The West Coast rapper, the leading voice of black rage on record for the past two years and star of the hit summer movie Boyz N the Hood, has delivered hard and nasty verbal blows before, but never with such wide-reaching impact.
His new album, Death Certificate (Priority), which recently debuted at No. 2 on the pop album charts, has brought a storm of criticism from rights groups and music critics, and once again has thrust rap, and Cube in particular, into the role of pop-culture villain.
Death Certificate paints an unremittingly bleak picture of what it means to be a young black male in America. It is laced with harsh language and vivid descriptions of the violence, anger and frustration of ghetto life.
Two of its 20 tracks have been singled out as particularly demeaning to other ethnic groups.
One is Black Korea, in which Cube rages that he is made to feel unwelcome in a neighborhood store by its proprietor, an Asian who thinks “every brother in the world is on the take.” Cube’s response is a warning: “Pay respect to the black fist/or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.”
The second track is No Vaseline, a vicious diatribe against Cube’s former group, N.W.A., and its Jewish manager, Jerry Heller.
Cube left the group in 1989 over a financial dispute, and has since been trading insults with it in the press and on record. On No Vaseline, the bad blood boils over as Cube fantasizes about lynching and burning N.W.A. leader Eazy E, and then, in reference to Heller, urges the group to “get rid of that devil real simple/Put a bullet in his temple/Cause ya can’t be the nigger-for- life crew/with a white Jew tellin’ ya what to do.”
Those two sets of lyrics prompted an unprecedented editorial in the Nov. 23 issue of Billboard magazine, the bible of the record industry, condemning Cube for “the rankest sort of racism and hate-mongering.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human-rights group, has urged retailers to remove the record from their shelves, and numerous music critics around the country have condemned it. Perhaps the bluntest reaction came from Robert Christgau, veteran pop critic of the Village Voice: Cube, he writes in the Nov. 15 issue, is “a straight-up racist, simple and plain, and of course a sex bigot, too.”
Cube could not be reached for comment because he was shooting a movie in Atlanta, but in an interview with Billboard, he said, “I never say all Koreans, all whites (or) all Jews, so for somebody to take that perspective on the record, they are ignorant to what the record is talking about.”
Such controversy is not new to Cube, nor is his defense. He was also criticized for his 1990 album, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority), because of its misogynist lyrics.
In an interview last summer, Cube said his depiction of women as money- hungry whores on that album was not intended as a blanket indictment of the gender.
“The women I’m referring to look at a man strictly in economic terms,” he said. “If that’s the sole reason they pick one man over another, that brings down the community as a whole. What you end up with is kids who don’t have money looking to get money to impress these women, and that generates crime.”
It’s a reasoned argument, but none of it comes across on the record. Any kid who listens to AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted gets one message: Women are whores who deserve to be cursed and beaten.
In the same way, Cube’s hateful ethnic references on his new album are bound to be taken by some listeners as referring to all Koreans and Jews.
In so doing, Cube plays into the hands of rap detractors such as David Samuels, who authored a Nov. 11 cover story on the music for New Republic.
Samuels asserts that Cube and other hard-core rappers are cashing in with whites because they play up to white stereotypes of black brutality and thuggishness.
“Racism is reduced to fashion,” he argues, “by the rappers who use it and by the white audiences to whom such images appeal. … Anti-Semitic slurs and black criminality correspond to ‘authenticity,’ and ‘authenticity’ sells records.”
Indeed, Ice Cube T-shirts and cassettes are hot items in suburban school playgrounds. Extreme music is a status symbol for young people, and Cube is currently the baddest of the bad.
Yet to dismiss Ice Cube as a financial opportunist, no better than the cash-obsessed prostitutes he so often demeans, is to cut off one of the last links between mainstream society and the ghetto.
