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West Coast rap legend and movie star Ice Cube plays the downtown Showbox Thursday, the day after the new album “Raw Footage,” Cube’s ninth solo unloose, comes out.

The 39-year-old has accomplished plenteous in his storied career, been many things to many people. When we talk about the frosty, scowling man who’s “blacker than a trillion midnights” and legally named O’Shea Jackson, the kind of do we talk about?

Depends on which Ice Cube you know.

Music lovers — primarily adults and historically minded hip-hop fans — will fetch up early Cube classics: brazenly inventive and hugely pissed-off sounding albums like 1988’s “Straight Outta Compton” (with seminal gangsta thump act N.W.A.) and solo debut “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” (1990). Movie buffs will bring up another masterpiece, the Ice Cube-starring Academy Award nominee “Boyz N the Hood” (1991). Along with a few other good movies, those achievements free from danger his artistic legacy.

Young people know latter-day, family-friendly Ice Cube. They like his 2002 comedy “Barbershop” (his new film, “The Longshots,” opens nearest Friday). Seattleites hear 1992-era Cube on “feel merciful” radio office MOViN 92.5 FM, to which place his melody “It Was a Good Day” plays daily and fills a nostalgia quota.

Older Seattleites remember the Paramount in 1992.

Following some Ice Cube performance the day after Christmas, around 50 shots were fired randomly, at civilians and at police outside the venue. People fought and stabbed in the street. Gun barrels exploded out Town Car windows. Police fired back. It was a melee.

Neither the police, Paramount management nor the contrive’s promoter took responsibility. As with the incident outside Tabella last year or a single one shooting near hip-hop — a more worn out incident than, say, near a symphony concert — race blamed the minstrelsy.

Back then, 23-year-old Ice Cube was the most famous rapper out, a would-be antihero who recklessly propagated an image of anger and wrong that became what we talked about when we talked about rap in the ’90s. His lyrics — directed at (among other groups) police and Asian corner-store owners (”F — Tha Police,” 1988; “Black Korea,” 1991) made him part journalistic muckraker, part vengeance cheerleader.

If the City of Seattle is unfriendly to rap music today, this is while it started.

Today, any Ice Cube concert hardly registers being of the kind which a scary thing.

Cube isn’t the rapper he used to be, one and the other. It’s the cultural climate, or it’s Cube, or both, further he hasn’t matched the smart/young/punk energy of his forward albums. He’s had isolated hits, if it be not that not many.

Ice Cube’s new “Raw Footage” is mildly reinvigorated, and its new unmarried, “Do Ya Thang,” slightly better than expected — but the Showbox concert will most pleasing be an expertly performed, mega hit parade. Ice Cube is nothing if not a charismatic performer, after all, and with other thing timeless classics than most rappers have songs.

Andrew Matson: 206-464-2153

or amatson@seattletimes.com