Ice Cube

Once again it’s on, the motherfucking psycho

Ice Cube the bitch-killer, cap-peeler

Yo, running through the line like Bo, there’s no pot to piss in

I put my fist in

Now, who do ya love to hate?

Los Angeles, 1989. The most explosive divorce in rap history is on everyone's lips. Ice Cube and N.W.A. are about to trade knives for words. Very heavy words. For O'Shea Jackson Sr., his former friends are goddamn traitors, spineless sellouts incapable of getting him properly paid. Cube feels betrayed, especially by Eazy-E, so he drops everything and decides to go solo. But N.W.A. won't forgive him, and within days they unleash the track that will send Cube into a rage, "Real Niggaz", off the "100 Miles And Running" EP, in which he's branded "Benedict Arnold", the American general who abandoned the revolutionary cause in 1780 to side with the British. A bold provocation that will cost Cube's old crew dearly, since in 1991 he'll fire back with the most spectacular diss track ever recorded, "No Vaselines", so devastating it leaves no room for a reply.

Although driven by contractual disputes and diverging visions - endemic, as always, in groups of every kind - Ice Cube's decision rested on solid artistic ground. This was proven above all by "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted", the album with which O'Shea made his solo debut in 1990, enlisting the celebrated team behind Public Enemy's productions, The Bomb Squad, who agreed to help thanks to the friendship between Cube and Chuck D. Chuck D himself took an active part in the project alongside Flavor Flav, trading verses on "Endangered Species (Tales From The Darkside)" and "I'm Only Out For One Thang" respectively.

The title says it all: "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" alludes both to the TV show produced by 20th Television and later Fox Corporation, guilty in Cube's eyes of showcasing the unjustified and excessively violent arrests of countless African Americans, and to the Ku Klux Klan via the capitalized triple K. A wordplay loaded with references, also meant to voice dissent against the most racist core of America at the time - a racism, it must be said in passing, still alive and well, sadly, in a substantial part of the United States. The sixteen tracks on "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" are indeed a relentless frontal assault on everything that rubbed Cube the wrong way: from African Americans in cahoots with corrupt white figures like Arsenio Hall, called out in "The Nigga Ya Love To Hate", to hip-hop radio stations incapable of championing the causes of Los Angeles's Black community ("Turn Off The Radio").

You ask me, did I like Arsenio?

About as much as the Bicentennial

I don’t give a fuck about dissing these fools

‘Cause they all scared of the Ice Cube

If the lyrics - often criticized, even at the time, for their stubborn sexism and excessive verbal insolence - are the main course served up by a true wordsmith like Cube, the production reveals a state of grace just as rhythmically explosive, thanks above all to the contribution of masters like Sir Jinx, present on practically every track, and the equally significant input of pioneers like Eric Sadler.

The opening track hits like a doped-up Ben Seoul-bound Johnson: "Nigga Ya Love To Hate", like most of the other beats, is packed with samples as outrageous as they are surprising - to name just a few, it draws from Steve Arrington's "Weak At The Knees", The New Birth's "Keep On Doin' It" and The Meters' "I Need More Time".

It's pure west coast hip-hop, packed with verbal lightning bolts fired off relentlessly by Cube, between sudden call-and-response swings that feel like an unhinged party and restarts it's literally impossible to resist without bopping along like a lowrider hopper at a red light. There's not a moment to breathe. The Los Angeles rapper's aim is to flatten everything in his path, while small fragments borrowed from Sly & The Family Stone, Kool & The Gang, James Brown, The Last Poets and countless others pop up from every direction, as in the following title track, another barrage with which Cube sets the record straight in his own way, sparing no one, and which also served as the album's lead single.

Even the proverbial skits play their part, and in some cases they're interrupted songs that would have made the career of countless other rappers, but which Cube instead uses like small sharpened blades hurled into the blue sky of the City of Angels - take for example "What They Hittin' Foe?", which precedes one of the album's few "relaxed" moments, "You Can't Fade Me/JD's Gaffilin'", from which emerges a phenomenal melodic hook spurred on by the usual sharp samples, like the scattered sections of Parliament's "Rumpofsteelskin" and Melvin Bliss's "Synthetic Substitution".

In an interview given to Medium.com, Cube explains the genesis and evolution of the track like this: "Everything you hear that's p-funk, like in the chorus, me and Jinx put that in there. I got a lot of criticism for the lyrics on this song. I wasn't expecting it, but it didn't piss me off. I just thought it was a great rhyme, so I was okay catching heat for it. A lot of people liked it, so it wasn't all bad. When it came to the line 'kick her in the tummy', I didn't do it to piss people off, it was just part of the flow. I mean, men are sick in the head, man! I've heard men say stuff like: 'That bitch is pregnant, makes me want to go kick her in her damn stomach!' It's just real. Whether they'd actually do it, I doubt it. I've never seen anyone do it, but I've heard motherfuckers talk about it. So for me it was nothing to put it in a rhyme. I never had any paternity suits back then, hell no." Lines that today would rightly spark endless debate about Ice Cube inciting violence against women, on top of deep outrage, but which back then, despite the criticism from many, still fell within that huge (and shaky) catch-all known as freedom of expression.

Getting back to the music itself, though, the middle stretch of "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" delivers a concentrate of energy that's at times mischievous, alongside more relaxed passages, at least rhythmically and melodically, like "Once Upon A Time In The Projects", a song that spins magically around the refrain and riff of "Shoo-B-Doop And Cop Him" by Betty Davis, confirming once again the soundness of the choices made by Cube and the Bomb Squad.

Between one fresh assault and a figurative punch worthy of peak Tyson, the record moves along briskly, brimming with wonder. There's also room for episodes like "A Gangsta's Fairytale", which owe more than a little to the typical framework of tracks by their friends Public Enemy, particularly in the sheer amount of jester-like improvisation scattered here and there, between one tirade and the next, stadium-style chants and ironic little laughs.

The second half of the record is undoubtedly the less "explosive" and more properly old school side ("Rollin' Wit' The Lench Mob"). It's essentially the dual soul of an absolute masterpiece in the history of hip-hop's vast (and then some) universe, so influential it would later be plundered by hundreds of rappers. The album that showed the world the limitless potential of one of the greatest MCs of all time. "A man who never has to ask", to borrow one of the most questionable ad slogans of the 1980s, but one that today comes in handy, amusingly enough, to define the charisma of a musician as obviously divisive as he is remarkably impossible to pin down: Ice Cube.

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08/02/2026