"I was already into the game and I already knew Cube when this came out. I already knew Public Enemy too because I worked with them with my first band, The 7A3 and they produced one song on our album. At this time, I was hip to the game and when Ice Cube released this record I was just like 'This is fucking dope.' I knew a little of what to expect [from hearing mixtapes] but he was taking the best from two different coasts and just putting them both together; you knew this shit was going to be special – there's no way it could not be. With his time in NWA coming out of the West Coast, it was the first time you heard a great rapper coming out of that area: not a good one, but a great one with power. Now you had a West Coast MC with a New York based production unit, a New York sound which was something revolutionary in the game and I felt that the power that he brought was incredible. Ice Cube brought what was going on in certain parts of LA to the world. He left NWA, he did his first solo album with Public Enemy's producers. The storytelling, the self-centric lyricism of Ice Cube was phenomenal: that shit just took over. It was in many ways like a gangster Public Enemy and it changed the way people viewed and listened to this music, including me. Previously, you thought there were limits to how far you could go when you listened to this type of music but he just shattered every fucking limit that you thought there was: Ice Cube shattered your perception of music."

"I got to love this album when I was 18, working in a second hand clothes shop in Glasgow, where one of the guys I worked with played it constantly. It was the first time I had heard music that felt like genuine contemporary protest music. The combination of Chuck D’s informed eloquence and unashamed confrontational stance was so potent. Here was a guy name-checking Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the same breath as Coltrane and Anthrax. It was revolutionary in every sense. It felt dangerous. These guys had the FBI tapping their phones and were taking on the behemoth of the US establishment. While in retrospect the S1Ws may be the campest paramilitaries in history, the imagery of guerrilla conflict intensified the sense of resisting persecution. Like the best groups, it felt like a gang, too. Flav the joker, Chuck the boss, Terminator-X voiceless, but ever-present. Tight. Then there was the music. That fragmented repetition. Those bursts of brass and breakbeats, squealing like sirens against stolen guitars. Amazing. It didn’t sound like anything else. While Chuck D and his cartoon foil Flavor Flav had the lyrical articulacy, Terminator-X, Professor Griff and the Bomb Squad matched it musically. Their imagination was in context – how to take something from its original context, place it against something else out of context to create something way more powerful than either in isolation. In many ways, I still see this LP as the pinnacle of rap. Of course it is of its time and sonic trends advanced, but for sheer inventiveness and lyricism it has never been matched. It felt like rap was violently booting the world into a better direction – a brief flash of genius before it became mired in the vocabulary of egoism, misogyny and avarice. There have been great pinnacles since, but nothing matches this moment."