Here's where I'm supposed to make a bunch of jokes about Are We There Yet? and Barbershop decimating whatever street cred Ice Cube carried into the 21st century, but I can assure you that I Am the West might have the purest artistic motivations of any hip-hop record this year*.* Cube is clearly not in it for the money; an independently released rap album is about the least financially beneficial project he could dedicate himself to at this point. Which makes I Am the West exciting in a way Ice Cube albums haven't been for years. It turns out to be a hip-hop version of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, with Cube telling young gangbangers to get off his lawn.
It doesn't work; the problem isn't the anger itself but rather the manner in which it's being directed. Too often, Cube's either making specific threats against vague targets or vague threats at specific targets, ultimately offering a viewpoint more confused than conflicted. Cube rants, "Why can't I talk about the shit I see?/ Without Alicia Keys, without going R&B?" and combined with a track called "No Country for Young Men", it's obvious Cube is trying to instill some kind of restorative old-school values into hip-hop. Throughout, there are off-handed but telling asides like, "this ain't Tha Carter," "not like Kanye," and what I can presume to be a dig at Drake for having a white mother.
Now, if Cube wanted to just go off at other rappers over defiantly retro G-funk beats, well, that basically describes a Westside Connection record, not coincidentally the last good music project he was involved with. But he shows his hand by half-bragging, "I'm a hall of famer/ Treated like a stranger," operating from the vantage point that radio airplay is still the lingua franca of respect in the rap game. Cube gets in what seems like a pretty obvious dig at Dr. Dre on "Drink the Kool-Aid", and while he's denied any sort of beef, an apology is wholly unnecessary since I Am the West pays full tribute to Aftermath's assembly-line mid-decade production-- it's nothing but plodding piano vamps, sterile handclap snares, and the occasional rave synth preset. Cube stridently reps L.A. throughout ("I Rep That West", "Too West Coast", "Life in California"), but despite the outro of "Your Money or Your Life" doing an "I'm Still #1"-style namedrop of all of the West Coast legends he's down with, the only one that shows up is WC, who promptly blows away anyone else here. Then there are the hooks, and they're all totally embarrassing, set to stilted cadences and going downhill from there. Fun fact: out of the 17 tracks on Ice Cube's Greatest Hits, only five feature him rapping on the chorus. He's above this sort of thing.
I suppose you have only yourself to blame for being disappointed by an Ice Cube album at this point, but similar to Public Enemy, you're disappointed because they're hip-hop artists who weren't necessarily destined to age so poorly. Both ascended to legendary status not so much by the manner of radio hits or a time-stamped rhyme style, but rather with an intellectual clarity and force of conviction that made them more dangerous than anyone merely preaching violence. And Cube can still be potently incisive in detailing whatever's fucking up America at the time: "Hood Robbin'" addresses the health-care woes and housing bubble with depressing realism.
Initially, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the outro to "Soul on Ice", which informs the listener that maybe they should familiarize themselves with Cube's prophetic early albums, as if this is really going to be anyone's introduction to him. Sounds silly to ask if you've been able to follow his career in real time, but a 16-year old who stumbles on the video for the Bangladesh-produced "She Couldn't Make It on Her Own" would've been five the last time Cube was getting serious airtime on music channels. So even if I Am the West is little more than another reminder of what Cube's day job was before becoming a Hollywood supermogul, if it does result in someone's hearing AmeriKKKA's Most Wanted or Death Certificate for the first time in 2010, it's done its job and, frankly, I'm jealous of those kids.
