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Amerikkka's formerly
most wanted
Ice Cube's solo
reissues and the fire next time.
By Hua Hsu
IN 1992,
Ice Cube was scary. A couple of months after riots had permanently wounded the soul of Los Angeles, the former N.W.A. rapper found himself onstage at the Shoreline Amphitheatre as part of that summer's Lollapalooza tour. In a scene that was surely replicated at all of that summer's shows, Cube prefaced "The Nigga Ya Love to Hate" by asking the crowd to yell at him "Fuck you, Ice Cube." The crowd – confused, a bit frightened – threw back a stale effort, the half-hearted words hanging in the air and dying somewhere short of the stage. "Louder," he teasingly boomed, until thousands who would probably cross the street if they saw him coming were cursing him to high noon. Cube laughed – it sounded like it was pointed back at the audience – "Good."
At the height of his popularity, Ice Cube seemed as though he was put in this world to make people feel uncomfortable. He arrived with his feet up on the table, and you could never really tell where you stood in his imagined crusades. As a member of seminal don't-give-a-fuckers N.W.A., Cube was the one with the meanest scowl and the hardest presence. But when he broke with the band in 1989 and forged east to start a solo career, he grew from the pissy little "crazy motherfucker" choking on unnamed furies into an intensely proud young man angling all the hopes, contradictions, and indignations of inner-city life into some of the most powerful, if not prophetic, songs ever recorded. Priority/Capitol recently reissued Cube's first four solo albums with bonus tracks and additional material like the 1990 Kill at Will EP, as well as Ice Cube: The Video Collection on DVD. Together the releases capture the politics, paradox, and violence of his uneasy growth spurt.
When Cube walked away from N.W.A., only Public Enemy was as storied or as infamous as the Compton quintet. They both rolled deep with flowing characters, subplots, and custom-made mythologies. But where PE kicked knowledge and discipline and suggested hope to millions of radicals-in-waiting, N.W.A. fixed on the dark and dreary. They spoke to the dispossessed and the forgotten, to those who didn't want to be part of any conscious army or whatever, but just wanted to be and say as they saw fit.
Cube chilled out in New York and got together with Public Enemy's production team, the Bomb Squad. He resurfaced in March 1990 on Public Enemy's galloping "Burn Hollywood Burn" and released his solo debut, Amerikkka's Most Wanted, two months later. Perhaps the most ominous aspect of the album is its cover. There stands Cube in the foreground, eyebrows arched menacingly and hands clasped confidently. Behind him is his own nation of millions, a dense and seemingly endless mass of young black men crowding a Los Angeles street. To nonbelievers, scared sheetless, it was a prophetic image suggesting that Cube wasn't alone and that the anger, the politics, and the violent fantasy of redemption weren't his inventions.
In retrospect, Amerikkka's is neither his most complete nor his most compelling album. It finds Cube channeling the rage of his N.W.A years and directing it toward more concrete aims. Following the success of Amerikkka's – which went gold in 10 days, then platinum in three months – Cube released Kill at Will, notable for the seminal pour-some-out theme "Dead Homiez." On Halloween of 1991, he released the powerful Death Certificate. Consisting of a "death" side – because he accused black America of being "mentally dead" – and a "life" side, the disc is the sound of Cube getting things together in his head. The album insert depicts Cube standing on a sidewalk reading The Final Call, his body – and the paper's headline, "Unite or Die" – dividing Da Lench Mob from some Nation of Islam brothers.
Where the album's "death" side is full of lurid hedonism, the "life" side aspires toward hope and self-determination but instead lands somewhere deeply disturbing. Antiwhite statements like "I Wanna Kill Sam" and "Horny Little Devil" may have fit with Cube's revenge-obsessed and Nation of Islam-influenced view of a black-and-white world, but "Black Korea" took his bile to the next level. It was a vicious riposte to the "chop suey ass" merchants whom Cube saw as a blight to black neighborhoods. The song ends with the warning "So pay respect to the black fist or we'll burn your store, right down to a crisp." Some defended "Black Korea," especially in light of mounting black-Korean tensions following the March 1991 shooting of Latasha Harlins by a Korean American grocer. Others saw "Black Korea" and the homophobic, allegedly anti-Semitic "No Vaseline" as evidence that Cube had finally gone too far.
All the angst and confused pride Cube represented found expression on the afternoon of April 27, 1992, with the acquittal of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with the unlawful beating of black motorist Rodney King. The city's sorrow and the weight of its history could be contained no longer. The only meaning to be found was in violence and the thick plumes of smoke sighing across the cool, blue skies. The only scene more bizarre than the appalling videotaped beating of King and the sick retaliatory action against white motorist Reginald Denny was the line of riot cops defending Beverly Hills from nothing. Rather than responding to 911 calls in South Central and Koreatown, the police sought to contain the damage to minority neighborhoods and let the fires burn themselves out.
Released in November that year, The Predator was Cube saying, "I told ya so." "Ice Cube wishes to acknowledge white America's continued commitment to the silence and oppression of black men," he wrote in the liner notes' acknowledgments section. "To sum it all up, thanks for nothin'!" Cube's bombast was no less real than before, but the post-riots world around him seemed too real, too strange to be true. The Predator is a fierce and cocky record, but one that ultimately suffers under the weight of real rubble and real hunger. Cube's project seemed exhausted by this point. His records had been a safety valve keeping all hope from being lost; they had been dares to an unbelieving mainstream. Now the establishment believed him. Now that the rhetorical violence had become real violence – now that the threat of "Black Korea" was fantasy no more – the stakes were higher, and Cube struggled to put the pieces back together in any meaningful way. Despite some inspired moments – most notably the haunting stillness of "It Was a Good Day" – The Predator and its 1993 follow-up, Lethal Injection, were comparatively lackluster efforts that strayed far from the street knowledge for which Cube had become notorious.
The titles of Cube's first four albums are suggestive of how he imagined, going from prey (Amerikkka's Most Wanted in 1990) to 1992's Predator, sealing the deal and claiming the ultimate victory he'd suggested with 1991's prophetic Death Certificate by administering 1993's Lethal Injection. Only a few years later, he would become a cartoonish approximation of his former self, going from "Burn Hollywood Burn" to a Hollywood icon. On Amerikkka's "Endangered Species," he rapped coldly, "You wanna free Africa? I stare at ya, 'cause we don't have it too good in America." He found himself in Africa – or a Hollywood soundstage approximation of Africa, anyway – a few years later, first for Dangerous Ground and then for the snake-ya-love-to-hate action vehicle Ananconda.
Cube's words are still scary, but the world has proven itself to be much scarier. In the years leading up to 1992, Cube strung together words that aspired to burn down buildings and order, trample illusions, and radicalize the neighborhood. It was, in retrospect, a rather utopian vision born of a totalizing frustration that hadn't really been heard in hip-hop. It expressed itself in an inexcusable violence he took out on everyone, be they pigs, traitors, or women, and ultimately this is why it's hard to listen to Ice Cube in 2003. At their heart, Cube's albums were about the hope one pulled from contradiction. They aspired toward an uneasy and self-righteous pride in the face of an indignant system, and they spoke to the power of attitude-as-resistance. There'll be the fire next time, Cube warned, but when real fires burned those real buildings down, the rhetorical and symbolic power of Cube's good and bad words were lost too. The attitude lives on, inherited by a generation, but gone for now are the bruised dreams and fantastical hopes that propped up the swagger.
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