Legendary artist Ice Cube has revealed one of the more bizarre feuds associated with hip-hop. And one of the antagonists was a popular children’s entertainer.
The West Coast legend shed some light on this controversy while celebrating the 30th anniversary of his seminal album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted with a digital listening party last weekend.
During the track-by-track playback, Ice Cube recalled how his song ‘A Gangsta’s Fairytale,’ sampled the theme song from Mister Rogers’ self-titled children show.
For the uninitiated, the show ‘Mister Roger’s Neighbourhood‘ aired for a whopping total of 912 episodes between 1968 and 2001 – making the TV host, of course, a legend in his own right.
And, apparently, he was not impressed about the musical appropriation – which kicked off a legal dispute over the track, originally written for Eazy-E.
Cube explained, “I actually wrote this for Eazy-E. But y’all know what it is, we weren’t getting down at the time so I had to take it myself.”
Explaining the bizarre feud, he said, “It’s a trip because off this song, Mr. Rogers sued us. He was mad because we had the Mister Rogers theme at the beginning of this shit. ‘It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood’ and all that. The n***a sued us and was getting like five cents a record until we took that part off.”
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AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was the debut studio (solo) album by the American rapper, released way back on May 16th 1990.
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