thirty-five and still rapping, keep rapping, my boy,” Cube declares in the intro. “Fuck all of that, ‘Oh, I’m getting old’ shit. No, we need y’all, we need y’all to save music. We need the real lyricists back.”
In a 2023 interview with Noah Callahan-Bever for Complex’s Idea Generation, Cube reflected on his early solo career and revealed he initially planned for Dr. Dre to produce his debut album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. However, that idea was shut down by Eazy-E and N.W.A. manager Jerry Heller. The now-iconic project ended up being produced by The Bomb Squad, with major contributions from Sir Jinx and Cube himself.
“I still tried to be friends with the guys who had nothing to do with the business,” Cube said around the 14-minute mark of the interview. “Me and Eazy was shaky, and I didn’t care about Jerry Heller at all, so it wasn’t no love lost there. But I tried to keep it together with Dre. I even wanted Dre to produce my solo record, and we was talking about it, but Eazy and Jerry vetoed it.”
