Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  But the hip-hop progressives had always argued that the media needed to be opened to unheard voices. By calling themselves journalists, Ice Cube and NWA outmaneuvered the hip-hop progressives, positioning themselves between the mainstream and those voices. No one else, they claimed, was speaking for the brother on the corner but them—loudly, defiantly and unapologetically. So Straight Outta Compton also marked the beginning of hip-hop’s obsession with “The Real.” From now on, rappers had to represent—to scream for the unheard and otherwise speak the unspeakable. Life on the hair-trigger margin—with all of its unpredictability, contradiction, instability, menace, tragedy and irony, with its daily death and resistance—needed to be described in its passionate complexity, painted in bold strokes, framed in wide angles, targeted with laser precision. A generation needed to assassinate its demons.

  Many young hip-hop progressives would thus come to have their “NWA moment,” that moment of surprise and surrender when outrage turned to empathy, rejection became recognition and intolerance gave way to embrace. “I was going to a club called ‘Funky Reggae,’ and I remember being in the middle of the dance floor, hearing ‘Dopeman’ for the first time and stopping,” says Lester. “And going over to the side of the dance floor and just concentrating on what they were saying—which was tough to do because the beat was so bananas. The lyrics just struck me so tough I had to step to the side and really concentrate on what they were talking about. And that’s when I fell in love with NWA. There’s been moments in my life when I’ve thought certain things or put up with certain things and felt a certain way about things and then, with the snap of a finger, clarity came. And this was one of those moments.”

  Suddenly the ghosts of 1965 seemed not only prescient, but present. They were gazing over Ice Cube’s shoulder. They were pushing hip-hop progressives to give up the certainty of the past, to embrace their generation and its future, even if that meant coming closer to apocalypse and decay. A millennial impulse was brewing.

  Richard Dedeaux’s words from Watts seemed prophetic:

  Ever since they passed them civil rights

  Those fires have been lighting up the nights

  And they say they ain’t gon’ stop til we all have equal rights

  Looks to me like dem niggas ain’t playing.

  Ice Cube’s Amerikkkan colors, 1993.

  Photo © Daniel Hastings

  15.

  The Real Enemy

  The Cultural Riot of Ice Cube’s

  Death Certificate

  Rap is really funny, man. But if you don’t see that it’s funny, it will scare the shit out of you.

  —Ice T

  Sometime in the middle of 1991, two icons of Black power—past and present, female and male, progressive and nationalist—sat down to break bread. It would be an eye-opening afternoon for Angela Y. Davis and O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson.

  Ice Cube had just been through two years of turmoil. After coming off a tour that had ended with something close to a police riot, he returned home to the same bed he had slept in as a teenager. His mom had him washing the dishes and taking out the trash.1 The house got fired upon, mistakenly, in a gang drive-by.2 What was he still doing here, he wondered, and what was up with his money?

  Together, Straight Outta Compton and Eazy Duz It had sold three million copies. The tour grossed $650,000. Cube went to ask Jerry Heller about his cut. He received $23,000 for the tour, $32,700 for the album, and was told to leave it alone. “Jerry Heller lives in a half-million-dollar house in Westlake and I’m still living at home with my mother. Jerry’s driving a Corvette and a Mercedes-Benz and I’ve got a Suzuki Sidekick,” he told Frank Owen. “Jerry’s making all the money and I’m not.”3 He got his own lawyer and accountant, and took off for the east coast.

  The magnet was the Bomb Squad. “I just thought, at the time, there was two producers that was even worth fucking with—Dr. Dre and the Bomb Squad. If I couldn’t get Dre, I was going to the Bomb Squad. To me it was simple,” he says.

  Creatively and philosophically, Cube felt he had taken the idea of Black teen rebellion to its logical end. He was ready to grow up, and in Chuck and the S1Ws, he found willing mentors. They gave him books to read, introduced him into the Nation of Islam, and he soaked it all up with the wide-eyed hunger of a younger brother. “Up to this point, I was just rolling through life trying to get money. That was my life before,” Cube says. “This kind of opened me up to a whole new world. It gave me my freedom mentally to deal with this world.”

  The Politics of Getting Mine

  Amerikkka’s Most Wanted was completed in February 1990 just after the Bomb Squad had wrapped up Fear of a Black Planet. If Black Planet had seemed tightly wound, the result of a need to regain control, Most Wanted was the opposite, like Cube had been waiting to exhale. Eager to flaunt his skills and his knowledge, he made every track a hot blast.

  From police and street rivals, Cube moved to new targets, like naïve panAfricanists and jock-riding fans. But, reflecting his newfound interest in Farrakhan-style nationalism, he reserved most of his venom for the pathologically dependent.

  On “Once Upon a Time in the Projects,” Cube’s middle-class narrator pays his girl a visit in her public housing apartment. Her neglectful mom has abandoned one of her brothers to the gangs and left the other to run around in a dirty diaper while she cooks up crack in the kitchen. The detail may have come off as In Living Color–funny, but it barely hid his outrage: here was how government handouts degraded the weak-minded Black poor.

  “You Can’t Fade Me” leapt headlong into controversy with feminists. The narrator imagines “kick(ing) the bitch in the tummy” and going “in the closet looking for the hanger” to end the pregnancy of a girl with whom he had a one-night stand. The woman is “the neighborhood hussy,” looking to pin a man for child support. The song may have seemed equally merciless to its narrator—a jobless drunk trying to look good to his homies, more concerned about taking care of his dick than taking care of a kid—except that in the end the man crows when it turns out the baby is not his. Taking care of yourself was the only way to maintain self-respect. It was Darwinian politics, survival of the fittest. Weakness was feminized.

  At the same time, Cube brought depth to the male characters he played—on record or on screen. Tapped to play Doughboy in John Singleton’s film Boyz N The Hood, Cube became a post-industrial Cain suffering from a mother’s derision and a father’s absence. Both Singleton and Ice Cube had strong, loving relationships with their fathers, but fatherlessness would always loom large in their work, the ghosts of Malcolm, Martin, Bunchy, and George appearing as absent fathers to a wayward generation gone nihilistic.

  Cube now saw his experience being bused to the Valley as formative. He realized, “I was mad at everything. When I went to the schools in the Valley, going through those neighborhoods, seeing how different they were from mine, that angered me. The injustice of it, that’s what always got me—the injustice.”4Cube was moving toward a racial and generational view, his gangsta aesthetic evolving into a proto-nationalism.

  On the title track, Cube’s criminal antihero is literally breaking out of South Central, heading into the suburbs, seventy years after Blacks spilled south out of downtown, to launch a “nigga invasion, point blank, on the Caucasian.” This is payback. Jacking, he muses, is “the American way, ‘cause I’m the G-A-N-G-S-T-A.” Suddenly the police crack down on him. “I said it before and I still taunt it,” he concludes. “Every motherfucker with a color is most wanted.” The ambiguity of “color”—did he mean blue and red or Black and brown?—summed up Cube’s move from repping his streets to something bigger.

  When he returned to South Central to film the movie, he met Craig “Kam” Miller, a rapper and a former gang member who was in the process of becoming Craig X at the Compton Mosque #54. Cube was soon meeting with Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the charismatic firebrand who had organized Muhammad Mosque #27. The bald-domed Muhammad called himself a “truth t
errorist and knowledge gangsta, a Black history hit man and an urban guerilla,” and his mosque expanded its ministry into the broadening gang peace movement, becoming a national model for Farrakhan’s gang outreach work.5 Cube shaved off his jheri-curl and took refuge in the Nation of Islam. Full of new ideas, he was confident his next album, Death Certificate, would be his masterpiece.

  The Image of Revolution

  Angela Y. Davis had grown up in the South in an activist household, and proved an intellectual prodigy. At Brandeis University, where she was one of a handful of African-American students, she was enthralled by a speech given by Malcolm X. Later, while studying in Germany with Theodor Adorno, she had come upon a picture of the Black Panthers in the Sacramento Assembly chambers. She returned to South Central Los Angeles to join the Revolution. After checking out the various political organizations, she rejected Karenga’s US Organization as anti-feminist, and joined both SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Soon after, she would note, the Panthers published an essay by Huey Newton in its newspaper that called for solidarity with the emerging gay liberation movement.

  After George and Jonathan Jackson were killed and her trial ended in acquittal, she had emerged as an international hero and a leading light in the anti-prisons movement. She became a professor in women’s studies and African-American Studies, finally landing at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

  As the 1990s opened, she had become painfully aware of how images of her youthful life-and-death struggles were being revived to signify an all-too-vague oppositional style. In a speech she mused, “On the one hand it is inspiring to discover a measure of historical awareness that, in our youth, my generation often lacked. But it is also unsettling. Because I know that almost inevitably my image is associated with a certain representation of Black nationalism that privileges those particular nationalisms with which some of us were locked in constant struggle.”6

  She said, “The image of an armed Black man is considered the ‘essence’ of revolutionary commitment today. As dismayed as I may feel about this simplistic, phallocentric image, I remember my own responses to romanticized images of brothers (and sometimes sisters) with guns. And, in actuality, it was empowering to go to target practice and shoot—or break down a weapon—as well, or better, than a man. I can relate to the young people who passionately want to do something today, but are misdirected . . .”7

  These youths still saw Angela Y. Davis’s afro and her Black fist frozen in time. But she had moved on, and she hoped to engage them as an elder would.

  The Gangsta Meets the Revolutionary

  It had been publicist Leyla Turkkan’s idea to sit Angela Davis and Ice Cube together. Turkkan had grown up on New York’s Upper East Side, a bohemian “parkie” hanging out with graffiti writers like ZEPHYR and REVOLT. In college, she became a promoter for Black Uhuru on their breakthrough Red tour, then moved into publicity, always looking for ways to bring together her P.R. skills, her extensive industry contacts and her progressive politics. Like Bill Adler, she was particularly ready for the rise of Black radical rap. But after the success of the Stop the Violence Movement, she had felt sideswiped by Public Enemy’s Griff debacle. At one point, David Mills forced her to deny that she and Adler had ever tried to build up Public Enemy as politicians or social activists. Turkkan felt she had another chance with Ice Cube. By sitting Cube with Davis, he could be presented as an inheritor of the Black radical tradition.

  The interview was a provocative idea—one that both Davis and Cube welcomed. But none of them had any idea how the conversation would turn when they got together in Cube’s Street Knowledge business offices.

  To begin with, Davis only heard a few tracks from the still unfinished album, including “My Summer Vacation,” “Us” and a track called “Lord Have Mercy,” which never made it to the album. She did not hear the song that would become most controversial—a rap entitled “Black Korea.” In another way, she was at a more fundamental disadvantage in the conversation.

  Like Davis, Cube’s mother had grown up in the South. After moving to Watts, she had come of age as a participant in the 1965 riots. While Cube and his mother were close, they often argued about politics and his lyrics. Now it was like Cube was sitting down to talk with his mother. Davis was at a loss the way any parent is with her child at the moment he is in the fullest agitation of his becoming.

  Cube sat back behind his glass desk in a black leather chair, the walls covered with framed gold records and posters for Boyz N The Hood and his albums. Copies of URB, The Source and The Final Call were laid out in front of him. Davis asked Cube how he felt about the older generation.

  “When I look at older people, I don’t think they feel that they can learn from the younger generation. I try and tell my mother things that she just doesn’t want to hear sometimes,” he answered.

  “We’re at a point where I hear people like Darryl Gates saying, ‘We’ve got to have a war on gangs.’ And I see a lot of Black parents clapping and saying: ‘Oh yes, we have to have a war on gangs.’ But when young men with baseball caps and T-shirts are considered gangs, what you doing is clapping for a war against your children.”8

  When the conversation swung from generation to gender, Cube’s discomfort was palpable:

  ICE CUBE: What you have is Black people wanting to be like white people, not realizing that white people want to be like Black people. So the best thing to do is to eliminate that type of thinking. You need Black men who are not looking up to the white man, who are not trying to be like the white man.

  ANGELA: What about the women. You keep talking about Black men. I’d like to hear you say Black men and Black women.

  ICE CUBE: Black people.

  ANGELA: I think that you often exclude your sisters from your thought process. We’re never going to get anywhere if we’re not together.

  ICE CUBE: Of course. But the Black man is down.

  ANGELA: Well, the Black woman’s down, too.

  ICE CUBE: But the Black woman can’t look up to the Black man until we get up.

  ANGELA: Well why should the Black woman look up to the Black man? Why can’t we look at each other as equals?

  ICE CUBE: If we look at each other on an equal level, what you’re going to have is a divide. It’s going to be divided.

  ANGELA: As I told you, I teach at the San Francisco County Jail. Many of the women there have been arrested in connection with drugs. But they are invisible to most people. People talk about the drug problem without mentioning the fact that the majority of crack users in our community are women. So when we talk about progress in the community, we have to talk about progress in the community, we have to talk about the sisters as well as the brothers.

  ICE CUBE: The sisters have held up the community.

  ANGELA: When you refer to “the Black man,” I would like to hear something explicit about Black women. That will convince me that you are thinking about your sisters as well as your brothers.

  ICE CUBE: I think about everybody.9

  When Davis tried to suggest the power of building alliances with women, Latinos, Native Americans, and others, Cube was dismissive. He said, “You have people who fight for integration, but I’d say we need to fight for equal rights. In the schools, they want equal books, they don’t want no torn books. That was more important than fighting to sit at the same counter and eat. I think it’s more healthy if we sit over there, just as long as we have good food.”

  Davis replied, “Suppose we say we want to sit in the same place or wherever we want to sit, but we also want to eat food of our own choosing. You understand what I’m saying? We want to be respected as equals, but also for our differences. I don’t want to be invisible as a Black woman.”

  Cube answered, “It’s all about teaching our kids about the nature of the slave master. Teaching them about his nature, and how he is always going to beat you no matter how many books you push in front of him, no matter how many leaders you send to talk to him. He’s always going to
be the same way. We’ve got to understand that everything has natural energies.”

  Then he cited Farrakhan’s analogy: “There’s the chicken and the chicken hawk. The ant and the anteater. They are enemies by nature. That’s what we’ve got to instill in our kids.”10

  Two Videotapes

  In May 1963, news footage of Black civil rights protestors being attacked by police and dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, Alabama, had a powerful effect in mobilizing public opinion during debates over the Civil Rights Act. In March 1991, there was no remotely comparable legislation on the table when two videotapes—one from an amateur’s camcorder, the other from a store surveillance camera—surfaced. Public horror and outrage would have no channel to find. Tension filled the moment to its bursting point.

  After midnight on Sunday, March 3, Rodney King was beaten by five police officers at the entrance to Hansen Dam Park in Lakeview Terrace. He had led police on a chase in his battered old Hyundai before stopping there.

  King had just done less than a year in prison for trying to rob a Korean American–owned store with a tire iron. He had been such an ineffectual thief that the store-owner had seized the weapon from King and sent him running for his Hyundai as the store-owner took down the license plate number. King got out early for good behavior, and found work as a construction laborer.

  After a hard week of work, he had been unwinding that Sunday, drinking 8-Ball and watching a basketball game with friends. By midnight, he was drunk and behind the wheel, pushing the limits of what his Hyundai could take, terrified of being sent back to prison. His carmates were yelling at him to pull over.

  In the video, King is a shadow in the middle of a uniformed cipher lit by sirens, headlamps, and a ghetto-bird searchlight, a dark mass tossed and rolled by flashing batons for a minute and a half. By the time he whimpered, “Please stop,” and was hog-tied, he had suffered fifty-six baton blows and shoe stomps and kicks to the head and body. Within twenty-four hours, the video was being broadcast nationwide.