Ice Cube AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted

Part of what makes AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted essential is how ugly it is. Ugly in its observations about race (“Endangered Species (Tales From the Darkside)”) and ugly in its casual hatred of women (“You Can’t Fade Me”). Ugly when it’s being playful (“Who’s the Mack?”) and really ugly when it isn’t (“AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted”). At a time when artists like Public Enemy and Ice-T were exploring rap as something that could be explicitly political, Cube sounded less like a philosopher or reporter than a participant in the same societal corrosion that made him a victim in the first place—a gangsta because “gangsta” was all he thought he could be. Couch this in some of the most dynamic and musically entertaining hip-hop of its time (courtesy the Public Enemy production team The Bomb Squad) and you have a problem: An angry Black man with a gift for the spotlight. Or as an ABC interview put it by way of introduction: “Even if you’ve never heard of him, your kids have.” This was a pivotal couple of years in rap music: Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out, De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (the inspiration, in part, for AmeriKKKa’s skits) and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique—the list could go on. AmeriKKKa connected rap back to the morally ambivalent pimp stories of Iceberg Slim or a good Richard Pryor routine, and set the groundwork for the scathing social awareness of Biggie’s Ready to Die and Kendrick’s To Pimp a Butterfly. It had the bounce of West Coast rap and the cast-in-concrete feel of New York. Yeah, the controversy probably drove sales, but it also staged an encounter between kids from the suburbs and lines like “Why more n*****s in the pen’ than in college?” He wasn’t just leaving N.W.A.—he was trying to outgun them.