Death Certificate : Ice Cube : Review : Rolling Stone

When N.W.A's main lyricist, Ice Cube, left the group in 1989, he joined forces with the crew closest to himself in temperament: Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad. The resulting collaboration, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, was beautiful anarchy, a mercilessly funky record that combined politics and street credibility at a time when the two notions were not mutually exclusive in hip-hop. The follow-up, Death Certificate, produced by him and West Coast cohorts such as Sir Jinx, preserved that chaos. It also contains two of Cube's most vitriolic political statements: "I Wanna Kill Sam" and "A Bird in the Hand," which has a critique of Bush Sr. that sounds awfully relevant today: "Do I gotta sell me a whole lot of crack/For decent shelter and clothes on my back?"

1992's The Predator was just as cacophonous -- recorded in the aftermath of the L.A. uprisings, it had to be -- but it also sported such hits as the rap verite "It Was a Good Day." Lethal Injection shows Cube trying to catch up with his one-time groupmate Dr. Dre on G-funk tracks such as "Bop Gun." After Lethal Injection, Cube focused his energies on a part of Los Angeles just as shady as South Central -- Hollywood -- and his later albums suffered for it. But Cube's Tinseltown clout made him one of hip-hop's most powerful figures in media. On 1990's "The Nigga Ya Love to Hate," he says, "You wanna sweep a nigga like me up under the rug." Not bloody likely.

JON CARAMANICA
(From RS 918, March 20, 2003)

(Posted: Feb 25, 2003)

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