It Was a Good Day

The second single from The Predator, released on 23 February 1993, was written by Cube and produced by DJ Pooh. Cube recorded a demo in his home studio and the album version at Echo Sound Studios. It is built on the Isley Brothers' Footsteps in the Dark, with the Moments' Sexy Mama also sampled. Cube told Blender in 2005 that he had heard the track used before, on Can I Kill It? by Compton's Most Wanted, but only as a short loop, and that he decided to use the whole eight bars. DJ Pooh said there was not a lot for him to do, and that he added bass and vocals. Cube then went into the booth with the whole story mapped out.

Cube said the inspiration was his life at the time, in a hotel room in the summer of 1992: after the riots, what about all the good days he had? In the song the Lakers beat the SuperSonics, the air is smog-free, and there is dominoes and dice. Cube has also called it a fictional song, a little of this and a little of that, and said you cannot pinpoint the day. Next on the album comes We Had to Tear This Mothafucka Up, about the officers acquitted in the Rodney King trial.

Reception

It reached 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, 7 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and 27 in the UK. F. Gary Gray directed the video, which first aired in March 1993 and follows the lyrics. It ends with police cars surrounding Cube's house and the words To Be Continued, which lead into Check Yo Self. The Los Angeles Times found in it a tenderness rare in hard-core rap. Entertainment Weekly described a partly melancholy, partly swaggering beat. It won an ASCAP R&B Music Award in June 1994, and BBC Culture ranked it 17 on its list of the greatest hip-hop songs of all time in 2019. In 2014 a fundraiser by four friends persuaded Goodyear to fly lyrics on its blimp for the charity A Place Called Home.