When I heard about EMI’s deluxe re-issue of Ice Cube’s first four albums, I was struck with a strange sense of nostalgia for both the albums and the era they represent. Of course, nostalgia is kind of a quaint emotion to feel for ultra-violent, incendiary, unabashedly angry albums that viciously attack Jews, white men, women, and Koreans (and that’s just for starters).
Yet I couldn’t help but think back to the days of my tortured adolescence, when I memorized the lyrics to “It Was A Good Day,” watched Yo! MTV Raps every day and played Dr. Dre’s The Chronic until the tape broke. Like countless other melanin-light rap lovers, the bottomless rage of early gangsta rap spoke to me and my life in ways other kinds of music didn’t. It didn’t matter that Ice Cube rapped about being a cynical black outlaw in South Central L.A while I was a white, hooky-prone kid in Chicago. At its heart, gangsta rap, like The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and a lot of other revolutionary music, was all about being young, angry, poor, and at war with corrupt authority—themes as timeless and universal as any in popular music.
Nirvana’s Nevermind is generally given credit for banishing the plague of hair metal from the pop-music landscape, but the gangsta rap revolution initiated by NWA deserves equal credit. After all, compared to the scowling, police-hating, renegade bad-asses in NWA, Motley Crüe couldn’t help but come off as mascara-abusing girly-men recycling Sweet chords and dressing up in their mommy’s clothing. It’s no coincidence that when metal eventually came back, it had mutated into a rap-rock beast that drew heavily on rap’s unparalleled ability to piss off parents and antagonize adults.
Popular music is inherently a young person’s game, and rap music is even more youth-obsessed than other genres. When Ice Cube wrote much of NWA’s seminal Straight Outta Compton and his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990), he wasn’t old enough to legally buy beer, but he was experienced enough to convey to a receptive interracial audience the anger and hopelessness of life in the ’hood. Before the Rodney King riots, Cube’s music served due notice that there was a city full of people with nothing to lose who were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Collectively, Cube’s music, the riots, and films like Boyz N The Hood (Cube’s cinematic debut) and Menace II Society forced white America to come to terms with the rampant poverty and alienation of its inner cities.
There’s always been an element of voyeurism in white folk’s embrace of black music. Ice Cube’s early albums allowed white suburbanites to vicariously experience the heightened emotions and lawless hedonism of West Coast thug life without ever having to leave the security of their parents’ basement. Ice Cube’s early work rejected outright the utopian promises of integration and assimilation. In albums like AmeriKKKa’s, the crushing poverty and rampant crime of ghetto life made integrationist fantasies like The Cosby Show and similar yarns of endless upward mobility seem like particularly sick jokes. Like the great pulp novelist Jim Thompson in Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, Ice Cube invited audiences to look at the world through the eyes of a violent sociopath. But in his early albums at least, there was a distinct political context for his misanthropy. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm X, Cube was the hate that hate made, the stone-hearted consequence of America giving up on its inner cities. Cube threw the American dream back in his audience’s face, suggesting that greed, hatred, and racism were the building blocks of a nation founded on slavery and genocide.
The first NWA member to bolt from Eazy-E and Jerry Heller’s Ruthless Records plantation, Ice Cube made a historic decision to record his solo debut with East Coast-based The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s sonic assault team, and one of the most innovative production teams in music history. Cube’s decision had long-lasting political and cultural ramifications, and his association with Public Enemy gave him added credibility among the sizable but largely overlooked rap audience described once by Common as “coffee shop chicks and white dudes.”
Never one to hold his tongue, Cube made his opinions about that particular demographic painfully clear on Death Certificate (1991) and Lethal Injection (1993). On “Cave Bitch,” Cube railed against white women for, um, being white, while on “Horny Li’l Devil,” he chastised white men for the same crime. Ice Cube’s first four albums are maddening amalgams of razor-sharp social criticism and psychotic hate. One moment, Cube’s incisively calling out America for committing the very crimes it condemns in individuals; the next he’s launching a blatantly racist, unforgivable attack on Koreans for doing business in black neighborhoods.
Lethal Injection marked Cube’s last solo album until War & Peace Volume 1: The War, which came out five years later, in 1998. During the interval, rap music underwent a distinct paradigm shift. The success and eventual martyrdom of Notorious B.I.G. presaged the P-Diddification of rap. Rap had always put a premium on image, but Puff Daddy’s reign led to an emphasis on crass materialism that drove countless people away from rap and did irreparable damage to the genre’s soul. Then too, Tupac Shakur’s similar martryrdom created an army of Tupac clones, some enormously successful (DMX, Ja Rule, Master P), some not, all essentially derivative.
A generation of rap-loving crackers and whiteys who grew up on Public Enemy, NWA, Beastie Boys, EPMD, and Boogie Down Productions found little to identify with in music that seemed more concerned with flash, image, and money than social criticism. Lyrics became borderline irrelevant. Gangsta rap’s misanthropy and misogyny overtook its latent streak of social consciousness. Master P built an empire on little more than brand loyalty, assembly-line production methods and loud, flashy album covers. Mainstream hip-hop seemed to forget its history, focusing only on the now.
Meanwhile, Ice Cube became a movie star. Rapping seemed to become a sideline, something to do between films, commercials, and television appearances. Accordingly, when he returned from his hiatus, he had absolutely nothing to say. The man who once boasted one of the most important voices in popular music was reduced to being just another anonymous gangsta rapper barking out monosyllabic bursts of unimaginative thuggery.
Rap is far from dead, though. One need only look at MCA’s roster (Blackalicious, Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Nappy Roots, Black Star) to find signs that it’s not just alive but thriving. And that’s not even mentioning Outkast, Missy Elliott, N.E.R.D., Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Timbaland, and Lauryn Hill. On the independent front, labels like Def Jux, Stones Throw, and Rhymesayers (home of Minnesota’s own Slug, rap’s most important slacker-depressive since Basehead) have all established sterling reputations for creativity and innovation. Good, important, relevant rap music is still being made. But do you care?
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