Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  Political and social messaging, however, was of no interest to N.W.A on Efil4Zaggin. Cube penned unflinching, profane yarns commenting on the perils of the hood, but he was gone. If N.W.A’s critics thought they were obscene before, they couldn’t have been prepared for how filthy the rhymes were this go-round. “When Cube left, you really didn’t miss anything but his essence of him being Cube,” Cold 187um insisted. “At Ruthless we had a high volume of cats that could do things on a next level so Eric had enough people around writing. We all just kinda stepped up—me, Kokane, Laylaw—to help Ren and D.O.C. with the writing. But there was definitely a void. We hated when Cube left and it turned into animosity.”

  Without Cube’s social commentary, deviant sex and extreme violence was the driving force of the group’s lyrics.

  MC Ren shockingly brags about a fourteen-year-old who “sucks dick like a specialized pro” on “She Swallowed It,” a sequel to 100 Miles and Runnin’s ribald “Just Don’t Bite It.” Eazy lauds himself as “the mothafuckin’ pussy-beater” on “Findum, Fuckum & Flee” and flips Bootsy Collins’s love groove “I’d Rather Be with You” into “I’d Rather Fuck You,” a record that sees him doing his best R & B croon. There’s talk of gang rape, forced oral sex, and murdering prostitutes. The cops get a tongue-lashing on “Real Niggaz Don’t Die,” and the group confronts their rampant usage of the N-word on “Niggaz 4 Life”:

  Why do I call myself a nigga you ask me?

  Well it’s because motherfuckers wanna blast me

  . . . and label me as a dope dealer yo and say that I’m no good

  There are also digs at Cube. On “Alwayz Into Something” Ren labels Cube a “bitch,” and a skit dusts off the Benedict Arnold motif. “No matter how hard you try to be,” Dre warns him, “Here’s what they think about you.” Answering messages from “fans” calling in to make disparaging remarks about Cube follows.

  Released in May 1991, Efil4zaggin was another flash point of controversy. In the United Kingdom, thousands of copies were confiscated by British police under the Obscene Publications Act—a first—before officials ruled the recording didn’t break any laws. Seattle libraries later came under fire after a board of trustees voted to ban the album. Critics aggressively panned the record with the New York Times calling the album a cheap attempt at shock value—“[T]he equivalent of a slapdash sequel to a first-rate horror film”—and a betrayal of the band. Rolling Stone said “listening to it is like hearing the loudest guys at a neighborhood barbecue strut, brag, wolf-whistle, and lie about sex.”

  But like Straight Outta Compton, the lack of radio airplay didn’t matter, nor did the fact that national retailers like Kmart, Walmart, and Sears refused to stock the album at a time when department stores accounted for 15 percent of annual record sales. Efil4zaggin sold nearly a million copies in its first seven days and opened at number two, the highest entry since Michael Jackson’s Bad made its debut at number one in 1987. The next week it upended Paula Abdul’s Spellbound to become the first Gangsta rap album to hold the top spot.

  A switch to the computerized SoundScan sales-tracking system greatly boosted the performance of Efil4zaggin. Before SoundScan was implemented, Billboard essentially relied on an honor system, by asking record stores and DJs to self-report what was popular. It was a method that at best was haphazard and at worst corrupted by label executives. The new system eliminated any chance of error or impropriety by using point-of-sales data from cash registers, and with radio airplay now monitored through a third party, SoundScan revolutionized the way charts had been determined since Billboard started publishing a chart of the top albums in 1945.

  Efil4zaggin’s swift ascent to number one decimated the myths of detractors who abhorred rap and considered its appeal to be limited. Danceable, pop-leaning acts such as MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice had ruled the charts and made rap history, but this was the first time a hard-core rap album sat atop the pop charts. Gangsta rap had officially crossed over, with 1991 marking the most significant revolution in the history of modern pop music. According to researchers in the United Kingdom, who studied the chord structure and sounds of seventeen thousand songs written in the last half-century, the rise of rap and hip-hop was “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts.”

  Less than a month after Efil4zaggin hit number one, N.W.A’s former chief lyricist, Ice Cube, made his film debut in Boyz n the Hood. Set in South Central during the 1980s, the film—the directorial and screenwriting debut of John Singleton—is a gritty drama about a group of friends coming of age surrounded by drugs, gangs, and violence. Starring alongside Ice Cube were Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, Laurence Fishburne, Nia Long, and Angela Bassett. Cube was Singleton’s first choice for the role of Doughboy, whose short life is marked by jail and gang violence, and his performance is masterful, as the inexperienced actor deftly humanizes the type of tragic figure he and N.W.A had, in essence, gotten famous for glorifying. Boyz n the Hood was met with acclaim, with Singleton becoming the youngest person, and the first African American, to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar, and in 2002 the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress. “From doing ‘Boyz-n-the-Hood,’ the song, to doing Boyz n the Hood, the movie—the song created the group, and that created the movie,” Cube said.

  The success of Boyz n the Hood wasn’t without controversy. Though the film had a strong antigang message, violence between rival gangs marred opening screenings of the film in LA. Nearly two dozen people were injured in incidents from Seattle to Minneapolis to Long Island, and a man was murdered at a midnight showing near Chicago. A subgenre of films closely informed by experiences of inner-city youth was born in its wake, with films like Juice, Menace II Society, Above the Rim, Poetic Justice, Fresh, and South Central debuting shortly after.

  Rap’s foray into the mainstream was a complicated one. The opposition to the genre is especially fascinating considering how widely it was embraced by whites, and not just on the consumer level—two of the genre’s most influential entities, rap publication the Source and Def Jam Records, were founded by white college students. The relationship between rap music and its white fanbases has often been a point of contention. “Rap’s appeal to whites rested in its evocation of an age-old image of blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of white society are defined, and, by extension, through which they may be defied,” David Samuels wrote in 1991 issue of The New Republic. And it was seemingly true: rap artists who were promoted as violent thugs were far more popular among white audiences than, say, Afrocentric-minded acts like A Tribe Called Quest.

  No one toyed with that perception more than Eazy. His story of drug dealer gone straight leading a crew of hard “niggas” with attitude made him a superstar. It’s an image that’s much tougher to sell after you’ve gone multiplatinum, toured the world, and enjoyed the fruits of building a successful independent rap empire that upended hip-hop and pissed off the FBI, and much of America for that matter. Yet Eazy, after success, doubled down on the image of the menacing thug, taking it to outlandish extremes during the promo campaign for Efil4zaggin—he showed up to the Arsenio Hall Show wearing a straitjacket and a hockey mask.

  The image of Eazy as a demented thug made his presence at the White House in 1991, at a republican luncheon no less, all the more confounding—and that was exactly what he was going for.

  Having made a substantial donation (about $25,000) to the City of Hope charity, Eazy’s name landed on a Republican Party mailing list. Although Eazy was extraordinarily charitable, he kept it out of the spotlight as to not curtail his hard image, Greg Mack noted.

  An invitation from Texas senator Phil Gramm arrived: “You are invited to an exclusive Republican Senatorial Inner Circle luncheon,” it read. President George H. W. Bush would be on hand to address the Inner Circle, a group reserved exclusively for donors who contributed between $1,00
0 to $5,000. In a follow-up letter, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Estée Lauder were members. For $2,460, Eazy could have two seats at an event called “Salute to the Commander-in-Chief.”

  The event was set for March 18, 1991, two months before N.W.A’s Efil4zaggin was set to drop. It was too easy of an opportunity to pass up. The purveyor of Gangsta rap, who drew the ire of the FBI and law enforcement agencies over a profane song, invited to a fancy lunch at the White House? You couldn’t make it up if you wanted to. “He was real sharp about the business of show business—how you look, the image,” said Cold 187um. “He was really sharp when it came to that.”

  “I paid $2,500 for a million dollars’ worth of publicity. I’m not a Republican or Democrat,” Eazy later gloated. “I don’t give a fuck. I don’t even vote.”

  Jerry Heller, who would be Eazy’s plus-one to the shindig, tipped off CBS News reporter Bob Schieffer, who showed up at DC’s National Airport, cameras in tow, and interviewed fans, Eazy, and Jerry about the visit. “Do you think . . . the other members of the Republican Inner Circle know who Eric is and what he does?” Schieffer asks Jerry.

  “No, no . . . I think that probably they would be shocked to find out who he really is. But as for us, we’re happy to be here,” Jerry smiled, his excitement over the press attention beaming through the camera.

  Eazy and Jerry sat amid 1,400 Republicans at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, grazing on poached salmon and roast beef as television personality Willard Scott emceed. Eazy stuck out in his LA Kings cap, black leather suit, and white T-shirt. He also wore a flashy gold bracelet encrusted in diamonds that had his name engraved on it. Jerry wrote in his memoir that Eazy sat next to a woman who, he surmised, had never socialized with a person of color before and didn’t even notice Eazy was stoned out of his mind.

  President Bush spoke then made his exit. Regardless of the warm invitation, Eazy never got to meet the president.

  Eazy’s inclination that the media would eat up his appearance was correct, with outlets across the country covering his appearance. “Rap’s Bad Boy to Get Lunch with the Prez,” a headline in the Los Angeles Times read. “Guess Who’s Coming to Lunch,” the Washington Post wrote, making a play on the classic Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn film about interracial marriage. The National Republican Senatorial Committee praised itself when asked to comment—though anything less would have made them look awful.

  “This is clear and convincing evidence of the success of our new Rap-Outreach program,” a statement from the Republican Hill committee read. “Democrats, eat your hearts out.”

  SA PRIZE

  “Here’s what they think about you.” When Ice Cube first uttered those words—on 1990’s “Turn Off the Radio,” lifted from his debut solo record—he was chiding black people who went to great lengths to assimilate into white culture by reminding them of the litany of foul stereotypes whites have denigrated them with, sampling a montage from Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee’s searing 1989 exploration of racial tension. A year later Dre used Cube’s line to mock him in a skit that collected voicemails from “fans” dissing his former group member. In the war of words between N.W.A and Ice Cube in the early 1990s, the group fired the first shot, but nothing was as venomous as Cube’s “No Vaseline,” which closed his second album, Death Certificate. He’d heard Dre mock him on the “Message to B.A.” interlude from N.W.A’s Efil4zaggin album. Considering the album sold nearly a million copies in its first seven days and made history as the first Gangsta rap album to go number one, it was tough to ignore the diss.

  Inspired by the time-honored art form of insult game “the dozens”—depending on what hood you were from, it might be called “capping,” “roasting,” clowning,” “joning,” “checkin’,” or “snapping”—that serves as the foundation of rap battling, Cube unleashed a verbal attack that is one of the greatest diss tracks to ever land on wax. He took that “here’s what they think about you” line that Dre had turned against him and threw it right back at them, sampling N.W.A’s insults toward him and capping back—and that’s just the intro. “That first line, ‘Goddamn, I’m glad y’all set it off,’ Cube actually had that rap when he left the group and he just sat on it for a year,” Sir Jinx said. Indeed, after hearing his former group members blast him on their latest album, Cube went to the studio the next day, he said. He hadn’t found the track he wanted to use as his response until he heard the song “Dazz” from Brick and remembered how Dana Dane had sampled it on “Cinderfella Dana Dane.” “Once I found that track, I knew I was doing the song,” Cube said. “They dissed me on Niggaz4Life and went in, [so] that was my plan.”

  When the bright, bouncy beat kicks in, Cube growls through verses that cut like razors set ablaze.

  “Cube really came out to stand up as an artist,” Jinx said. “When we were working on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Kill At Will, and all those songs, we had the utmost respect for Eric, the utmost respect for Dr. Dre. Cube said, ‘I don’t want to say anything.’ It would be just shitting on your people. That’s why there’s no funny lines—‘Short motherfucker I could kill you’ or ‘You not a doctor.’ When they started doing records it was ‘Benedict Arnold’ and ‘Ice Cube’s a bitch’ and all this shit. They took it to heart. We took a jab at them on ‘Jackin’ for Beats,’ ” but nobody got it. That’s why ‘No Vaseline’ was such a Mike Tyson uppercut.”

  N.W.A fired the first shot, but “No Vaseline” was Cube taking out an AK-47 and going for the kill.

  I started off with too much cargo, dropped four niggas now I’m making all the dough

  White man just ruling . . . the Niggaz With Attitudes? Who ya foolin’?

  Cube rips Eazy over his publicity stunt with the president, says the group is jealous of him, dismisses Yella as a loser, implies that Ren is a slave for the label, accuses Eazy of fucking Dre (anal sex as a metaphor for financial exploitation is quite the thread here), and blasts him for letting a “white Jew” break up the crew, referencing Jerry Heller—whom he saved the bulk of his vitriol for. Cube calls Jerry a devil and instructs his former friends to put a bullet in the manager’s temple.

  “No Vaseline” is as brutal an indictment as it gets. Ren was so pissed, while at a party where the record was played, he demanded it be cut off. “I was ready to mash. Like ‘Oh, this nigga wanna do it like this,’ ” he said. “I was mad. That was the greatest sneak attack ever.” Yella, who got the least of the brunt—though arguably the fact that Cube barely acknowledged Yella said a lot about how he saw him—admitted the entire group knew Cube had won the battle when they heard the record.

  “When the song was done, there was a lot of debate in the studio over whether I was going to put it out,” Cube said. “People were coming in and out of the studio and asking me to play it. ‘Play that “No Vaseline.” Play that N.W.A diss.’ I was trying to make a concept record and not worry about a diss record, but that was one that I felt like I had to do.”

  To this day Dre and Cube have never discussed the record, and he actually completed about a verse and a half of a second diss track he was going to release after “No Vaseline,” but he decided against it. Jerry Heller spent the rest of his life condemning his former client over it: “I think it’s one of the most vitriolic attacks on the Jewish people that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And yeah, it hurt me. I don’t have the kind of respect for him except that he knows how to make money.”

  Death Certificate debuted at number two on the pop-album charts when it was released in October 1991 before going platinum. The album is regarded as a rap classic and, arguably, Cube’s finest work. It was also met with controversy.

  The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an LA-based Jewish human-rights organization, implored national record chains to stop selling copies of the Death Certificate album. “Recording artists these days like to use the excuse that their music reflects reality, but this record is dangerous,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper told the Los Angeles Times. “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.”

  A few critics were scathing, with a Village Voice review calling Cube “a straight-up racist, simple and plain, and of course a sex bigot, too” and Billboard, in a rather unprecedented move, penned an editorial condemning Cube for “the rankest sort of racism and hate-mongering.”

  He was confronted repeatedly about his lyrics, and claims that he was an anti-Semite—he was even asked how he’d feel if someone listened to his record and then went out and shot a Jewish person. “Taking rap music literally for everything that’s said is like taking TV literally,” Cube responded, bewildered by the question. “Of course the TV programs are most parts fiction and the news is real. And with my records, you have both. You have the news and you have the fictional things.” Cube later admitted that he regretted using anti-Jewish language, but defended his position: “I didn’t know what ‘anti-Semitic’ meant until motherfuckers explained why it was just not okay to lump Jerry with anybody . . . But I wasn’t like, ‘I wanna hurt the whole Jewish race’—I just don’t like that motherfucker!”

  For Death Certificate, Cube broke the album into two themes—the death side, a mirror image of where he believed we were at the time, and the life side, a vision of where we needed to go, the “we” being black America. “I was making a transformation, mentally, from knowing street knowledge to knowing world knowledge—history, seeing things from a different perspective,” Cube said of his intention. “It was two different records, the life that I was coming out of into the life I was trying to envision and see myself going into. The death side is a lot of the craziness we do and go through. The life side was trying to make sense out of it and using it to better ourselves in a certain way.”

  Following Kill At Will shortly after AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Cube felt confident as he headed into Death Certificate. The recording never stopped once he started working on his debut, but seeing the response Kill At Will received was encouraging to Cube and Jinx, who did the project without the Bomb Squad. “We were just doing music. We had our own budget. We were confident,” Cube said. “We felt like we were on a roll and we were just ready to keep going.”