Ice Cube is telling people who suggest he's too old to rap to refrain from telling him to act his age.
The hip-hop icon recently dropped a new collaboration with Scarface titled "Act My Age," a tongue-in-cheek anthem celebrating veteran rappers who refuse to retire. The track and its playful music video, which features the two legends' faces superimposed on baby bodies, take direct aim at critics who mock older artists for staying active in the game.
"This is for the Black, white, brown, and beige/Never tell me to act my age," Cube raps on the hook, before firing back at anyone questioning his longevity.
While some praised the song's energy and humor, not everyone was impressed. One viral tweet called the video "a prime example of why as a rapper you just gotta know when it's time to hang the mic up." The tweet crossed Cube's path, and he didn't hold back in his response.
"I would never listen to you and hang up my mic," he wrote. "You've obviously lost your sense of humor. You need to go find it and stay out my business."
The rapper's sharp comeback mirrors the message behind the song itself, which opens with a defiant call to older MCs to keep creating despite the noise.
"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."
Last year, Cube sat down with Noah Callahan-Bever for Complex's Idea Generation and reminisced about he was originally planning on having Dr. Dre produce his debut solo album, 1990's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted; however, Eazy-E and N.W.A. manager Jerry Heller pulled the plug on that collaboration. The now-classic record was eventually produced by the Bomb Squad, with significant help from Sir Jinx and Cube himself.
According to Cube, he tried to stay on good terms with the other members of N.W.A. following his departure.
"I still tried to be friends with the guys who had nothing to do with the business," said Cube at around the 14:00 mark, below. "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."