For the record, Cube eschewed the melange of textures that was the Bomb Squad’s signature for a heavy assortment of seventies P-Funk and soul samples with production handled by himself, Sir Jinx, and the Boogie Men—the production team of Bobcat, Rashad, and DJ Pooh, who would become one of Cube’s closest collaborators. “Having them in there, I felt like a running back with a Hall of Fame line. Ain’t no way in the world I wasn’t getting 100 yards, period. That’s how I felt. I was in good hands,” Cube said of his trusted producers. “For a rapper, there’s nothing like knowing the production is going to be right. When all you can do is keep coming up with dope concepts and you got the right producers to help you create it, there’s nothing like it.”
Death Certificate showed Cube just scratching his prime. “Every song was better than the last one,” he said, recalling the recording sessions.
Everyone was subjected to Cube’s venom on the record: Whites, police officers, gays, President Bush, Jesse Jackson, and blacks. “Do I have to sell me a whole lot of crack, for decent shelter and clothes on my back? Or should I just wait for help from Bush,” he asks on “A Bird in the Hand,” a record that tackles the limited options for many men in the inner city who might have committed a small crime or not finished school. He rails against white supremacy on “I Wanna Kill Sam,” sneers at black “sellouts” on “True to the Game,” tackles gang warfare on “Color Blind,” and stresses safe sex on “Look Who’s Burnin’ ”—empowering and socially conscious messaging commingled with misogynistic, homophobic, and bigoted posturing. It made Cube a confluence of contradictions, something journalists worked overtime to challenge during interviews.
“No Vaseline” was but one controversial lightening rod on the album. “Black Korea” drew just as much ire from critics. On the short track, he blasts Korean shop owners for perceived prejudices toward the blacks who frequent their shops:
Look, you little Chinese motherfucker,
I ain’t tryin’ to steal none of yo’ shit, leave me alone!
The relationship between the Korean immigrants who maintained liquor and convenience stores throughout South Central and their black customers became fraught with tension during the 1970s and ’80s when, after a few clashes, the media became fascinated by the “Korean-black conflict.” Stories of how Korean immigrants were “taking over” black communities in South Central were common.
“In their pursuit of the American dream, the new immigrants seemed oblivious to the African Americans’ long history of struggle for their unfulfilled dreams,” journalist Helen Zia explained. “In Los Angeles as well as New York and other cities, black people bristled over incidents of disrespectful treatment and false accusations of shoplifting.”
In Brooklyn, an eight-month boycott of Family Red Apple market was initiated in 1990 after the store’s Korean owner accused a black customer of shoplifting and the two got into a physical altercation. In Philadelphia, there were protests when a Korean-American merchant shot a black man to death inside a hoagie shop.
The strain between blacks and Koreans in South Los Angeles reached new heights on March 16, 1991, when Latasha Harlins walked into Empire Liquor Market and Deli in South LA. Soon Ja Du, a middle-aged Korean immigrant, was working the store that day instead of her son—who stayed home after he was threatened by some Crips he planned to testify against for an attempted robbery. Harlins, a fifteen-year-old high school student, grabbed a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, put it in her backpack, and pulled out two dollars to pay for it. Du accused her of shoplifting.
“You bitch, you’re trying to steal my orange juice,” Du shouted at the girl, before grabbing her by the sweater. Harlins punched Du in the face, breaking free of her grasp. Harlins tossed the orange juice on the counter and turned to leave the store, but Du took out a .38-caliber handgun and fired a round into the back of Harlins’s head, killing the girl instantly. She died with two $1 bills clutched in her fist.
Police concluded there was no attempt at shoplifting and a jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which carried a maximum sentence of sixteen years in prison. The judge, however, decided to give the woman probation, four hundred hours of community service, and a $500 fine after determining that the fifty-one-year-old’s reaction, while inappropriate, was understandable, considering the string of robberies she and her family had experienced at their shop. Harlins’s shooting inflamed blacks across LA, who were still reeling from the beating of black motorist Rodney King by LAPD officers following a high-speed car chase, the footage of which was captured by a witness and aired on the nightly news. For many blacks in LA, the Du verdict was confirmation that black lives meant nothing—feelings that were validated a week later when a Korean immigrant received thirty days in jail for abusing his dog.
“Look at the message,” Cube told a reporter pressing him about “Black Korea.” “A dog in this case is worth more than this black little girl’s life. We’re getting fed up. To say that we ain’t is a lie. And to not express our frustrations and our anger when we had a chance to is wrong for the black community, because then when it gets to a boiling point . . . people from the Korean community can’t say, ‘We didn’t know, nobody told us.’ ” He turned out to be correct: A handful of Korean-owned stores in South Central were firebombed one night in August 1991, including the store where Harlins was slain.
In response to “Black Korea,” a boycott of Cube was called by the national Korean-American Grocers Association. Thousands of stores represented by the Southern California chapter pressured the owners of St. Ides malt liquor to drop Cube as their spokesman. Widely available across South Central liquor stores, St. Ides was popular for its low price and potency—at 8 percent alcohol, it’s one of the strongest malt liquors on the market. McKenzie River, St. Ides’s San Francisco–based brewer, revamped the brand by dropping soul crooners Four Tops as its endorsers and recruiting Gangsta rappers in an attempt to attract younger customers. The company hired DJ Pooh to produce its new commercials and he brought Cube on board. In one commercial Cube crudely raps that the malt liquor “gets your girl in the mood quicker [and] gets your jimmy thicker.”
Cube was just one of many rap stars in the early nineties who lent their likeness to the brew: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, and Notorious B.I.G. were among the brand’s endorsers. McKenzie River declined to remove Cube so stores decided to pull it off shelves. The brand was a market leader at the time between its omnipresence in Gangsta rap subculture and its spokesman’s prevalent consumption of the product in the successful film Boyz n the Hood (after the film’s release, liquor store owners couldn’t keep product on shelves), and its owners couldn’t afford the controversy. McKenzie River caved to the pressures of the grocers association and pulled Cube’s advertisements from rotation. The dispute was solved with an apology from Cube and a public commitment by McKenzie, which announced a donation of up to $90,000 to Korean American groups. The album’s multiple controversies still surprises Cube.
“Nobody is safe when you listen to Death Certificate. Any of us that has any kind of flaws in our character, Death Certificate was probably going to find it. So, it didn’t matter what color you are,” he said. “I said more about black people on that record than anybody else. It was much ado about nothing. It’s that saying, you throw a rock into a pack of dogs and the only one that hollers is the one that got hit. The ones that were hollering, to me, were the ones getting hit by the truth—as I seen it—in a rap song. At the end of the day it’s still music.”
Death Certificate and Boyz n the Hood thrust Cube deeper into the mainstream, though his rising profile came with its fair share of scrutiny, no less for his affiliation with the Nation of Islam. Like many young black men, Cube was exposed to the Nation of Islam through Public Enemy. The rap group’s pro–Nation of Islam lyrics were the source of much hand-wringing due to the inflammatory teachings of NOI leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, which have been labeled as anti-Semitic, antiwhite, misogynist, and homophobic. Farrakha
n’s notion of black advancement has often been seen as racial separatism. In 1989, Public Enemy found themselves at the center of a firestorm when its “Minister of Information” Professor Griff made anti-Jewish comments during an interview. It was PE affiliate the Drew who introduced Cube to Farrakhan’s teachings by giving him tapes of the Minister speaking. For Saviours’ Day one year—a NOI holiday that commemorates the birth of founder Wallace Fard—Cube flew to Chicago to see Farrakhan speak. The minister invited Cube back to his opulent Hyde Park mansion known as “the Palace” for a meal, which Cube accepted. “We kicked it and had a good time,” he said.
“Cube is a sponge. He’s a chameleon. The Nation were the brothers that held us down. It was just another kind of college that we needed to learn. With them being around, it taught us how to be a little bit more like gentlemen,” Sir Jinx said. “We never got into trouble. No rape charges, nobody getting shot or killed, nothing. They ran it like a military. You wasn’t playing around with Ice Cube. When the Nation came it was a breath of fresh air of men that I idolized. I didn’t have a father, so I didn’t know certain things. We were twenty-something-year-olds. The Nation provided guidance.”
Although he never officially joined, Cube was attracted to the political and religious movement’s philosophies on black advancement—philosophies he believed could rid blacks of societal ills such as drugs and violence. “[The] teaching is self-love, and everything we got from America is self-hate. Once you start loving yourself, you can respect anybody that looks like you,” he once explained to a reporter.
Cube shaved off his Jheri curl, with help from Kam, a political rapper from Watts signed to the Street Knowledge Records production imprint Cube founded in 1990 after leaving N.W.A. At a Nation of Islam function, he testified about how its teachings had changed his life. “I’m sick of begging for the white man to put out my records . . . for him to treat me equally. My father always taught me to always want to be equal. But once I learned who the devil was, I would never want to be equal to him,” Cube said in his speech. In fact, in what’s become yet another piece of infamous rap lore, a furious Cube—vexed over his royalties from Priority—decided to teach label head Bryan Turner a lesson by smashing up his office with a baseball bat. “I swear to God . . . I remember him looking around the room trying to look for something to break that wasn’t too expensive,” Turner said, “so he broke the TV, which we laughed about after.”
Nation of Islam doctrine widely inspired Death Certificate. “No longer dead, deaf, dumb, and blind out of our mind . . . Look that goddamn white man in his cold . . . blue eyes,” controversial NOI spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad implores at the conclusion of the death side of the album. Muhammad’s comments mirrored what Cube believed about black people at the time. “The best place for a young black male or female is the Nation of Islam,” Cube inscribed on an image inside the album picturing him reading NOI publication The Final Call. The image is a crucial one to understanding Cube’s mind frame at the time. To the left of him is the Lench Mob, the backing crew of rappers and faceless hypemen he originally formed as a concept for AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted—its name a nod to the horrifying act of lynching of black men by mobs of racist whites (Da Lench Mob spun off into a real group, releasing its debut in 1992)—and on the right is the Nation of Islam, standing tall and immaculately dressed in suits and bow ties. “We decided Cube needed a backup group. Some no face niggas that nobody knows—faceless men so that everywhere we went we had a gang. We were trying to re-create Straight Outta Compton,” said Sir Jinx. “At first the Lench Mob was the Mad Circle. It was supposed to be Ice Cube and the Mad Circle. But since we were working with WC [Dub-C], Cube remembered that he wrote ‘N.W.A is the lynch mob’ [in ‘Express Yourself’] and he changed it to that.” It was a literal representation of the duality of the album and the beliefs of the Nation. Cube put it this way: Black men and women were in a state of emergency, mentally dead because a limited knowledge of self has led to a “nigga mentality” and the Nation was the vision to bring them back to life.
Cube’s Nation of Islam–influenced views made Death Certificate even more inflammatory and politically driven than its searing predecessor. He rapped how interracial dating and moving to the suburbs was stalling black men from reaching their potential, although to be fair, he believed selling drugs and gangbanging were just as ill. The racially charged lyrics of the album and the blowback from “No Vaseline” and “Black Korea” left Cube unfazed, though, which only further incensed his critics.
“The truth is, I don’t care what the white community thinks about the record,” Cube said. “I’m talking directly to my black brothers and sisters. I speak in a language we talk in the streets. Other people can listen too—they might learn something—but I’m talking to the black kids who need somebody to talk sense, honest sense, to them.”
The media took particular interest in provoking Cube, between his increasingly confrontational and militant lyrics and his affiliation with the Nation of Islam. “Why are you so angry on your records?” he was asked in one interview. He regularly sparred with reporters over Death Certificate’s content. The media attention of his religious belief frustrated him. “That’s why people have issues with the media now because they have an agenda. It’s human nature to have an agenda. But when they are so forcefully trying to push on whoever they are trying to interview, some people take the bait and others wrestle with them,” Cube said. “People aren’t going to make me say something that I don’t want to say, or that I don’t mean or try to interpret my words or thinking without me correcting them. Ultimately, though, religion is private when it’s all said and done. It’s nobody’s business what you believe.”
And there was particular fixation on Cube’s facial expression, a seemingly permanent snarl that particularly came in handy as he broke out in Hollywood as an actor. References to Cube’s menacing “scowl” became so frequent he eventually began playing it up.
“It’s interesting, the people who are so intrigued by that,” Cube said. “They think just the look on your face can define who you are and how you’re feeling. It’s cool, I’m fine with that. A lot of us are angry and mad and people need to feel us. I don’t mind being the total opposite of what they try to project me to be or want me to be. We [as black men] have to show strength because showing weakness don’t get us nowhere.”
Cube and Public Enemy remain the most cited emcees who aligned themselves with the Nation of Islam, but the teachings of the Nation and the Five-Percenters, which teaches the ideology that black men are god personified and derived from the Nation, can be traced through decades of rap. Poor Righteous Teachers, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan, Digable Planets, Jay-Z, LL Cool J, Common, Nas, and Jay Electronica, all to some degree, have embraced the teachings of both over the years.
N.W.A’s MC Ren actually joined the Nation in 1993, converting to Islam after friend DJ Train gave him tapes about the history of Egypt and exposed him to Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America. “I took that book everywhere I went . . . I couldn’t put it down, read through it like twenty-three times. That book changed it for me,” he said. Ren’s conversion greatly informed his solo debut, 1993’s Shock of the Hour (its title changed from Life Sentence to one referencing a speech from Minister Farrakhan), with the album playing like two separate sides—its first half rife with the gun-and-dick-slinging braggadocio he typically spit and the second half containing recordings he cut after joining the Nation of Islam.
TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT
Dr. Dre was becoming eager to start work away from the Ruthless fold. Before the release of N.W.A’s swan song Efil4zaggin, Dre talked to Ren and Yella about exiting and joining Death Row, the new label he was starting with D.O.C and Suge Knight. Yella never answered him and Ren passed on the opportunity after Dre took him to Dick Griffey’s SOLAR Records building in Hollywood where the label was seated. “Fuck this. This is a worse situation,” Ren thought. Dre had also been in communica
tion with Ice Cube to discuss the possibility of working on Death Certificate after Ruthless barred him from contributing to AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, further proof of how Dre was looking to distance himself from Ruthless—though he changed his mind after learning about “No Vaseline.”
CPO Boss Hogg, Ren’s friend who was signed to Capitol Records through his MC Ren Productions was one Ruthless affiliate who would join Dre. CPO Boss Hogg, with his partners DJ Train and Young D, the other members of Capital Punishment Organization (CPO), released To Hell And Black in 1990. He was frustrated with the way Capitol handled the record at the time. Eazy had talked to him about doing an album under the Ruthless banner, but CPO declined because of his relationship with Ren. CPO was excited by the type of music Dre was creating and he wanted to be a part of it. “[The] beats were just too funky. He had this whole new thing,” he said. “When you’re working with Dre, it’s the shit. I would sit on the back wall and just watch him. He’d be there, standing and bobbing his head and just mixing. Everybody talks about Dre’s production, to me his talent isn’t production—his mastery is mixing. He could probably make the worst sounding track ever put together sound like it was the shit, because of his mixing.”
Dre’s first non-Ruthless project was producing on the soundtrack to Deep Cover, a neonoir crime thriller starring Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum, that SOLAR was releasing with Sony’s Epic Records. In late 1991, Dre’s stepbrother Warren introduced him to a key collaborator that helped elevate Dre’s work on Deep Cover. It was during a bachelor party Dre had thrown his friend and Ruthless keyboardist Andre “LA Dre” Bolton, when the music had run out. The DJ for the night had breezed through all the cassettes he had and asked Warren if he had any music. Warren had a demo of his trio 213 in the car and asked a friend to run and grab it. He had been shopping demos of the group he formed with his two lifelong friends, church singer Nathaniel “Nate Dogg” Hale and rapper Cordozar Calvin Broadus, who went by the name “Snoop,” to no luck. Warren, Nate, and Snoop were thick as thieves growing up on the East Side of Long Beach, where they played Pop Warner football together. “We just stuck together as a crew all our lives . . . from elementary,” Warren said.
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