One of the more fun exercises in obscure Hip Hop pedantry has been nailing down precisely which day Ice Cube’s classic anthem It Was A Good Day refers to. It never mattered that Ice claimed that it wasn’t referring to any specific day; That’s not a good enough reason to kill the fun of lining up all of the key plot points.
Yo! MTV Raps was on the air, it was clear day, the Lakers beat the Sonics, You could still get beepers, Cube was home in LA. As comedian Donovan Strain is credited with deducing, there is a day that seems like a perfect match: On January 20th, 1992, all of these clues check out. Now, one thing missing was a Goodyear blimp flying over the city declaring that Ice Cube’s a pimp, but we all chalked that one up to creative exaggeration.
Last time I had this debate with friends, I believe we found some competing possibilities and/or holes in Strain’s argument, but fuck it. In the name of fun and good sportsmanship, we’ve all accepted January 20th as the date of National Good Day Day.
Well, on this 22nd anniversary of the Good Day, three Hip Hop heads devised a perfect way to commemorate the event. It involved the Goodyear blimp.
The so-called “Team Good Day Blimp” vowed to raise $25,000 for South Central youth organization A Place Called Home if Goodyear would send its famous blimp up into the air with a shout out. Ice Cube supported it, Jimmy Fallon plugged it, and Goodyear pretty much had no choice. As LA Weekly reports, they were a bit too conservative to display “Ice Cube’s a Pimp” on the blimp, instead opting for Ice Cube’s name, and the PC message “It’s a Good Day.”
Photos by Ted Soqui for LA Weekly.
