Ice Spice on Success, Haters, and Her Debut Album: ‘I Won, Bro’

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS is many things to many people: a wildly popular cartoon character, an endlessly renewable source of memes, a sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea. To Ice Spice, he’s an icon of hard work and hustle. We’re sitting in a private room at a steakhouse in New York City’s Meatpacking District in mid-June, talking about the era that inspired her debut album, Y2K! (out tomorrow). “I think I learned a lot from that show,” Ice says. “He never wanted a day off, even when Mr. Krabs would tell him, ‘Go the fuck home.’ He’d be like, ‘No, I need to work.’ ” 

These days, Ice is sort of the same way. The 24-year-old rapper’s schedule of late has included prepping for both a European and an American tour (the latter begins July 30), traveling between New York and London for video shoots, recording new songs for the deluxe version of an album that’s not even out yet, and, as one does, shooting a scene with Denzel Washington for the upcoming Spike Lee film, High and Low. “I was so nervous because he’s a legend,” Ice says of Washington. “But he made me feel super comfortable, and it was a smooth shooting day.” 

At dinner, she’s wearing an archive Dior slip dress from the early 2000s, featuring a maximalist design — gothic patterns doused in reds, pinks, and whites. Earlier in the week, she debuted a series of different hairstyles, including a now-iconic tan­gerine-colored bob for her “Phat Butt” music video, which she teased a few days prior on Instagram. Tonight, it’s a long silky beam of fluorescent orange swimming down the length of her back. 

Ice is affable and levelheaded, with an abundance of what young people might call “aura,” that preternatural self-assuredness that comes just to the edge of cockiness. It’s the kind of armor that seems useful if not essential for a famous person in the era of the algorithm — particularly when you’re a Black woman, and particularly when you’re as good at attracting scrutiny as Ice Spice is. 

She orders the salmon, her favorite dish here, and tells me she’s been prioritizing healthy eating lately, all part of an overarching desire to make the most of her life while she has the opportunity. “It just feels like time is fleeting, so I have to take advantage of the time I do have now while I’m still young, healthy, and everything like that.” 

It seems fitting that Ice Spice would be concerned with the fleeting nature of time, since she has managed to become one of the most recognizable young rappers on Earth in just a few years. The Bronx native is already a symbol of stardom for a generation raised on TikTok’s For You Page, catapulted to fame thanks to her ability to commandeer phone screens and fickle attention spans — whether via consistently meme-able punch lines, impossible-to-look-away-from drama, skillful and mesmerizing ass-shaking, or her ever-growing catalog of bangers. 

Ice has managed to connect so thoroughly to the zeitgeist that even her detractors, in constantly analyzing her rise and supposed falloff, prove to be more invested than they would let on. When her breakout single, “Munch (Feelin’ U),” took off in 2022, the mood on social media seemed to start at ridicule — men sat in front of microphones in their bedrooms and debated the artistic merit of Ice’s rhymes and the track’s viral video. Some cited Ice’s now-signature dance move — where she hunches over, back facing the camera, and proceeds to defy the laws of gravity with her behind — as the primary reason for the song’s becoming a hit. They argued that Ice Spice was riding hypersexuality to the top, and like evangelical preachers shouting about doomsday, they saw her success as an affront to the sanctity of hip-hop. 

In fact, “Munch” was a perfect New York drill crossover, not unlike Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party,” which had also balanced the genre’s gritty bravado with a touch of club-ready brightness. “It’s funny, because once ‘Munch’ dropped, I started to feel like a clock started ticking up until I drop another smash record or a hit,” she says. “I feel like every time you do that, the clock resets.”

Seeing an opening, she put her foot on the gas, dropping a spree of songs that proved the staying power of her distinctive take on New York drill — infused with a lush, sensual, and playful sensibility. Fans started referring to Ice both as “the people’s princess” and “Princess Diana” — and like the late royal, Ice’s poise in the face of an intense celebrity culture made her allure all the more potent. Her fandom, the “Munchkins,” kept growing, and soon Ice was garnering collaborations with brands like Starry and Dunkin’. There’s even an exclusive Chia Pet designed around her signature curly orange ’fro. 

Along the way, there were surreal moments, like when Drake flew Ice and her team on a private jet to see his OVO Fest in Toronto just after “Munch” dropped. “We was on the jet like, ‘Wait, Drake’s flying us out? Like, gag,’” she says. “When we saw him, I was like, ‘Nah, this is crazy.’ He’s just casually there. There’s mad random people around, and he’s just, like, blending in somehow.” Ice says she’s still hoping to one day work with Drake, whom she counts as a major inspiration. “We talk, but we never really was on some bestie shit,” she says. “He’s excited for Y2K!, he told me.” Of the recent beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, she’s diplomatic: “I’m a music lover. So, I appreciate the sport of it — I think it’s really cool.”

A superstar Ice does count as a bestie is Taylor Swift, whom she calls her “closest celebrity friend.” The two have been pals since they worked together on the remix of Swift’s “Karma” last year. “I was living in my first apartment in Jersey, and [producer] Riot was there recording me,” Ice recalls. “And I remember my manager called me, and he usually texts, but he called, and he’s like, ‘You ready for this one?’ And I’m thinking it’s going to be some bad news or something. He’s like, ‘Taylor Swift has a record for you to get on from her album.’ I’m playing it cool on the phone. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. Super cool.’ And then I hang up the phone and I’m hysterically crying. I’m in my walk-in closet, and I’m like, ‘Bro, this is not real life.’ Riot definitely filmed it. That’ll probably be in a documentary one day.” 

Swift says she was struck by Ice’s ability to navigate the pitfalls of fame and the music industry so early in her career. “I love when I meet a new artist who takes a keen interest in not just the music, but the music industry and how it works,” Swift says. “I’ve seen how our industry tries to convince artists that they’re better off just being creative and making music and letting the labels and the management do the rest. Seeing Ice lean into the strategic, financial, and business aspects of her career is really exciting for me. The more artists learn about the inner workings of the music industry, the more power they can have in their creative world. I knew based on the questions she asked and the observations she made that she didn’t just want to be a passenger in her own career. She wanted to be the driver of it.”

Some saw Swift’s decision to work with Ice as a calculated attempt at clout, as if she were borrowing some of Ice’s cool. “Which is so rude to me, [because] why would she not want to be my friend?” Ice says. “Taylor fucks with me. She’s so funny. I think our personalities mesh really well.” 

Swimsuit: Vintage Ed Hardy from UmaLu Vintage by Uma & Luca Jewelry: Custom made by Benny Da Jeweler.

Their friendship further came under the microscope when Swift’s now-ex-boyfriend, the 1975 frontman Matty Healy, made comments about Ice that many viewed as racially insensitive. “I actually was late as fuck to that. I didn’t know about it until like a month after or something like that,” Ice tells me. “He apologized multiple times, but I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was to other people. I feel like people just wanted something to be mad about, I guess. I wasn’t angry or sad or anything. I was just kind of confused. I never really cared about that.” (Ice even says she still listens to the 1975: “I am a huge fan.”)

By the end of last year, Ice had released her debut EP, Like ..?, two collaborations with Nicki Minaj, the “Karma” remix, and the smash PinkPantheress team-up, “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” racking up four Grammy nominations and successfully beating the one-hit-wonder allegations in the process. But in January, after she released “Think U the Shit (Fart),” the online discourse turned sour again. Some listeners homed in on the track’s minimal lyrics and scatological subject matter. (“Think you the shit?” the chorus goes. “You not even the fart.”) Detractors were only more emboldened after her follow-up single, “Gimme a Light,” where she raps: “I’m Miss Poopie like I need a diaper.” 

“It’s so interesting how that took a turn,” Ice tells me. “That’s one thing that I didn’t expect. The first time I introduced ‘Miss Poopie’ was on [the 2023 track] ‘Deli.’ I said: ‘I’m the shit, I’m that bitch, I’m Miss Poopie,’ right? It just means I like shitting on bitches, I like shitting on niggas. It’s just what I like to do. I be shitting.”

Even the cover art for Y2K! faced a tide of scrutiny, as commenters asserted that the David LaChapelle-photographed image — Ice in a heavily-graffitied subway station, her back facing the camera — insufficiently captured the Y2K aesthetic. “Throughout my entire career, I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment of strictly praise. I think, through it all, there was always a lot of hate,” she says. “And I kind of appreciate that, because I find that when people are only love, they’re not as real. I don’t dwell on how people are perceiving me, whether it’s negative or positive, because that’s really what you sign up for when you put yourself out there on a public platform. It’s for people to make their opinions about you.” 

More often than not, she finds the hateful comments funny, though it can be tough to not engage with them sometimes. “It is very hard, actually, because I have a smart-ass mouth. My parents always called me a smart-ass growing up,” she says. “I also troll back, but I have to lay off that a little bit, because it’s not nice.”

I wanted to display [a new] side of me — like, ‘Ok, guys, I can rap, relax.’

BEFORE DINNER, I meet Ice Spice at a recording studio in downtown Manhattan to hear Y2K! — an album on which Ice proves, once and for all, that she’s more than a viral sensation. She arrives at the studio with her team, all of whom move with graceful precision. Bags and laptops shuffle around, and soon, RiotUSA, Ice’s longtime producer and friend, starts playing the album. Those initial singles, “Think U the Shit (Fart)” and “Gimme a Light,” are the only songs that resemble anything Ice has released so far. The rest of the record finds Ice exploring new territory. “I think I’m, like, 90 percent I’m going to do whatever I want, and then 10 percent I’ll give you something you want. But at the same time, I just really like making fun records because that’s what I like to hear most of the time,” she says.

“Phat Butt,” Y2K!’s opening track, rides a menacing synth melody and reads like a statement of purpose directed at the so-called rap purists who think she can only write catchy songs. “I did want to display that side of me as an artist because I feel like everybody’s always like, ‘Oh, it’s always you think you’re the shit, bitch,’” Ice says. “I was just like, ‘OK, guys, I can rap, relax.’” Elsewhere, like on the Travis Scott-assisted “Oh Shhh …,” Ice raps with an airy, elastic flow over booming, trap-infused horns, effortlessly bouncing off of Scott’s signature buoyant cadence. On the devilishly seductive “Plenty Sun,” she employs a near-hushed tone, expanding her sonic and lyrical register and offering up a gend­er-flipped version of the kinds of dynamics you hear Future rap about.

The album’s title refers, in part, to the fact that Ice was born at the dawn of the new millennium, right as the world freaked out about the Y2K bug. “I was really born into chaos, and I feel like the album sounds very chaotic, in a good way,” she says; it’s also about an aesthetic sensibility that’s been creeping into the mainstream for some time, fueled by Gen Z’s recent fascination with the early 2000s. “I just love the Y2K aesthetics as a whole, how people dressed,” she explains. “That’s just my shit. I would just say it’s very cunty. Right now, things can be cunty, too, but it’s just everything [in the 2000s] was focused on being cunty. Everybody was like, ‘How can I be the cuntiest?’ And I just love that.”

Fur coat sourced from Daniel’s Leather. T-shirt by Baby Dior. Jeans: Miss Me, sourced from the Vintage Twin. Pepperoni Pizza: Judith Leiber Couture

Ice recorded much of the album in Miami, where she moved briefly last year before returning to New York. The record is full of moments where she pushes the boundaries of her own sound, experimenting with different styles of delivery. On “Popa,” named for a Dominican slang term in the Bronx for “coochie,” you can hear flashes of Chief Keef, who Ice says has inspired her since she was a kid, when she raps “Told him that I love him/I was trollin’,” deftly extending her syllables for melodic effect. “I definitely wanted to branch out more and try different sounds, and it was also just really natural, too,” she says. “I’d get in the studio and say the first thing that comes to mind. A lot of these beats are still drill beats, but we’re using a lot of trap elements, too, to spice it up.”

For Ice, it all starts with the beat. She tells me excitedly about a record she’s looking forward to adding to the deluxe version of Y2K!. “The beat is hypnotizing. When I heard it, I was like, ‘Yeah,’” she says. “I don’t like to have to convince myself of a beat. I want to feel possessive of the beat. I want to be like, ‘Nobody can get this.’ Whenever I love a beat, I will tell Riot, ‘You better hit up whoever made the loop and make sure they don’t send that shit out to nobody.’”

Like many legendary producer-rapper duos who came before them, Ice and Riot have an unshakable chemistry. “Of course, we bump heads sometimes. I think all collaborators do, especially when you’re working on something so important,” Ice says. “It took time. It’s not like we just were the friendliest ever in the studio. There’s been moments where I’m like, ‘Fuck this,’ fucking flip shit over and be like, ‘I’m not recording no more,’ and just leave. But we probably have the best working relationship.”

“Did It First,” a Y2K! track featuring the buzzing U.K. rapper Central Cee, taps into that hypnotic quality Riot is so adept at conjuring. The track, which rides a pulsating quasi-Jersey Club rhythm, complete with a treacly, pitched-up vocal sample, is a perfect distillation of all of the things Ice does well, while managing to expand into more club-ready terrain. The track’s rollout, too, feels uniquely Ice Spice. In videos posted on social media in the weeks leading up to the song’s premiere, Ice and Central Cee were seen shopping together, which almost immediately fueled dating rumors. But Ice says she’s single and her relationship with the British rapper is merely platonic: “We’ve been friends since ‘Munch’ came out, honestly. We’re just twins.”

It really is hard for me to open up to people. It’s, like, trust issues.

With her packed schedule, there was one thing Ice wasn’t able to record. Charli XCX approached her to add a new verse to an official “Deli” remix Charli had premiered at her pop-up show in Brooklyn this spring. Ice was too busy finishing Y2K! to oblige, but she cleared the original “Deli” sample — and as she pulls up the remix on her phone to play it over dinner, it’s immediately clear why she did. “I’m like, ‘Girl, that’s the vibe. That one. I’m going to clear it for you. Don’t worry about that,’” Ice says. “She wanted a brand-new verse. I was like, ‘Fuck, I wish this was at a time when I had finished my album, because then I could have did it for her.’ I’ll catch her on the next one.”

ICE SPICE WAS BORN Isis Gaston on Jan. 1, 2000, a date that coincided with intense global anxiety over the future of technology — fitting for an artist at the forefront of a generation that was raised on smartphones. She recalls the stories her mother told her about what went down as she came into the world: “The day before she gave birth to me, there was a blackout or something like that, and she said everybody was panicking. People were smashing their computers. I don’t know what they thought was going to happen.” 

Ice’s mother is Dominican, and her father is African American; they split up when she was two years old, and Ice says she maintains a good relationship with both. Growing up as the oldest of six siblings on Fordham Road in the Bronx, she listened to a lot of hip-hop. “My pops was always playing a lot of Jay-Z, 50 Cent. He was playing a lot of Jadakiss and a lot of DMX, basically just, like, any popping rapper, really, from the early 2000s and stuff like that,” she says. “I feel like all of it has some type of influence on me in a way.” Her father even spent some time as an underground rapper. Hearing from her family, and her dad specifically, was a standout moment as her career began to take off: “I remember my dad was like, ‘I’m so happy for you. This is finally happening for you and things are moving,’” she says.

While Ice didn’t have a bad childhood, growing up in the Bronx could be, as she puts it, “treacherous.” In fact, the only comments online that actually seem to get under her skin are when people make jokes to the effect of “Send her back to the Bronx.” “It’s just like, bro, if you grow up in the Bronx, you know how treacherous it gets,” she says. “So it’s like, for you to threaten me to go back there, it’s like you want to fight me now.” There was no shortage of trauma in her neighborhood. “People don’t know this because I don’t talk about it much,” she tells me. “But I’ve seen people get stabbed to death. I’ve seen people bleed out on the fucking street in the middle of the day.”

Ice says she could be something of an angry kid, etching the words “I hate my life” into her dresser at one point. “My dad saw it, and he was like, ‘Is everything OK?’ I am so happy he asked me, because it really showed how much he cared about me,” she says. “But also, what type of fucking cry for help …? ‘I hate my life,’ carved into my dresser. I knew he’d fucking see it. It was just like any other teenager at the time.… It was just a lot.” 

Blouse: Vintage Christian Dior by John Galliano, sourced from Mes Deux Filles Boutique. Shoes and pendant: Vintage Christian Dior by John Galliano from Pechuga Vintage. Shorts: Vintage American Apparel. Bra: Vintage Victoria’s Secret.

Ice’s parents, wary of the activity in the neighborhood, were pretty strict about her going out. “I’m literally Rapunzel watching this [violence] happen,” she recalls. “And so, I’d be on the fourth floor looking down. A lot of shit like that would happen.”

She always knew she’d make something more of her life. She tells me about a realization she had while in her high school health class, while learning about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “One of my favorite teachers, Ms. Marques, was telling the class how, in order for us to live a fulfilled life, we had to basically check off all these boxes,” Ice remembers. “You have to look at every area of your life and evaluate it and be like, ‘Am I happy with this?’ And do that for every area of your life, whether it’s family, relationships, your personal health, or your image. And it’s like there’s just this whole self-fulfillment thing. I don’t want to make it seem like everything I do is for myself, but it kind of is.”

As a kid, Ice tended to keep things close to the chest; even as an adult, you never see her getting too personal on social media. “I don’t like social media rants because it allows people to see me in a super vulnerable way, and then I feel like people will use that against me,” she says. “I never want people to use my vulnerability against me. Because it really is hard for me to open up to people. It’s, like, trust issues. And I think it really just comes from where I grew up and seeing people fucking stab each other and shit like that.” 

Riot cites Ice’s New York background as the reason she’s been able to navigate a quick rise to stardom. “She’s hella strong, bro. I think it’s the New York in her. And as a woman in New York, too, I’m assuming you have to be strong,” he says. “She used to tell me that in high school she was always the hot topic. So I feel like she’s been used to people talking about her for good or for bad, whatever it is.”

After high school, Ice enrolled at SUNY Purchase, just north of New York City, where she majored in communications. Riot, also a Bronx native, met Ice at SUNY. “And then she found out that I started doing music and was recording my own music, and then that’s how we started chilling in the studio,” Riot recalls. “Once we got a little bit more cool, she started texting me little voice notes and shit like that. And that’s when I really heard her for the first time. She had this dope tone, and she was rapping this Brooklyn-drill flow on these AXL-type beats and these Sheff G-type beats. I’m just like, ‘Bro, I’ve never heard nothing like this, ever.’” 

How do I deal with the hate? I don’t give a shit, because I won, bro.

Ice lived on SUNY’s campus for a semester, then moved in with her grandmother, commuting back and forth to school. Eventually, she’d stop attending school altogether. Riot helped her get hooked up with a job working in a warehouse packing orders for the Pharrell Williams-owned streetwear label Billionaire Boys Club around the beginning of the pandemic. “That was a fun-ass job though, because we was able to play music off the laptop and shit,” Ice remembers. “Our boss was mad cool.” (In something of a full-circ­le moment, she’s working on merch with the brand now: “It’s coming. We have BBC x Ice Spice merch.”)

Ice took on a few other jobs, too, namely babysitting. All the while, she and Riot were recording the handful of songs that would end up changing her life. First came “No Clarity,” the Zedd-sampling drill track that introduced Ice’s sensibility — a playful yet sincere take on drill’s intensity — to the world. The song got a little pickup on rap blogs, though it featured a viral hook that presaged Ice’s knack for quotable lines, something she’d solidify on “Munch,” which would come shortly after. 

“That’s when we learned there’s always more work to do,” Riot says. “We were like, ‘Oh, shit, we got to keep going crazy. We got to do bigger things than this.’ That’s how we were feeling.”

IN LATE JUNE, Ice performs “Phat Butt” at the BET Awards, and the moment marks the beginning of a subtle shift in public opinion back in her favor. After weeks of commentary focused on poop, the haters are treated to a triumphantly well-executed live show. Clad in a custom lace two-piece and furry white boots, Ice commands the gaze of the camera, rapping and dancing on cue with an enthralling confidence that makes it hard not to root for her. Performing live is something Ice is becoming very good at, in fact. Her Coachella set this spring was a sensation, drawing a massive crowd and even more massive social numbers on the videos. 

The day before that BET triumph, I meet Ice as she rehearses at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. She arrives in the greenroom around noon, wearing Givenchy boots and a miniskirt, and immediately begins to assess all of the work they still have to do. She remembers watching awards-show performances on TV growing up: “I’d be like, ‘Oh, that was awkward. Why the fuck would they do that? Why was she looking there?’ When you’re doing it yourself, you’re like, ‘OK, this is a lot.’ There’s like 10 different cameras. There are cues, and everything is just so much, but it’s fun, though. At the end of the day, when it’s over, it’s fun.”

Outfit by Balenciaga. Necklaces custom made by Azature.

There’s an issue with the wardrobe. A panty that was shipped from Italy hasn’t arrived yet, and a few of the items needed for rehearsals haven’t shown up, either. Ice is clearly frustrated, though she has a gentle way of expressing anger: stern, but never yelling. “The thing is, I’m going to cry before I start yelling,” she tells me. “I can’t get loud because I’m going to start crying. I literally had to stop talking because I was about to start crying. I was getting so frustrated. It’s like tears of frustration, it’s not sadness. It’s like I’m super fucking irritated and I know I can’t fight you, so I’m going to just start crying because I know I don’t want to go to jail. You know what I mean? I love my job. I love freedom. So, it’s crying out of restraint.”

When she finally makes her way to the stage to rehearse, I notice just how self-aware Ice is. Every camera angle, every possible permutation of perception is accounted for. Everything has to be perfect. It’s a burden typically reserved for women in the public eye, as Ice notes to me later. “We do live in a misogynistic world where it’s like you have to be breathtakingly hot to get certain opportunities,” she says matter-of-factly. “I was born as a woman and raised as a woman, so I only know this lifestyle, but I could just imagine how easy it is for guys. I am very jealous when the men on my team get to sleep an extra five fucking hours because they don’t have glam.” By the end of the rehearsal, she’s giving notes to the producers about changes that’ll be needed from the camera operators. 

After rehearsal in L.A., Ice and her team make their way to a press junket for the BET Awards. I follow behind as they shuffle through a maze of impromptu radio-booth setups, with Ice giving brief, rapid-fire interviews to everyone from nationally syndicated radio hosts to upstart podcasts. Besides LL Cool J, who I see walking through the premises, Ice appears to be the most coveted interview of the day. 

In one of her last interviews of the session, a radio host asks her if she thinks there can be an all-female rap tour, and Ice appears to be visibly annoyed. “I’m like, ‘Hasn’t there been?’ I’m pretty sure there has been. I think there are some going on right now,” Ice tells me in her hotel room later. “I just feel like that narrative is so dead. There are so many rap girls that have just done so many big things simultaneously. It’s not like one or the other. There’s so many different flavors to choose from now.”

And women in rap shouldn’t be seen as a monolith. Take Latto, who’s made hits like “Big Energy” — and traded subtle jabs with Ice Spice in their music. Fans speculated that “Think U the Shit” is about Latto; when the Atlanta rapper became the first woman to headline a local radio station’s Birthday Bash summer concert, her friends even got her a poop-shaped cake, a photo of which Latto tweeted with the caption “Think I’m the shit, bitch ?????”

“I feel like if we ever spoke and I asked her ‘What’s the issue?’ it’d be like a blank stare. It’d really be no issue whatsoever. Especially from me,” Ice says. “I can understand a friendly competition, but I just feel like at this point it’s a joke that she’s just dragged out, and it’s just not even funny. Like, bro, ‘Think U the Shit’ is from January. You’re going to post a piece of shit cake to announce something that’s good news for you? But it is kind of a compliment because you’re taking something that’s supposed to be a fun moment for you and you’re making it about me … again.”

Less fraught, but nearly as talked about, is Ice’s relationship with Nicki Minaj, who at one point dubbed Ice the princess to her queen of rap. Despite rumors to the contrary, Ice says her relationship with Minaj is in a good place. “We don’t have the closest relationship, you know? But we’re definitely good,” she tells me. “We’re mutuals. We had smash records together. I love us together. I think the world does too.”

Earlier this year, a former close friend of Ice leaked text messages in which Ice expressed frustration with the contract negotiations with Minaj for their joint song on last year’s Barbie soundtrack. “I think that the saddest part of the whole situation, it’s somebody I knew for so many years and called my friend had me open up and be vulnerable with them, and then took complete advantage of that for her own benefit,” Ice says. “So that was the saddest part really, just feeling used, basically.” 

Minaj hasn’t commented on the leaked messages, and there hasn’t been any public rift between the two since. “She’s busy as hell,” Ice says. “I don’t really think she cares about shit like that coming from a random girl. But what I said in those texts was just in a moment of frustration around contract negotiations. I could have chose different words. But at the end of the day, regardless of how I felt in that moment, [Nicki] is still somebody I respect as an artist, and I’m always going to admire everything she’s done for me and the culture.” 

As we talk, evening is beginning to set in, and Ice has some food delivered to her hotel room. More salmon, which she shares with me. I ask how she manages to go through such long days — grueling rehearsals, daunting press circuits, and the like — all while seeming to be mostly unbothered. She tells me a story about a driver she had once, who she saw quickly hide a lottery ticket when she got into his car. The moment triggered something of an epiphany. 

“It literally made me sad. I was just like, ‘Fuck, bro. There’s people out here wanting to win the lottery, and I feel like I won the lottery,’” she says. “When I think about that, it really humbles me and it makes me so grateful. So when people ask me, ‘Oh, how do you deal with the hate?’ I don’t give a shit, because I won, bro. I win at life. I can only just be grateful for people talking shit, for people supporting me. Everything that comes with the territory, I can only be grateful for.”