Mister Rogers Would Never Sue Anyone Except [REDACTED]
Welcome to the neighborhood, mother****er
I love Mister Rogers. The sound of his voice, the soft fur of his sweaters, the lilt of his puppet voices. They make me feel cared for, home, and safe.
He wasn’t perfect. Not by any means. But by god, he embodied what he preached. He just wanted to give each child an expression of care. Even that mean as hell Senator in 1969 didn’t get an eye for an eye. Fred responded with his greatest song delivered in spoken lyrics.
You’d have to cross a line I’ve never even heard of to get Mister Rogers to snap.
One man unfortunately had cubes cold enough to find out.
Mister Rogers sued me over my first solo album
“He was mad because we had the Mister Rogers theme at the beginning of this ****,” Ice Cube said, recalling the history behind “A Gangsta’s Fairytale,” the ninth track of his 1990 debut solo album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.
Now I’m not sure about you, but I honestly have no idea what it would be like for Fred Rogers to take a swing at me.
Would it matter if the fist belonged to him or one of his puppets?
Because I’m betting either way, it would hurt.
You come at the king, you best not miss
Ice Cube hasn’t shared many details about the incident ever since it happened, and Fred Rogers didn’t utter a peep to the public about it.
If not for the topic coming up in an exclusive interview with Brian Coleman — former Medium writer and now the founder of Good Road, a media relations, event management, writing agency, and record label based in Boston —I might have forgotten to ask.
“He told us we couldn’t use it,” Ice Cube added in an article for Global News. “We took the song off the album, and he sued us anyways… [He] was getting like five cents a record until we took that part off.”
But there’s always one tiny bit more to the story, isn’t there?
Thankfully, Ice Cube’s long-time friend and American hip-hop producer Sir Jinx was available to add a few supporting details.
Jinx: Here’s how you know who the true fans are — the first 200,000 copies of the album have a piece on the beginning of “A Gangsta’s Fairytale” that’s like Mister Rogers [Jinx sings a version of theme song with gangsta drawl… after “Won’t you be my neighbor?” he makes sounds of gunfire].
The second version just starts out with, “And now, in the black part of the city.” If you got the version with the dude singing Mister Rogers then it’s probably worth some money! Ultimately we had to pay Mister Rogers five cents a record, he got paid off of that. After the first 200,000, we took it off. That mean-ass man! [laughs]
So there you have it
It’s hard to believe there are fairy tales you’ve never heard before, but now you can finally cross this one off the list.
Once upon a time, Mister Rogers sued Ice Cube.
I’m not sure what the lesson was. Fred never talked about it, at least not directly…but if he felt strongly enough to sue Mister Cube, maybe he felt strongly enough to leave a coded message?
