Happy 30th Anniversary to Ice Cube’s debut solo album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, originally released May 16, 1990.
In 2020, O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson is an American institution. He’s a hip-hop pioneer with a musical career that’s spanned five different decades. He was enshrined into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 as a member of the world’s most dangerous group, N.W.A. He’s recognized for his acting chops and bankability in the film world, starring in dramas, comedies, family films, and action franchises. He’s also become a fixture in the realm of sports, becoming on the most recognizable Raiders fans on the planet, and is one of the creators/owners of the Big3 basketball league.
But 30 years ago, Ice Cube was a young man trying to assert his place in hip-hop’s growing landscape. He’d recently made a gamble by leaving N.W.A to forge out on his own. He then released AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, his debut solo album, to massive acclaim and success.
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted deserves many superlatives. It’s the best album released in 1990. It’s the strongest album in Ice Cube’s extensive catalogue. It’s one of the finest “going solo” albums ever released. It’s one of the most dynamic debut albums ever released. It’s also one of the greatest albums of all time. I personally consider it one of the top three albums ever recorded, in any genre.
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was one of the first examples of my musical dreams coming true. During the late 1980s, my favorite groups were Public Enemy and N.W.A, and my favorite rapper was Ice Cube. So when it was announced that my favorite rapper was linking up with my favorite group and their production squad to put together his debut album, it was pure hip-hop nirvana.
As soon as I copped AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, it become the theme music to the end of my freshman year of high school and subsequently my soundtrack to the summer. Along with Mecca And The Soul Brother, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, and What More Can I Say?, it’s one of the albums that I’ve listened to the most throughout my life.
Anyone who’s seen the Straight Outta Compton biopic knows more or less why Cube left N.W.A. He felt he wasn’t getting his fair share of money for his contributions to the collective, and he placed the blame squarely on the group’s manager Jerry Heller. He left and began negotiating with Priority Records to allow him to release a solo project.
However, Cube’s going solo also made sense. He had been a larger-than-life personality on record, with his striking voice and his superior lyrical and storytelling abilities. Recording a solo album seemed like a logical eventuality. However, it’s safe to say that if Cube had never left N.W.A and still recorded a solo album, it would never have sounded like AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.
The story of the creation of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is one of “What if…?” Cube has said the original plan was for Dr. Dre to produce the album, since he maintains he was on largely amicable terms with everyone in N.W.A, and only had problems with Heller. However, Heller apparently blocked Cube from working with Dre, so he had to search for contributors outside his immediate circle to produce the album.
Chuck D had been counseling Cube during this period, at first advising him to stay in N.W.A. After the situation became untenable and Cube left the crew, Chuck D suggested that Cube work with Sam Sever. The beat-maker had gotten his start doing drum programming for Mantronix and Run-DMC, before doing production for 3rd Bass’ debut LP The Cactus Album (1989). Cube was supposed to meet with Sever at the Def Jam headquarters, but the producer no-showed. After talking with label president Lyor Cohen (Cube hoped to join the Def Jam roster if things didn’t work out with Priority Records), he ran into Chuck D in the hallway, who invited him to a Fear Of A Black Planet recording session.
During this session, Cube ended up recording a brief verse for “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and then talked with the members of the Bomb Squad. At some point, Cube and the Squad came to an agreement that they would produce the album in its entirety, with Cube temporarily relocating to New York to both write and record.
Though by all accounts the Bomb Squad was eager to work with Cube, they put together AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted during a particularly hectic time for the team. As alluded to earlier, the Bomb Squad were in the midst of recording Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet at the time, as well as producing and remixing tracks for Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison (1990). On top of that, they were laying the groundwork for what would become their own imprint, S.O.U.L. Records. Complicating matters, some of the members of the production crew weren’t getting along with each other, making communication difficult.
As a result, Anthony “Sir Jinx” Wheaton became an integral cog in the album’s machine. Jinx was Cube’s longtime friend, and a member of the group CIA, where they both got their starts as rappers. As a producer, Jinx had been working on the Los Angeles independent scene, and Cube brought him, along with his rough and tumble homies J. Dee and T-Bone out to New York for the winter to help him put together the project.
In Brian Coleman’s Don’t Sweat the Technique, Volume 2, Cube says Jinx functioned as AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted’s “overseer,” making sure everything held together and that the project still honored the West Coast hip-hop sound. When necessary, he even fashioned some of the tracks, often working closely with Bomb Squad-member Eric “Vietnam” Sadler.
The enduring “story” of AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted has been how it featured a marriage of the West Coast and East Coast sounds. And it’s true that at times the production is as loud and noisy as anything you’ll find on Public Enemy’s Fear Of A Black Planet, and other times as straight up funky as one would expect from an early ’90s Los Angeles hip-hop album. But the Bomb Squad’s production style wasn’t that alien to Cube, as Dr. Dre’s production on Straight Outta Compton (1988) is heavily influenced by the Bomb Squad’s early triumphs.
The real marriage on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is one between himself as N.W.A-styled gangsta and a Public Enemy-infused revolutionary. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted still plays to Ice Cube’s gangsta sensibilities, as it’s widely known for showcasing his political awareness. This increased consciousness on record helped elevate Cube as a lyricist, solidifying him as one of the best emcees in the business at the time.
The album positions Cube at the crossroads, still able to create tongue-in-cheek gangsta fairytales and ill-fated adventures in the project, but also astute enough to vividly explain how the LAPD has transformed young black men in Los Angeles into hunted animals. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted transitioned Cube from gangsta rapper to political poet and hip-hop icon.
The “pillars” of the album that provide its overall structure derive from the songs that Cube recorded early in the recording process. The album opening “N***a Ya Love To Hate” serves as the thesis statement for the album and for much of Cube’s solo career. “They try to keep me from running up,” he barks. “I never tell you to get down, it’s all about coming up.” He adds digs at pop rappers, Soul Train, and Arsenio Hall, sneering, “I don't give a fuck about dissing these fools, ’cause they all scared of the Ice Cube.”
The song is best remembered for its chorus, where Cube basks in the shouts of “Fuck you, Ice Cube!” The Bomb Squad do their best approximation of the West Coast sound, blending the keys from George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” with Steve Arrington’s “Weak At The Knees.” The “Weak At The Knees” sample was the backbone of N.W.A’s “Gangsta,” allowing Cube to go back to his roots as he starts his new musical life.
The album’s title track and first single is another one of its pillars. The track has all the hectic energy and complicated beat switches of vintage Bomb Squad production, in this case put together mostly by Chuck D himself. The track was originally intended for Public Enemy affiliates Son of Bazerk, but Cube very much does the beat justice. He spins tales of committing robberies and burglaries throughout South Central Los Angeles, always evading capture “’cause I’m slick and slippery / They can’t get with me; cops ain’t shit to me.”
It all builds to the final verse, where Cube decides to head to the suburbs to “let ’em see a n***a invasion / Point blank on a Caucasian.” Things go awry, and he ends up with his face plastered on TV and is soon arrested. The track ends with Cube’s observations on the inequality of how community policing is executed, rapping, “I think back when I was robbing my own kind / The police didn’t pay it no mind / But when I start robbing the white folks / Now I’m in the pen with the soap-on-a-rope.”
Along with railing against disparities in the criminal justice system and white supremacy, Cube directs his venom at mainstream broadcasts on “Turn Off The Radio.” The difficult relationship between hip-hop and commercial radio during the ’80s and early ’90s, is well known. Still, Cube’s aggravation with radio stations ignoring raw hip-hop in favor of “straight R&B” and mindless pop music is memorable, bellowing “Reality: that’s what they're running from.” The Bomb Squad create a track that is aggressively inaccessible, merging the guitars from Kool & the Gang’s “Rated X” and a winding horn solo, broken up by fake smoothed-out radio personalities and shouts of “Turn off that bullshit!”
The Bomb Squad employ their full wall of sound production technique on “Endangered Species (Tales From the Darkside),” a solid example of Cube’s growing consciousness through his raps. Teaming up with Chuck D, he delves into how the lives of young Black men in the United States have become devalued, both by the police who see them as targets, and by perpetrators of violence living in the inner cities. Cube vents his frustration with the futility of the situation, rapping, “A point scored, they could give a fuck about us / They’d rather catch us with guns and white powder” and “It’s a shame, that n***as die young / But to the light side, it don’t matter none.” Thirty years after this song was released, the young Black population of the United States is still struggling for the country to acknowledge that their lives have intrinsic value.
Ice Cube embraces his West Coast N.W.A-based roots throughout the album, even, in some cases, repurposing material he had originally intended to use for the world’s most dangerous group. Cube has said he wrote the lyrics for “Gangsta’s Fairytale” with Eazy-E in mind. You can almost hear Eazy kicking the uncouth raps “for the fucking kids,” detailing the street adventures of various characters from children’s nursery rhymes and cartoons. Whether it’s a narcotics dealing old lady living in a shoe or a turf war between the three little pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, Cube adds his vulgar spin to the entire realm of the children’s storybook.
The Bomb Squad originally crafted the bouncy track, which samples Maceo and the Mack’s “Parrty,” for the relatively obscure crew True Mathematics, but decided that Cube was a better fit. The song opens with a parodied riff on the theme song to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the earliest pressings of the album, but the beloved children’s TV host filed a lawsuit and Cube removed it from subsequent re-releases. Considering how early I bought AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, I have no explanation for why I’ve never heard this original version of the song.
“Once Upon A Time In The Projects” also sticks close to Cube’s gangsta core. It’s another song Cube wrote with Eazy in mind. It features Cube at his descriptive best, as he describes going to pick up a date in her family’s apartment, only to discover that it’s a hub for the project’s drug activity. The track, produced by Sir Jinx, oozes funk, as it’s constructed from a loop of Betty Davis’ “Shoop-E-Do-Wop and Cop Him.”
Cube continued to excel as a storyteller throughout AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Sometimes it’s through short and straightforward tracks like “What They Hittin’ Foe?” where he displays his prowess at dice, while making sure to stay aware of potential set-ups, because “broke motherfuckas, they make the best crooks.” This song flows into the somewhat controversial “You Can’t Fade Me,” where Cube tangles with a pregnant woman who claims that he’s the father of her soon-to-born offspring. It’s not Cube’s most enlightened work, but the man knows how to frame a narrative.
“Rollin’ Wit The Lench Mob” is another of the album’s highlights. Even more than “Once Upon A Time…” and “Gangsta Fairytale,” it’s the most N.W.A-esque track on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. Cube delivers “Faces of Death on wax” while showcasing his new collective of South Central-based rappers and gangstas. Over a filtered sample of the JB’s “Givin’ Up Food For Funk,” Cube boasts, “Don’t sleep cause even on a solo creep / Yo, the Mob is still deep / And we’ll play ya just like a nit-wit / You thought you got with the crew you can’t get with.”
Cube introduces members of Da Lench Mob to the audience throughout AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. J. Dee makes a definite impression on the “JD Gafflin’” skit, explaining how he carjacks unwitting marks for their Nissan Trucks right in the McDonald’s Drive Thru. But it’s Yo-Yo, “the brand new intelligent Black lady,” who gets the most shine, going blow for blow with Cube on the adversarial “It’s A Man’s World.” Here she engages Cube in a knock-down, drag-out battle of the sexes, with Cube brashly dismissing all women as bitches, and Yo-Yo taking him to task for his sexist platitudes. The future star holds her own, as the song aptly ends in a stalemate between the two.
“Who’s the Mack?”, the album’s second single, is a well-placed change of pace. It’s a smooth and soulful entry that features Cube kicking game about three different types of “macks” or manipulators, from straight-up pimps to fast-talking drug addicts to phony playboys. The song features some of the album’s best production, as they blend samples of Marvin Gaye’s “’T’ Stands For Trouble” and Fred Wesley’s “I Wanna Get Down” with a live flute.
The album-closing “The Bomb” is similar in feel to a late ’80s/early ’90s track by Big Daddy Kane or Kool G Rap, as Cube flows rapidly over a frenetic beat by Sir Jinx and DJ Chilly Chill. It’s an overlooked moment on the album, as Cube displays a tongue-twisting delivery and some of the album’s only battle-oriented rhymes. He raps, “Then I transform like a Decepticon / With a mic as a bomb in my right palm / But I don't stay calm, so panic / Others can’t flow so they go schizophrenic.”
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was the beginning of great things for Ice Cube. The album demonstrated that he could earn critical and commercial acclaim as a solo artist on his own terms. Cube’s identity as a socially aware street soldier influenced artists from 2Pac to Killer Mike to Kendrick Lamar to countless others. In terms of structure, it laid out the blueprint for albums like The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die (1994) and other classics. It was a foundation of bedrock on which Cube built his career as a multi-media sensation.
Sadly, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was the swan song from the original Bomb Squad. Chuck D has said it was the last album that all of the original members worked on together, as some went their own way, and others, like Hank and Keith Shocklee, began focusing their energies on the aforementioned S.O.U.L. Records imprint.
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is a transcendent project that’s as timely and gripping today as it was upon initial arrival three decades ago. It perfectly balances consciousness and overall entertainment. The lyrics, music, and themes remain vital, their power undiluted by the passage of time. Even though Cube would go on to reach rarified heights as an artist and personality, he was at his best on this album.
LISTEN: