Ice Cube

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • Death Certificate
    Death Certificate
    Death Certificate

    1991

  • AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted
    AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted
    AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted

    Part of what makes AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted essential is how ugly it is. Ugly in its observations about race (“Endangered Species (Tales From the Darkside)”) and ugly in its casual hatred of women (“You Can’t Fade Me”). Ugly when it’s being playful (“Who’s the Mack?”) and really ugly when it isn’t (“AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”). At a time when artists like Public Enemy and Ice-T were exploring rap as something that could be explicitly political, Cube sounded less like a philosopher or reporter than a participant in the same societal corrosion that made him a victim in the first place—a gangsta because “gangsta” was all he thought he could be. Couch this in some of the most dynamic and musically entertaining hip-hop of its time (courtesy the Public Enemy production team The Bomb Squad) and you have a problem: An angry Black man with a gift for the spotlight. Or as an ABC interview put it by way of introduction: “Even if you’ve never heard of him, your kids have.” This was a pivotal couple of years in rap music: Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (the inspiration, in part, for AmeriKKKa’s skits), and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique—the list could go on. AmeriKKKa connected rap back to the morally ambivalent pimp stories of Iceberg Slim or a good Richard Pryor routine, and set the groundwork for the scathing social awareness of Biggie’s Ready to Die and Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly. It had the bounce of West Coast rap and the cast-in-concrete feel of New York. Yeah, the controversy probably drove sales, but it also staged an encounter between kids from the suburbs and lines like “Why more n*****s in the pen’ than in college?” He wasn’t just leaving N.W.A.—he was trying to outgun them.

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About Ice Cube

When Ice Cube left N.W.A. in 1989, he was already one of the most notorious gangsta rappers in the country. The staggering one-two punch of his first two solo albums, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted and Death Certificate, showcased the MC (born O’Shea Jackson in 1969) as unrelenting in his disdain for oppressive institutions―there was no person or group he wasn’t willing to take on. Cube railed against injustices from his N.W.A. collaborators; unfair treatment by the group’s manager, Jerry Heller; and the LAPD’s targeting of Black lives. His third solo album, 1992’s The Predator, played with similar themes, but its most recognizable song, “It Was a Good Day,” found the MC counting his blessings instead of his enemies. “Ice Cube is always supposed to be rapping about hardcore stuff. But I’m not hardcore, I just rap about reality,” Jackson explained to Apple Music. “If I’m having a good day, I’d be fake not to say it.” The song seemed then like a curveball in his catalog, but it proved to introduce a more congenial Cube, who has flourished into a family-friendly movie star, sitcom creator, and head of the BIG3 basketball league. Still, 2018’s Everythang's Corrupt betrays the fervor of an activist dismayed with the current state of affairs. He is tenacious in his search for a more just and reparative society―there’s even a song on the album called “Arrest the President.” When it comes to Ice Cube’s righteous anger, no one is spared.

FROM
Los Angeles, CA, United States
BORN
June 15, 1969
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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