Has Ice Cube gone too far?
That is the question of the moment in the world of pop music.
The West Coast rapper, the leading voice of black rage on record for the last 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 has once again 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, and 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 been trading insults with it in the press and on record ever since. 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 hatemongering.”
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 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.
As Public Enemy rapper Chuck D said years ago, rap has become the ghetto`s pipeline to the world, ”the black CNN.” What began as an entertainment for blacks in the South Bronx has 15 years later grown into a public forum on ghetto life: the loopy playfulness of De La Soul and P.M. Dawn, the moralistic gangster tales of Ice-T, the black militancy of Public Enemy and Poor Righteous Teachers, the horror fantasies of the Geto Boys, the street-level reporting of Ice Cube.
These are the voices of disenfranchised blacks, a segment of society that rarely is spoken about on the 10 o`clock news or in the halls of Congress. For these voices, the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police was not an aberration but a confirmation of what they had been rapping about for years. The King incident was eerily presaged a year earlier by ”(Expletive) the Police,” a track written by Ice Cube about police harassment on the first N.W.A. album.
Just as ”(Expletive) the Police” was widely misunderstood and denounced upon its release, the multilayered messages of ”Death Certificate” are being obscured. Once again, Cube`s undiluted hate has grabbed all the headlines, but it`s only part of the broader message.
In ”Death Certificate,” no one is spared: Jews, Koreans, whites, police, gays, George Bush, Jesse Jackson. But Cube reserves his harshest judgments for his fellow blacks in ”True to the Game” and ”Us.”
In the last, Cube rails, ”We mess up and blame the white man. . . . Us will always sing the blues `cause all we care about is hairstyles and gym shoes.”
More than anything, ”Death Certificate” is a warning siren. Like the youth who dies while handcuffed to a hospital bed, the innocent victim of a stray bullet, on one of the album`s more engrossing tracks, ”Alive on Arrival,” Cube warns that the black community is bleeding to death of self-inflicted wounds.
In an exchange typical of the rap ”network,” Cube`s message is echoed on ”We Can`t Be Stopped” (Rap-A-Lot), the new album by the Houston rap group the Geto Boys. The record is filled with horrific imagery, yet it contains the riveting ”Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” in which rapper Bushwick Bill talks about his town`s Fifth Ward ghetto:
”Day by day, it`s more impossible to cope/I feel like I`m the one doing dope . . . I know the Lord is looking at me/But yet it`s still hard for me to feel happy/I often drift when I drive/Having fatal thoughts of suicide/Bang!
And get it over with/And then I`m worry free/But that`s bull . . ./I gotta a little boy to look after/And if I die then my child will be a bastard. . . .” Only months before, the rapper lost an eye in an aborted suicide attempt. In W.C. and the Maad Circle`s blistering new album, ”Ain`t a Damn Thing Changed” (Priority), on which Cube served as executive producer, the group zeroes in on another aspect of the ghetto grind in ”(Expletive) My Daddy,”
about an alcoholic, wife-beating father.
”I used to pray and hope that daddy would die/`Cause over nothing momma is sufferin` with a swollen black eye,” W.C. raps. Later, he adds, ”The way I grew up was nothin` like the `Cosby` show.”
Like Cosby, hard-core rappers are broadcasting a message that, thanks to teenagers` listening habits, is finally making it into some suburban living rooms: ”We`re mad as hell and we`re not going to take it anymore.”
It`s a message that most of America would still rather ignore, if not censor. Yet behind its hate and anger is the story of a people clawing, kicking and screaming to survive.
With ”Death Certificate,” Ice Cube has magnified the depths of that desperation. He has made the voice of the ghetto impossible to ignore.
The real question, then, isn`t ”Has Ice Cube gone too far?” but ”Who`s really listening?”
