However, this isn’t the only thing that makes this song sound so smooth. You can nod your head to the beat and the words line up with your nod better than if he rapped, say, a triplet flow (like Migos). Laying lines and words on that rhythm exactly, as Ice Cube does here, makes the words sound perfectly in place. The 1/8th note is a fundamental rhythm in music, especially music in 4/4 time (as Martin has mentioned before, 4/4 is the time signature of almost all hip hop songs and a good majority of western songs from all genres). Those, and others throughout the song, land on 1/8th note beats. Notice the ending syllables on many of the lines and the beats they land on: “thank god”, “no smog”, “no hog”. Notice how the syllables of his words fit into the beat nothing ever sounds too rushed, everything feels nice and in place.

And while using simple end-of-bar rhymes, while the most common way to rap at the time, definitely contributed to the overall feel of contentment and easygoing-ness that Ice Cube was looking for, that’s not necessarily what I mean by lyrical complexity. Ice Cube takes his time detailing the events of his day and doesn’t spend much time trying to be lyrically complex. However, he doesn’t take advantage of the slow tempo to up the complexity. This isn’t a particularly fast-paced song at an cool ~80 BPM (beats per minute), the song chugs along nicely and gives Ice Cube plenty of time to stretch his lyrical chops and fit in as many syllables as he wants. There’s a two main things I noticed that made this particular track sound so silky-smooth: Ice Cube’s rhythmic choices and his disregard of bar lines.

But it’s more than the subject-matter and production that makes this track feel so smooth. In my opinion, that’s what made this song stand out so much: it was one of his only really laid-back tracks (he even acknowledges this at the end with the outro). I won’t go into all the details of Ice Cube’s persona and relevance, as I’m sure you’re already well aware of his intensity as both a rapper and a person.

E z e boyz n the hood