Ice Cube is a gangsta rap icon, no ifs, buts or maybes about it. In the past few years he has made the transition to Hollywood star with ease, yet clearly the passion for music still burns within, leading us to solo album number nine – Raw Footage.

I grew up alongside the music of Ice Cube. NWA was the group that got me into hip hop music circa 1991 and his early solo albums banged on repeat day in and day out as I lived my west coast dreams through his words. As he morphed more into an actor I always kept a keen eye on his movies, his comedic work in the Barbershop and Friday series as good as his earlier takes in Boyz In The Hood and Higher Learning. This is however, where the problems began to emerge, as he became a bigger star Cube began to act in buddy flicks alongside children, the sort of roles that no doubt make him rich, but make me as a fan of movies with grit or humour cringe. Try as I might to separate the two sides of Cube from each other I cannot. I cannot watch someone taking kids across country in a lovely jaunt, then listen to their latest CD full of ghetto slang and gangsta talk. It doesn’t work, and for me music needs to be believable to be enthralling.

Raw Footage has some of Cube’s best lyrical material in years as her rails against the powers that be and their constant derision of the genre he made – gangsta rap. He slams those in power repeatedly, lyrically taking apart their arguments on tracks such as Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It and It Takes A Nation. He takes down critics of his subject matter on Thank God and highlights the problems dealt to those without an education on Hood Mentality, while Stand Tall is an empowering call to those who feel they cannot achieve their dreams.

Delivery wise it is still the same cube, although these days a less aggressive model, but his structure and the technicality of his lyrics is a long way off the best on offer in 2008. Production wise too this record struggles, gone are the rolling funk laden beats that made releases from LA perfect to bump as you drove in summer. Replacing them are takes on what is selling today – sparse beats with the occasional big kick that to me sound like they are trying far to hard to be something from the US’s south.

This isn’t the worst album I’ve heard this year by any stretch, the problem is my mind judges it against a back catalogue of some of the most powerful records ever made. Sadly, I think it’s time for Ice to become a full time movie star.