Songfacts®:

• This is the title track to Ice Cube's movie Friday, a comedy where he plays a layabout who spends a Friday trying to survive when he and his friend (played by Chris Tucker) are threatened by the local drug dealer. It takes place in South Central Los Angeles, the setting for many of Ice Cube's songs.
• The song "Friday" describes a big ole party where folks from all over the neighborhood come together for some fun. Nothing like that happens in the film, but the song plays under the end credits, providing a uplifting coda after the main characters spend most of the movie running for their lives.
• Friday the movie did well at the box office, earning far more than it cost to make. The soundtrack was also very successful, going to #1 and selling over 2 million copies. Along with this title track, the soundtrack also features contributions from Dr. Dre, The Isley Brothers, Rick James and several others.
  
  The film became a franchise, with Next Friday released in 2000 and Friday After Next in 2002.
• Cypress Hill contributed a song to the Friday soundtrack called "Roll It Up, Light It Up, Smoke It Up," but they also accused Ice Cube of jackin' their beats for the song "Friday." According to B-Real of Cypress Hill, when Ice Cube came by the studio to hear "Roll It Up, Light It Up, Smoke It Up," they also played him another song they were working on called "Throw Your Set In The Air." Ice Cube asked to use that song in Friday as well, but they turned him down because they wanted it for their upcoming album, Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom. The Friday soundtrack was released first, with the song "Friday" sporting a chorus similar to "Throw Your Set In The Air." Cube swapped out "set" for "neighborhood" and used the same flow.
  
  This ignited a longstanding beef between Ice Cube and Cypress Hill, who flamed him with the song "No Rest For The Wicked."
• The main groove is sampled from "Darkest Light," a 1972 song by Lafayette Afro Rock Band. That saxophone lick is the same on Wreckx-N-Effect used on "Rump Shaker" in 1992. Other songs sampled in "Friday" include "Atomic Dog" by George Clinton and "More Bounce To The Ounce" by Zapp.