Ice Cube: “It Was a Good Day”
Early December, 2008. I’m sitting close to the bar at the Nest, an excessively smokey bar with salty bartenders near my house. I’m hunched over my Maker’s on the rocks, half-smoked cigaretted dangling from the space between my index and middle finger on my right hand. I look up and down the bar, and I spot a cute girl sitting with her friends at the couches in the back. I contemplate my move, but then come back to reality and realize I look like complete garbage, so forget that. I take a drink. Some unfamiliar modern hip hop is blaring on the stereo. I love it and hate it at the same time. I’ve found myself in this very situation too many times.
Some dude with a strong accent sits at the stool next to me, orders a gin and tonic and starts talking to me.
“Hallo. How are you?”
“I’m good. It’s Friday, y’know?” I reply
I ask about his accent, and it turns out he’s a Turkish ex-Pat who’s been living in my town for just about a year now. I ask him everything I can about Turkey: the food, the beaches, and of course the women. He prefers American women because they’re more reliable than Turkish women, supposedly. Whatever that means…
We drink and smoke and pick apart the soulless nature of modern hip hop, even though I kinda totally love T.I. He talks about coffee, and food, and women some more. We’re both kind of drunk at this point, but not falling off of our stools.
The music stops briefly, and then the beat to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” drops. I closed my eyes, started bobbing my head. Here’s the beauty: At no point did I decide to do this. It just happened. That’s what this song does to you — it completely disarms you, all your bitterness and hostility to this modern world, lonliness and isolation — it’s gone. This song is about being in that place. About having a good day, about not giving a fuck that everything that happened yesterday was totally eff’d up, and everything tomorrow will be totally eff’d up, but for right now, at this moment… It’s a good day.
I opened my eyes again after the first verse, and everything felt different. I look over to my friend, and he still had his eyes closed, bobbing his head. He was even awkwardly playing air guitar along with the riff, smiling all the while. The two guys sitting on the opposite side of my new friend had their eyes closed, bobbing their heads. I don’t think anyone in the entire bar was talking while this song was playing, now that I think about it. I think that everyone took a break from interacting with others while this song was playing, slow drags of cigarettes, patient sips of whiskey and other spirits. Everything was right.
That was a good day.
