The associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a largely Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles, called Friday on four national record chains to stop selling copies of rapper Ice Cube’s new album, “Death Certificate.”
In faxes to the heads of Musicland, Tower Records, Wherehouse Records and Music Plus chains, Rabbi Abraham Cooper charged that the album contains lyrics that “threaten and promote violence” against Korean Americans and “call for the murder” of a Jewish music industry figure.
“I know that recording artists these days like to use the excuse that their music reflects reality, but this record is dangerous,” Cooper told The Times on Friday. “This is not a just theoretical issue here. Ice Cube is advocating violence against other ethnic minorities and given the climate of bigotry in the 1990s, we consider this kind of material a real threat.”
Cooper specifically objected to the song “Black Korea” and a lyric in “No Vaseline” that advocates killing his former manager, Jerry Heller:
Get rid of that devil, real simple,
Put a bullet in his temple …
The album by one of rap’s most controversial and acclaimed figures was released Thursday by Los Angeles-based Priority Records–with advance orders totaling more than 1 million copies.
Priority President Brian Turner said the record is not anti-Semitic and said his company will continue to produce the album.
“The allegations made by the Simon Wiesenthal Center are absolutely invalid,” he said. “Ice Cube’s lyrics represent nothing more than a macho put-down kind of thing that stems from a long-standing feud between Cube and his former group, N.W.A. and that group’s manager, Jerry Heller.”
Ice Cube could not be reached for comment, but defended his music in an interview given before the boycott that will be published Sunday in The Times’s Calendar section.
