Ice Cube left N.W.A. in late 1989 over a royalty dispute, a fairly mundane conclusion to his tenure as the intellectual force and chief lyricist for the self-proclaimed “World’s Most Dangerous Group” after only one proper album. Cube’s lyrics for “Fuck the Police” had triggered an F.B.I. response earlier that same year, but Cube was still living at home with his parents when Straight Outta Compton was rocketing toward platinum status. He was 20 years old, and he’d just turned down a $75,000 check because he didn’t trust Eazy-E and Jerry Heller, who ran the group’s label, Ruthless Records. Two years later, with the release of Death Certificate, he’d be the biggest and most controversial rapper in the world.
During the two years between Cube’s split in late 1989 and the release of Death Certificate, his sprawling, imperfect magnum opus in late 1991, rap music grew up in a hurry, experiencing its pop and punk moments simultaneously. Crossover acts like L.L. Cool J, M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Kid ‘N Play, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and Digital Underground took rap to the top of the charts and into the heart of suburban multiplexes, while southern California gangsta rap continued to proliferate in N.W.A.’s wake via Above the Law, Compton’s Most Wanted and Cypress Hill. On the East Coast, Public Enemy’s Black Nationalist oratory and incisive media critiques, which inspired Straight Outta Compton, continued on 1990’s Fear of a Black Planet. The Geto Boys took their nightmarish vision of Houston’s Fifth Ward to the Hot 100 singles chart while Miami’s 2 Live Crew emerged as unlikely First Amendment pioneers, and regional rap scenes took shape around the country.
As rap continued to evolve and mutate during this two-year period, forces both internal and external worked to validate it as a cultural and economic power. By 1991, the quickly industrializing genre had spawned its own house organ, as The Source—the first magazine to cover rap in its fans’ vernacular, and a central node linking the disparate nationwide phenomenon together—was bringing in seven-figure ad revenues after moving to New York City from Boston in 1990. In March 1991, rap was legitimized in a different(and perhaps more significant) way: Billboard unveiled a radical (and long-overdue) change to its chart methodology. Instead of relying on self-reported sales numbers from retailers—which ignored many independent and “urban” outlets—the new SoundScan system used actual bar code data to determine sales. The impact for rap was felt immediately: N.W.A.’s independently-distributed Efil4zaggin debuted at #2 on the Billboard Top 200 chart behind Paula Abdul’s Spellbound, before climbing to the top spot in its second week. Six months later, Death Certificate, on which Priority spent $18,000 in marketing and which enjoyed no Top 40 airplay, outsold Hammer’s fourth album Too Legit to Quit (which Capitol spent a million dollars promoting) in both LPs’ first weeks in stores. Gangsta rap had won.
Death Certificate is not Cube’s best album. May 1990’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted is tighter, and the peaks of 1992’s The Predator, released after the Rodney King verdict-inspired L.A. rebellion, are higher. But Death Certificate is Ice Cube’s most important album, and one of the most essential works in rap history. Released a few months after Cube’s star turn as the dead-eyed Doughboy in the summer 1991 release Boyz in the Hood, and preceded by the irresistible first single “Steady Mobbin,” Death Certificate was anticipated like few rap albums had ever been. It had been six months since the King tape showed the LAPD gang-assaulting a black motorist, and their trial wouldn’t start for another six. A million copies of Death Certificate were shipped, and it was certified platinum two months after it hit stores. In the shadow of the King video, and with tensions higher than ever between south LA’s black citizens and the police, expectations were high for Cube, who at the time co-owned rap’s creative and political mantle with Chuck D. With Death Certificate, Cube met them head on.
In a nod toward the vinyl format that was rapidly obsolescing in 1991, Cube split the album into the “Death Side” (“a mirror image of where we are today”) and the “Life Side” (“a vision of where we need to go”). Other rap albums had toyed with the “concept” idea—De La Soul’s 1989 LP 3 Feet High and Rising was a big influence on Cube for AMW, skits and all. Yet due to its status, Death Certificate established a permanent lane for conceptual works in rap music, which Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. would capitalize on with their own death-fixated concept albums a few years later.
Death Certificate’s sides serve as an organizing mechanism for Cube’s two primary subject areas. The “Death Side” is Cube as crass hood storyteller, relating oft-hilarious tales about the VD clinic, stopping at your mom’s house to take a shit, haranguing a girl’s dad about her most intimate activities, even a trip to St. Louis that wound up in a jail stay. “Look Who’s Burnin’” and “Steady Mobbin’” show Cube’s unparalleled skill at lighthearted, detail-rich, slice-of-South Central-life songs—they predict not only the melancholic “It Was a Good Day,” but 1995 film Friday, Cube’s loving, hilarious ode to a single day in his neighborhood. And yes, some of these songs are stomach-churning—“Givin’ Up the Nappy Dugout” wavers between slut-shaming and sexual assault—but the “Death Side” concept is designed to allow Cube a performative “out.” This isn’t autobiography, it argues, but a reflection of the worst impulses of his community (personal mileage, as always, may vary).
The “Life Side,” conversely, is Cube as op-ed columnist, a racially isolationist embodiment of the album’s cover image of Cube standing next to a corpse tagged as “Uncle Sam,” with all the metaphorical subtlety of a political cartoonist. Interracial dating, moving to the suburbs, selling drugs, gangbanging: all of these are noxious activities that are preventing the black race (okay, black men) from reaching its potential. This side, significantly more controversial than the first, was an outgrowth of Cube’s fortuitous 1990 run-in with Chuck D. in the Def Jam lobby. After splitting with N.W.A. and learning that Ruthless wouldn’t let Dre produce his first solo album, Cube headed east, to track down 3rd Bass’ producer. After running into D., Cube took a feature slot on Public Enemy’s 1990 single “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and an east/west creative partnership was established.
D. and the Bomb Squad would exert a huge influence on Amerikkka’s Most Wanted. “Public Enemy taught me how to put a record together as far as knowing what song should come after what song and the feel of a record,” Cube later recalled. “Chuck D is a master at that. How it’s sequenced as a whole is just as important as each individual record.” AMW was a huge step forward for West Coast rap, with Cube further shaping the “nigga” and “gangsta” archetypes he’d started with N.W.A. while creating something close to a full conceptual work complete with skits, samples from the actual America’s Most Wanted television show, and an overall consistency that the shallow-past-the-singles Straight Outta Compton lacked.
Cube’s other P.E.-inspired transformation was happening at the content level, as he turned N.W.A.’s shock-rap into a new hybrid form: part gangsta nihilism and part post-Black Power militarism, inspired by P.E.’s deep connections with the Nation of Islam and its controversial figurehead Louis Farrakhan. The differences between P.E. and Cube are instructive: if “Fight the Power” pioneered a form of post-Black Power cultural politics informed by a desire for a cultural movement, then AMW proper opener “The Nigga You Love To Hate” (and its sequel, Death Certificate opener ‘The Wrong Nigga to Fuck With”) is driven by Cube’s sui generis self-interest. Where Chuck D. was an outspoken diplomat, Cube was a righteous mercenary in the KRS-One mold, aiming as much at suburban pieties—hey kids, check out “Gangsta’s Fairytale”!—as his perceived enemies.
After eight years under Ronald Reagan’s oppressive social and economic policies, which were particularly devastating to black communities, it made sense for a politicized South Central rapper to shun the idea of community mobilization and carve out a cultural politics of the self. The already privileged succeeded wildly, while historically marginalized populations like those in Compton and South Central L.A. deteriorated. Reagan’s Draconian “war on drugs” devastated inner cities for generations. First Lady Nancy urged kids to “Just Say No,” placing the onus to wipe out the crack epidemic not on the state but the individual. This same bootstraps ideal did away with civil rights organizing in exchange for self-entrepreneurship in a putatively free market, and it was from this landscape that Cube’s new identity was born. Jeff Chang explained it best in Cant Stop, Won’t Stop: “If Nation of Millions had signaled the end of the civil rights era, Death Certificate’s primary impulse was to dance on the grave.”
On Death Certificate, Cube expanded AMW’s lone-gunman individualism into a fierce, convoluted political manifesto. It’s not just about Cube alone anymore, but the future of young black men. “Niggaz are in a state of emergency” are the first seven words on the album. “I want to see my brothers and sisters on a higher economical level and treating themselves with more respect,” Cube told the L.A. Times in 1991. “The American Dream is not for Blacks. Blacks who (still believe in that dream) are kidding themselves…What I try to do is tell the kids the truth…the brutal, harsh truth—pulling no punches—about what's out there in the world.” Cube’s truth-telling was rooted in his recently forged relationship to the Nation of Islam, a movement that had recenty brought back to prominence by the outspoken Farrakhan. The NOI had done much good for Black communities over time by preaching a gospel of self-reliance and racial separatism. Both notions permeate Death Certificate’s politics, and, it should be noted, experienced their renaissance during that same individualistic, increasingly identity-factionalized 1980s.
On the album’s CD tray image, Cube is pictured reading the NOI newspaper The Final Call, while strategically positioned between his recently assembled Lench Mob crew on the left and Nation representatives standing at attention on the right. It’s tough to know how much Cube’s NOI affiliation was rooted in ideological purity or performative opportunism—on “Steady Mobbin’”, he wonders if the better come-up is to “start sellin’ bean pies” or bootleg “You Can’t Touch This” t-shirts—though he’d obviously taken Farrakhan’s recommendation to use his fame to spread the word. In 1991, the devout Muslim and Watts-bred rapper Kam and Nation spokesperson Khalid Abdul Muhammad shaved off Cube’s “toxic” Jheri curl, and both appear on the album.
It’s easy to draw a direct line between NOI teachings (including a discredited, Cube-endorsed book that alleges Jewish people dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade) and Cube’s anti-Semitic remarks on “No Vaseline,” Cube’s response to N.W.A.’s diss-track diptych “Message to B.A.” and “Real Niggaz” (the latter of which was repurposed from the 100 Miles and Runnin’ EP). “No Vaseline” doesn’t fit with the rest of Death Certificate at all—it’s like Cube left the stage and confronted N.W.A. in an alley behind the venue, bringing his mic. Although the violence was symbolic, “No Vaseline” remains a hateful song, Cube using homophobia and anti-Semitism as crude weaponry for his macho language battle. The track led the Simon Wiesenthal Center to call for a nationwide boycott of Death Certificate because Cube recommends dispensing with the “devil” Heller by putting “a bullet in his temple.” Island Records, which distributed the album in Europe, removed “Vaseline” (and “Black Korea”) from copies there. In his review of “Death Certificate,” the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called Cube a “sex bigot” and compared “Vaseline” to Axl Rose’s xenophobic lyrics on “One in a Million.”
The “Vaseline” controversy fed headlines for months, and for Cube’s millions of fans, its real-life soap-opera thrill only fed into the song’s problematic appeal. Like with so much art that is virtuosic and problematic in equal measure, many took perverse joy listening to Cube eradicate precarious communicative boundaries that help maintain civil discourse. Especially for the teenage boys who comprised Cube’s core audience at the time, “No Vaseline” was its own rap Wrestlemania headline bout: a triumphal act of face-saving in an easy-to-replicate cadence over a sample of Brick’s 1976 disco-funk hit “Dazz.” Cube flipped Ren’s “too much cargo” line from “Real Niggaz” and called him out for driving a B-210, and even turned Eazy-E’s subversive attendance at a Presidential dinner into an act of kowtowing to white authority. Even the song’s title (and theme) was intertextual: It was pulled from LL Cool J’s “To Da Break of Dawn” from the previous year, on which he eviscerates three foes: Kool Moe Dee, MC Hammer, and Ice-T. Cube outdid L there: he took out five enemies in one song. Until Jay-Z’s 2001 Nas-dismantling “Takeover,” “No Vaseline” was rap’s peak diss track: a non-stop series of consecutively landed, clever punchlines. N.W.A. would break up before getting a chance to respond.
“No Vaseline”s flawlessly executed “dozens” routine was one thing. The inflammatory 47-second track “Black Korea,” on which Cube rails against—and obliquely threatens—Korean-American shop owners, was another. The community relationship between Korean-American merchants (who had run liquor stores and convenience shops in black parts of Los Angeles for years) was already tense, but it was inflamed by the 1991 shooting of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by South Central liquor store owner Soon Ja Du, captured on surveillance video only two weeks after the King footage was released. On “Korea,” Cube alternately suggests a boycott (for which there was precedent) and arson for non-compliant storeowners, characterized as “Oriental, one-penny countin’ motherfuckers” and “chop-suey ass.”
The broader context of this issue is best characterized by Chang: Korean-American storeowners were overworked and often terrorized by local gang members; in 1986, Chang notes, the Black-Korean Alliance was formed after four Korean merchants were killed in a single month. Black citizens, on the other hand, were tired of local merchants who wouldn’t hire black workers, who didn’t give back to local communities, and who assumed that any black-skinned person entering their stores had criminal intent.
“Black Korea” was not a nuanced song, but Cube wasn’t a politician or a diplomat. He’s “the nigga you love to hate,” and “the wrong nigga to fuck with.” To many critics, however, Death Certificate was merely “the rankest sort of racism and hatemongering,” as Billboard argued in a rare editorial condemning the album. At The Source, editor James Bernard replied to Billboard in a manner befitting his publication’s mindset and audience: the industry magazine was “too dainty and thin-skinned to hear the anger and rage and frustration that many people are forced to deal with every day.” This was the official line from Cube’s camp as well. When Christgau asked for comment, Cube’s publicist Leyla Turkkan framed Death Certificate as “an honest expression of black rage.” Bernard went further (and broader) in a review for Entertainment Weekly: “I’m not arrogant enough to wag my finger at someone for stridency or incorrect language when many of his friends are dead and many of the rest are either in prison or standing on the corner surrounded by burned-out buildings and dying dreams,” he wrote. “These people don’t get to write magazine articles, don’t get elected to political office, and don’t get appointed to the Supreme Court.”
As 2Pac would two years later with Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., Cube exploited the mainstream exposure he was receiving as an opportunity to more powerfully broadcast his narrowly intended address. “The truth is I don't care what the white community thinks about the record,” Cube told the LA Times. “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.” This raises a crucial question that we still deal with today: whites bought Death Certificate—an album aimed toward black communities—in the millions. How was a white kid in the Midwest suburbs supposed to assume a subject position as the addressee of a song like “Us,” a song that examines the failures of young black men to take ownership of their own futures, and not rely on government intervention? The answer: we couldn’t. Instead, we eavesdropped.
Indeed, one of the most profound cultural shifts occasioned by the rise of gangsta rap, and pioneered by Ice Cube on Death Certificate, is the phenomenon of mass-cultural “listening in.” An album that sells millions of copies is designed to function as a communicative channel from one young black man to an audience of other black men. Chang called Death Certificate “the most impassioned attempt to speak to the young guns of South Central since Bunchy Carter had left the Slausons for the Panthers.” On one hand, of course, this perspective permits Cube a tautological “out”—“I’m not talking to you so you’re not my audience”—that is logically disproven by the fact that he’s releasing the album to a mass audience. On the other hand, understanding the intended audience of a work is absolutely crucial to empathizing with its message.
And there were messages: Amid Cube’s fiercest isolationist tendencies, Death Certificate exposes structural failings in a way that no rapper had yet attempted with this degree of clarity. Non-Black listeners may have bought the album for the illicit thrills of “Steady Mobbin’,” “Look Who’s Burnin’” or “No Vaseline,” but those with open ears could learn a lot from “Alive on Arrival.” Dramatically concluding the album’s “Life” side, penultimate track “Arrival” is a grim, detail-rich narrative of a drug-related shooting victim (“looked down, and my sweatshirt’s red at the bottom”) who dies while waiting for treatment at South Central’s MLK Community Hospital after being harassed by the LAPD. Cube’s description of his waiting room horror makes for one of the album’s most richly ironic lines: “One hour done passed/Done watched two episodes of MASH”. Much of the public attention paid to Death Certificate was devoted to Cube’s lashing out at anyone who stands in his way, but on “Arrival,” he talks about “an overworked physician” who didn’t have the time to give his character more than a band-aid and IV. “Why, oh why, can’t I get help?” Cube pleads as the song concludes. “’Cause I’m Black, I gots to go for self.”
