The recent release of Like You is an unabashed exposé by musical artist I.C.E. In this new single and accompanying music video, the LA-based artist owns his own young-man-angst–wholly and in style.
His highly autotuned electronic style and an endless slew of shots in which he swaggers through LA make I.C.E look out of reach, like yet another fame-washed LA-boy with designer clothes and sports cars and fast friends. His latest music video, Like You, is visually transfixing, with its highly saturated scenes of convenience stores and diners and gas stations, all shot by a camera that moves too fast through the fast-crowd. Hidden behind glamorous, catchy, visuals, though, is a boy-next-door.
The Asian American rapper’s early-2024 single Need You was a soliloquy about being “left on read” by a subject of his romantic interest. In Like You, he “can’t help comparing every girl to the one that got away.” In other words, the fodder motivating I.C.E’s struts through Los Angeles and inspiring his highly stylized bars is not that deep. And we can’t help but respect his honesty—he makes no attempt at hiding plain old hurt behind verbosity, behind a set of make-you-read-between-the lines lyrics. Simplicity is communicated simply. I.C.E doesn’t make any show of treacly introspection—rather, he wallows proudly, and invites us to join him.
As an Asian American artist, I.C.E is, by default, a guest in the African American-created and rightfully still-dominated genre. His response is to crossbreed hip-hop with electronic dance music and pop, to borrow elements from an assortment of cultures and musical genres in order to produce a polyglot-offspring. If you speak pop well enough, as most Gen Zs and Gen Alphas probably do, then you’ll probably like I.C.E. Heck, if you’ve ever been left on read or liked someone who didn’t like you, then you’ll probably like I.C.E. For most of us, at least the latter is true. For once, maybe we should consider ourselves lucky.