No. 123 - Ice Cube’s “Check Yo Self” feat. Das EFX changed my life

How Simon Ward’s Gandalfian, Donald Duckian big brother shaped him forever

Jan 09, 2026

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

• 4 min read •

Having a much older brother is like having a walking, talking gateway drug to cool shit. If they so choose, this third anti-parent can be the El Chapo of dealing grade-A films, books, counterculture, and music to an impressionable young mind. Gandalfian in their wisdom, Donald Duckian in their patience with irritating 9-year-olds, when they are not using you as crash-test dummy for slide tackles in the garden or undermining your parents’ worldview, they are shaping your tastes forever.

My brother is ten years older than me (and no, I wasn’t an accident — as the story goes, at least), and via osmosis from his love of all things that could sit in a crate, thrown there by Hunter S. Thompson, Alan Moore, or Frank Zappa, he set me on a lifelong path of liking what I like, doing what I do, and quite possibly thinking what I think.

Riding that memory train back through the fuzz of time, one song bounces into my mind, still bumping from the box room of my childhood home, as if blasting from the poster of the album cover on the wall.

In the ’80s we stared at stuff a lot more. As children, we were raised on striking still images that seared themselves uninvited onto our minds — VHS tape covers (Fright Night, anyone? House, Ghoulies, From Beyond), LP cover art (Remain in Light, Master of Puppets, Out of the Blue), and ZX Spectrum cases (Daley Thomson’s Decathlon, Underwurlde). They all tied themselves into our memory palette in a way that the content of the three-thousand-mile-an-hour flicky, streamy social media age never could.

Enter the early ’90s, and enter stage left an image and a song that changed my life.

Three posters on our Steve’s bedroom wall — two hanging on from the decade before.

By the window: a curling image of The Damned’s Phantasmagoria.

By the door: Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain.

Oooo and what’s this new one in the middle, freshly blu-tacked up to unintentionally bestow on me a lifelong love of hip-hop?

Black and white. A skull-shaped pipe next to a cheek. Distorted ghost smoke drifting by sealed lips.

It’s perfect.

It’s The Predator.

It’s Ice Cube.

Go on, close your eyes — if you were listening to hip-hop in ’92, the image of this album cover will be right there.

“What the bloody hell does ‘Feat.’ mean? And who are Das Eee-Ef-Ex?”

That was my dad (and secretly me) learning that rappers feature on other artists’ songs. Wonders never cease.

“Check Yo Self” was playing while I stared at The Predator poster and listened to the two men (because that’s what my bro was by then, I was 13ish he was 23ish) discussing the song he’d been asked to turn down — because the neighbour, Mr. Gibbs (unfortunately not Freddie), was trimming the edge of his front lawn with scissors and didn’t need to hear that shotgun bullets are bad for yo health.

Simon (left) with friends in London, including Kambi Thandi (right)

Big Bro the Gatekeeper had swung open the door and I head-nodded in. From Da Lench Mob to Public Enemy to Snoop to Dre to ohmygod I’m getting chills just remembering getting the album off my own back, Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers. Then all bets were off, at least 30 years of hip-hop fandom.

I was Timberland-boot, baggy-jean bound as soon as Cube asked, “Das EFX in this, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Actually, most of the time, Mr. O’Shea Jackson, I didn’t know what you were sayin’ (sold it for a six-o, always let tricks know / and friends know, we got the indo… I’m sorry, what, duck?), but I’d be then spending years learning vernacular, dissecting lyrics, studying CD inlays, and sometimes *cringe siren* writing rhymes. The path sent me into London’s dungeon hip-hop clubs, freestyle nights, drinking Hennessy as Xzibit poured it into our mosh pit, and yadayadayada right up until last year as an old English unicorn standing out like a very tall, white thumb at Juvenile’s Juvie Tuesday in the Treme. Along the way, I connected with the people who are some of my best friends today. All thanks to that one song, that one seared image, and most importantly that one big bro.

Steve’s almost 55 now and still a never-ending personal public service announcement for new books to read, podcasts to check, documentaries to question, and always, always, always new music to listen to. And I’ve re-re-realised writing this, with slightly blurry eyes, that the love of all things creative is a love of life — what an incredible gift to give to an annoying little brother (in between making him sob incessantly by calling him Martian Head or Camel Teeth).

We lost our dad not too long ago, so my brother’s role as the third anti-parent has, unbeknownst to him, grown and morphed, and the time we spend together now is even more amazing than the precious pestered hours I fought for as a little ’un distracting him from teenage things to play with M.A.S.K. and He-Man toys.

I’m listening to “Check Yo Self” as I write this. Its funky West Coast swagger, inflected with some East Coast tiggedy-tongue fiddedy-flips, still sounds as fresh and important as all Ice Cube’s work did until he decided to become a Hollywood rent-a-scowl. This one song sent me on a meandering journey that opened me to issues of race, oppression, creativity born from rage, and much more. A funny thing as I listen on, as Cube viciously asserts that’s kinda trifle ’cause that’s a knife, hoe / AK-47, assault rifle, I don’t hear the violence or the anger. Instead, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for being introduced to one of the loves of my life and, most of all, a love for my big brother and appreciation for the years we still have together. ◆

About Simon

Simon Ward works in primary education and also writes books like The House That Fell Off the Cliff and the scary kids’ book The Perilous Prock. His two children do not think his rapping is cool.

⭐ Recommended by
Kambi Thandi (No. 089)

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