As Jackson himself says, his songs never strayed far from the truth. But the Los Angeles riots that followed the verdict had little to do with non-violent protest those six days were the most violent period of race-related unrest in America since the Civil War. Of course, The Predator has no shortage of fever-dream fantasies about finding the LAPD officers and the jury and making them pay for the beating and the verdict. The old song had new life as people searched for music that captured their anger in those moments.Ĭalling the songs pure fantasy is, it seems, a kind of revisionist history. Two years later, in the wake of the Mike Brown killing and the lead-up to the grand jury’s decision, the page lit up again. Two years ago, when George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, the YouTube page for The Predator’s Rodney King verdict revenge fantasy “We Had To Tear This Mothafucka Up” came to life with commenters looking for an outlet for their outrage. The same themes underpin Jackson’s earlier albums, but rarely as poignantly as on The Predator-an album of reaction rather than prediction, equal parts journalism and hip-hop fantasy that captured a specific moment in America.Įxcept, those songs have refused to stay buried in the memory of racial strife in the 1990s. That decision, and the days of deadly rioting that followed, fueled Jackson’s most successful album, The Predator, which ripped the verdict and the King beating as just one snapshot of a far wider culture of systemic subjugation of black people in America. That feeling Jackson describes is the same one he felt in 1992, when a jury in Los Angeles found the four police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King not guilty of assault and excessive force. “I feel the same way: mad as fuck,” he says. He says he doesn’t remember precisely where he was when he heard about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson in the Mike Brown killing-he suspects his wife told him the news-but the feeling was a familiar one. Jackson is in Australia at the moment, finishing an Ice Cube tour that spanned the first half of December.

Ice cube the predator