On March 2, 1991, construction worker Rodney King was watching basketball at a friend’s house. He was recently paroled from prison, after serving time for a conviction on charges he robbed a convenience store of $200. Though abstaining from alcohol had been a condition of his release, that night King was drinking 8 Ball, and had also smoked pot. After the game he departed in his Hyundai Excel, with both his friend and another acquaintance riding along.
King drove west on the 210 freeway. He later estimated his speed to be about eighty miles per hour, though Highway Patrol officer Melanie Singer clocked him at a top speed of more than 110 miles per hour, and attempted to pull him over. Exiting the freeway on Paxton Street in the San Fernando Valley, King refused to stop. Singer and her fellow-CHP officer Tim Singer gave chase, and before long they received backup from LAPD cars and a helicopter. “I knew I’m drinking, I knew I’m feeling buzzed, so I cannot afford to get pulled over, and I’m on parole, and I’m black,” King later said. “I made a bad decision by running from ’em.”
King finally stopped and exited his vehicle in Lake View Terrace, and a group of four LAPD officers took over the arrest. They incorrectly believed him to be high on PCP, due to his sweating, his resistance to Taser darts fired at him, and the strength he displayed while resisting capture. King charged at Officer Laurence Powell, who struck him with a baton, apparently on the right side of King’s face, contradicting orders from Sergeant Stacey Koon not to hit him in the head. King fell, but attempted to regain his footing as Powell and Officer Timothy Wind continued striking him, at Koon’s direction. Even after King appeared to be subdued, the officers did not cease assaulting him. Powell in particular appeared to relish the blows; of the fifty-six dealt to King, he delivered the majority. (It would later come out that Powell, responding to a domestic call in a black neighborhood earlier that day, compared the dispute to the movie Gorillas in the Mist.)
The fourth officer, Theodore Briseno, of Latino descent (the others were white), stomped on King, but at one point attempted to stop the beating. It did little good, as King was left with cuts on his forehead, a broken cheekbone, fractures on the side of his face, a broken ankle, and bruises all over his body. Another officer stepped on King’s face even while handcuffs were being applied, and began dragging him—while he was hog-tied and facedown—to the side of the road, before King was finally taken to the hospital in an ambulance. King was never charged in connection with his arrest.
Meanwhile, from the balcony of his nearby apartment, a man named George Holliday videotaped nine minutes of the incident, and sold it to a local television station for $500, who passed the footage along to the LAPD. The four officers were charged with the use of excessive force, and the video ran on a loop on news stations across the country.
That the film stirred widespread public outrage, and would lead to the downfall of police chief Daryl Gates, was little comfort to those who had experienced police brutality themselves. The statistics tell the story; between 1986 and 1990, Los Angeles paid out more than $20 million for excessive-force lawsuits. “Being an LAPD cop is like being in a gang,” said an LAPD member. “We earn stripes, do beat-downs, get tattoos, and back each other to the hilt.”
That same year David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, running as a Republican for governor of Louisiana, received nearly 32 percent of the vote in the first round, eventually losing in a runoff. A message had been sent: White supremacy was alive and well.
Many members of the Los Angeles hip-hop community expressed their anger or made songs in response to the Rodney King beating, but Ice Cube was particularly methodical about expressing his outrage. Some of his older siblings had been involved in protests surrounding the Watts riots in 1965, he said, and activism ran in his veins. “All black people are going to be faced with things like that, until we are where we are supposed to be in this society,” he said. “So every few generations are going to look to protests in that manner, if things don’t change.” He also understood the philosophical divide between two forms of protest: the nonviolent, epitomized by Martin Luther King Jr., and the “by any means necessary” approach popularized by Malcolm X. Cube made it clear which side he came down on. “I saw pictures of my family in the streets with picket signs—‘Nonviolent Movement’—getting beat and getting wet with a water hose and getting lynched. Now, a nonviolent movement, that’s as peaceful as you can get and this country did that to them,” he said.
As an artist, he was turned on by Public Enemy’s “spitting the truth as they saw it,” he said. “It was saying something to young black youth.”
Ice Cube wasn’t your standard civil rights activist. He started off as a bratty kid who said things to provoke a reaction out of people, like when he performed naughty cover songs at Skateland. But calling out racist attitudes on tracks like “Fuck tha Police” got attention, too, and had itself become marketable, as evidenced by the millions of records he was selling. Amerikkka’s Most Wanted cemented the idea that it was possible to be successful while simultaneously fighting for what he believed in.
Despite continuing their antipolice rhetoric in his absence, N.W.A became even more apolitical after Cube left. Its members wanted little to do with the ideals of black empowerment. Cube’s new affiliates Da Lench Mob, however, walked in lockstep with him. The South Central–based crew chose their name hoping it could serve a dual purpose—both to intimidate and appropriate a term describing violent atrocities committed against black Americans. They were rappers, activists, and tough dudes you shouldn’t fuck with, all at the same time.
In the beginning, Da Lench Mob was more of an abstract concept than a specific group. “We was like, ‘We need a group of faceless men, so everywhere we go, someone can be a part of your team,’” said Sir Jinx. A bang-’em-up posse that was everywhere, and nowhere, at the same time.
The original crew had more than a dozen members including Cube, Jinx, producer Chilly Chill, Yo-Yo, and Del the Funky Homosapien, a Bay Area–based cousin of Cube’s who later forged a remarkable underground solo career and with a group called Hieroglyphics. (He also performed with animated group Gorillaz.) Eventually Da Lench Mob gelled as a three-person group, consisting of Cube’s childhood friend T-Bone, Cube’s childhood rhyming partner J-Dee, and J-Dee’s friend Shorty, who was initially brought on for security after release from Corcoran state prison on a robbery conviction. T-Bone was a graphic artist who’d gone to school in the Valley with Cube, but J-Dee and Shorty were tatted-up Crips. The trio made for an intimidating presence.
They got shouted out on “Jackin’ for Beats,” a 1990 track from Cube’s Kill at Will EP. Produced by Chilly Chill, the song features Cube rapping over hot instrumentals from the era, including Digital Underground’s “The Humpty Dance.” The EP saw Cube’s songwriting skills continue to advance, particularly on the atmospheric “Dead Homiez,” about the funeral of a murdered former classmate. Why is that the only time black folks get to ride in a limo?… A single file line about fifty cars long / All driving slow with they lights on.
For many of us, eighties and nineties Los Angeles is just a haze of grainy news clips and music videos you can find on YouTube. For those impacted by the era’s crime and mass incarceration, however, the consequences of these years are very much present—family members killed, lost to crack cocaine, imprisoned for life. Three-strike convictions, overzealous drug arrests, and other miscalibrations of justice have had eternal consequences.
In 2015 I visited J-Dee in the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, a series of squat, tan buildings and barbed wire surrounded by stunning green hills and rolling mountain peaks halfway between dry Los Angeles and foggy San Francisco.
J-Dee, whose real name is Da Sean Cooper, has been in this prison since 2004, part of a twenty-nine-years-to-life sentence for the 1993 murder of a man outside of a South Central party.
Cooper, wearing a light blue collared prison shirt, is a dead ringer for Ice Cube, right down to the scowl. “I used to joke that I was Cube’s mom’s sister’s son,” he says.
J-Dee himself is the first to say he made devastating mistakes that others are still paying for. He grew up both in Compton with his father, dealing crack on Poinsettia Avenue, and in South Central with his grandmother, near Ice Cube. The “J” in his moniker J-Dee came from his nickname “Weed Junkie”; he couldn’t get enough of the stuff. He was a member of the 111 Street Neighborhood Crips, and did a lot of dirt, eventually distributing cocaine on a national basis.
Sir Jinx, who had the Beat Street garage, said he and Cube were initially a bit put off by J-Dee, because he was such a serious gangbanger. Indeed, he had little use for the law or respect for the criminal justice system, particularly after his father was murdered in 1986. No one was arrested. “I became angry after that, felt the system failed me and my family,” he says.
But concerning the 1993 murder, he maintains his innocence. Though he was at the murder scene, he says, he didn’t pull the trigger, and was taken down largely because he refused to turn in the actual murderer. Though plenty of convicts have similar stories, J-Dee isn’t alone in maintaining his innocence. “I know J-Dee is innocent. Everyone from the neighborhood knows,” T-Bone said. “Even a cop told me, ‘We know J-Dee didn’t do it, we just want J-Dee to do the right thing,’ meaning snitch.” But it’s not that simple. Owing to gangland’s G-code (also known as the no-snitching rule) J-Dee was caught in a catch-22. “If they found out he snitched, someone would try to kill him,” T-Bone said.
J-Dee rapped as a kid, but didn’t initially run in the same circles as Ice Cube. In fact, they first met when J-Dee became indignant about hearing his name in Eazy-E’s “Boyz-N-the Hood,” which he knew was written by Cube. The boy J.D. was a friend of mine, ’til I caught him in the car tryin’ to steal the Alpine.
What J-Dee didn’t know was that Eazy had actually penned that line, about a different J.D. When J-Dee approached Cube about the track (J-Dee knew Cube’s older sister Pat), Cube cleared up the misunderstanding.
They saw each other now and then, but by the time Cube left N.W.A, J-Dee had a young daughter and had ceased dealing drugs. He’d taken a job as a security guard and was working an in-store event at Wherehouse Records when Ice Cube walked in one day in early 1990. Amerikkka’s Most Wanted was nearly completed, but there was a problem: The ad-libs on the album sounded too “New York.” Sure, Cube had traveled across the country in the dead of winter to record with the Bomb Squad, but they still wanted someone who could give it some South Central flavor. Sir Jinx suggested J-Dee; the same qualities that made them wary of him as a kid—his street life—could be valuable for something like this.
Cube took J-Dee outside the Wherehouse to hear a rough cut of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted and asked if he was still writing and rapping. Indeed, he was. Cube promptly asked him to come to New York, taking out his checkbook and writing a check for $24,000. “I went back inside and quit on the spot,” J-Dee remembers.
Cube’s childhood friend Terry Gray, aka T-Bone, was also brought aboard, and the pair headed out to New York. On the album, J-Dee is featured in a skit called “JD’s Gafflin’,” humorously describing how he used to steal folks’ Nissan trucks in the McDonald’s drive-through. “Nigga, get your motherfuckin’ food, leave it in the car, nigga get out!” In terms of dark humor, it didn’t get more South Central than that.
As the Marriott Marquis in Times Square prepared to host the 1990 New Music Seminar, the four-star hotel had no idea what was about to hit it.
That July some seven thousand music industry types descended upon the annual conference to network, listen to speakers like experimental musician Laurie Anderson and record executive Irving Azoff, and see performers like Zimbabwean rock group the Bhundu Boys and Ice Cube’s protégée Yo-Yo. Cube himself spoke on a panel about the ongoing media controversy over hip-hop lyrics, which was the talk of the conference. Azoff expressed disgust that the industry had agreed to the Parents Music Resource Center’s demand for warning stickers on albums. “As the walls go down in Europe, the walls are coming up in America,” said Ice-T, speaking about 2 Live Crew’s obscenity charges in Florida.
Cube initially hadn’t wanted to fly Da Lench Mob to New York, but they talked him into it. They knew the Ruthless crew would be there, too, and wanted to prevent a reprise of the fight at the Anaheim Celebrity Theatre. “The only way you’re gonna be respected is if we see them and deal with them, otherwise they’re gonna continue to punk you,” said Shorty.
“When we run into Above the Law, we gonna kick they ass,” J-Dee said.
But there was one problem: Above the Law was rolling deep at the seminar, with rapper Kokane and a large contingency of locally based affiliates in tow. But Cube and Da Lench Mob had a big posse as well, including Sir Jinx, Cube’s childhood friend DJ Crazy Toones and his partner Coolio, both from the group WC and the Maad Circle. Also on hand was six-and-a-half-foot rapper King Sun, as well as numerous Sun affiliates from the hip-hop activist group Zulu Nation, who had joined them with the intention of providing moral support, not to rumble, said Jinx, adding, “We didn’t know it was going to be like West Side Story.”
The majority of the seminar passed without incident, other than the sad announcement that Heavy D & the Boyz member Trouble T. Roy had died in a freak accident after a concert in Indianapolis. But just before the final panel, the two Los Angeles crews encountered each other.
“They were like, ‘Wassup?’” remembered Cold 187um. “I was like, ‘Nuthin’, but if you want to make it something, we can make it something.’” His crew went back to the room for reinforcements, and the camps encountered each other again on the Marriott’s escalators, one going up, and one going down.
By this time Cube had left to speak on the panel. “We sent Cube out. We told him disappear, we don’t want you to get in no trouble, we got this,” J-Dee said.
The parties agreed to fight in a bathroom, away from cameras. But they didn’t make it, instead squaring off amid the terrified convention crowd, who scampered off. Shorty remembered tossing the first punch at Above the Law’s Total K-Oss, and J-Dee took on KMG the Illustrator. “Then the melee exploded,” said J-Dee. Something like one of those old-timey saloon fights, chairs were flipped and furniture went flying. King Sun picked up a long banquet table—“like the Incredible Hulk,” said Shorty—and smashed people with it. T-Bone lost his Air Jordans in a wrestling match.
“I was fighting with every last one of them, I couldn’t even tell you who,” T-Bone said. “You’d get hit in the back and before you know it you’d be swinging at someone else.”
At some point, Cube emerged from his panel to witness the chaos, but didn’t participate in the fight. The squab continued until Ice-T and Afrika Bambaataa emerged and warned them that the police were coming, at which point everyone scattered. T-Bone cut out via a side door and found himself in the middle of Times Square, with only socks covering his feet.
When I talked to Cube about it, twenty-five years after the fact, the incident no longer felt so raw. “I was more upset that we came all the way to New York—finally getting the respect we deserve—and we fucking up their seminar.”
Who won the fight? It depends on whom you ask. “Da Lench Mob got they ass rolled up,” Kokane told me. “Rolled up.” N.W.A’s track “Message to B.A.” claimed that Cube ran off while “the rest of his homeboys got they ass beat.”
Not true, counters J-Dee, who maintains that Above the Law were “lumped up” and sought medical attention. Sir Jinx said he got a cherry under his eye, but that nobody was seriously injured. Shorty got kneed in the eye by somebody, and notes that Da Lench Mob’s aggression had its intended effect: “After that they left Cube alone.”
Cold 187um chalked the whole thing up to young artists feeling the pressure. “We [were] kids,” he said. “You’re looking at young artists who came up at nineteen and twenty years old in a multimillion-dollar situation.”
J-Dee said rapper WC quashed the beef at his listening party the next year. “Hutch and I shook hands and embraced each other. Hutch is a good dude. He said they did that to show loyalty to Eazy,” he said. Hutch added that he and Cube later performed together.
“I talked to KMG before he died,” in 2012, reportedly of a heart attack, said J-Dee. “We laughed about this.”
The first years of the nineties were extraordinarily action-packed and consequential for Cube. It wasn’t just music. In February 1991 he and Kim Woodruff had their first child—O’Shea Jr., who would portray his father twenty-four years later in the film Straight Outta Compton.
Owing to the glacial speed of royalty payments, Cube wasn’t seeing sufficient money coming in. Preparing for his Kill at Will EP, he was counting on an advance from Priority to buy his family a house, but instead received a “bullshit excuse.”
“That was kind of a misunderstanding we had,” said Priority Records cofounder Bryan Turner.
And so, Cube did what we’d all like to do when our bosses jerk us around. Just a few days after his son’s birth, he grabbed a baseball bat and his fearsome associates J-Dee and Shorty. They headed over to Priority’s offices in Hollywood.
“There was a knock on the glass door,” said Priority employee Dave Weiner. “I looked up and it was Ice Cube, and he had [his] homeboys with him. They had their trench coats on and weren’t looking too happy.” He opened the door and they walked silently past, making their way into Turner’s office. About five minutes later, Weiner heard screaming and glass breaking.
Turner hadn’t told Cube what he wanted to hear.
Cube smashed an old television and other items. “I had an aluminum bat,” Cube said. “It was bent when I left.” Cube and his crew soon stormed out, but not before smashing gold and platinum plaques in the lobby.
It wasn’t, perhaps, as terrorizing as it seems. “I swear to God, man, I remember him looking around the room trying to look for something to break that wasn’t too expensive,” said Turner.
Nonetheless, as they returned to their car out back, the fuzz swarmed. “Freeze!” a cop yelled, and the three men put their hands up. They were told to get on the ground.
“There’s nothing going on here,” Priority’s other cofounder Mark Cerami insisted, undoubtedly worried about further alienating one of the label’s cash cows. Turner seconded that it was all a misunderstanding. And so the cops let them go. Cerami added that he and Cube met in Marina del Rey the following day and went out fishing. Cerami pledged to make things right.
In the end, Cube’s outburst had its intended effect: He got his money, and was able to buy a home in Baldwin Hills. He also got a BMW for Kim. The gift doubled as a proposal. “When she went to go get in the car, she was so happy about the car she almost sat on the ring,” Cube said. They married in 1992, at the Marina del Rey DoubleTree Hotel. The festivities weren’t too large, befitting an unusual rap star who wasn’t too flashy.
For all of his hip-hop success, Cube’s true introduction to mainstream America came in July 1991, when he starred in the South Central–set Boyz n the Hood, a box-office hit that helped launch an entire subgenre of gritty, inner city films. John Singleton, fresh out of USC film school, became the youngest person, and first African-American, to be nominated for the best director Oscar. Cube had just turned twenty-two. The pair met at a rally for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Singleton said Boyz originally had parts for all the members of N.W.A, but that only Cube took his offer seriously. (Eazy, in fact, later disparaged it to Spin, saying it “reminds me of a Monday after-school special with cussin’.”)
Astonishingly, Cube hadn’t acted before. “I thought, at the time, actors had to go to school and learn how to become that,” Cube said. “[Singleton] was like, ‘Yeah, that’s true, but some people have what’s called it, and I think you got it.’”
Cube’s portrayal of the combustible Doughboy—brash, loyal to his friends, and unconcerned with his future—became a film archetype. When it came time to play Doughboy, he drew as always from the real-life characters he knew growing up, the kids in the neighborhood who weren’t going to make it to twenty-five. “The only difficult scene was the one where I had to cry—I hadn’t cried in eight or nine years,” he said. “But I’ve had lots of friends that’ve been killed, so I just thought about them and the tears came.”
For many viewers the film was their first exposure to the horrors of daily life for many in long-idealized sunny Southern California. Along with New Jack City, which was released earlier in 1991 and starred Ice-T as a detective in his first serious role, Boyz inspired countless knockoffs, many starring rappers. Despite its clear antiviolence message, the film received a torrent of negative publicity following incidents at early screenings. Two dozen people were injured, and a man at a midnight Chicago showing was murdered. Many Southern California theaters pulled the film. “I didn’t create the conditions under which people shoot each other,” responded Singleton angrily at a Los Angeles news conference. “This happens because there’s a whole generation of people who are disenfranchised.”
Through gangsta rap and films like Boyz n the Hood, South Central and Compton were quickly entering the realm of myth, as apocalyptic no-man’s-lands where it was hardly safe to step out your front door. This would be propagated further by films like Menace II Society and groups like Compton’s Most Wanted. Such depictions of poverty and chaos remain, to a large extent, South Los Angeles’s main export to this day.
When Cube wasn’t cutting tracks or smashing up record company offices, he was becoming a savvy businessman, a trait that he would, ironically, credit to Eazy-E.
After leaving N.W.A Cube started his own production outfit, Street Knowledge Records. Masterminded along with Patricia Charbonnet, its goal was to release his music and that of new artists. Headquarters were a drab South Central building in the heart of Rollin’ 60s gang territory. Inside was quite comfortable, with a big television, a top-of-the-line preproduction studio, and Cube’s office. Label affiliates would come and go at all hours of the day and night, either to brainstorm ideas, or simply because the streets got too hot. “That was like our fortress,” Shorty said. Cube fostered a stable of artists, including Yo-Yo, a former classmate of Jinx’s who founded an activist group called Intelligent Black Women’s Coalition, which challenged hip-hop sexism.
Also on Cube’s roster was Watts rapper Kam, who combined a street mentality with a Muslim’s discipline. He developed an interest in the Nation of Islam through the music of Public Enemy and Trenton, New Jersey, group Poor Righteous Teachers. “I never heard anybody rap like that,” J-Dee said. “I stopped eating red meat and pork because of Kam.”
Lench Mob member Shorty, meanwhile, was hipped to the Nation’s teachings when they toured with Public Enemy in 1990. A friend of his brother’s found a cardboard box with dozens of Minister Farrakhan VHS tapes, which Shorty proceeded to devour. “We would smoke weed and just listen to the minister, all day and all night long,” he said. Upon joining the Nation he gave up the herb, though, along with booze and pork and even his given name, Jerome Washington. He temporarily became Brother Jerome 3X—Black Muslims traditionally take on the “X” to replace their European “slave” names—and then later was known as Jerome Muhammad.
Cube grew up in the Baptist church, but he took to the Nation’s teachings, particularly the idea that it was up to blacks to take back their power and dignity from white suppressors. He was introduced to Farrakhan’s teachings from a Public Enemy affiliate called Drew. One Saviours’ Day—when Nation members celebrate the birthday of founder Wallace Fard—he flew into Chicago to watch Farrakhan speak, and Farrakhan invited him to dinner afterward at his Hyde Park home, which is called “the Palace” and is the former residence of deceased Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. It’s not far from the Nation’s headquarters, called Mosque Maryam, a grand complex topped by the star and crescent symbol, which was purchased in the eighties with a multimillion-dollar loan from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Cube went back many times, sometimes bringing Shorty. Dining from a spread that might include salad, bean soup, chicken, and beef (no hog) at a large banquet table alongside foreign dignitaries, they received the minister’s counsel. “He would say that since God gave you the platform to speak, give the knowledge to your people, wake them up,” Shorty said.
Farrakhan warned that, though “enlightened” hip-hop was currently ascendant, the powers that be would try to silence them. “They don’t want our people to know that we were kings and queens, that all the technology came from us,” Shorty remembered him saying. “If you rob the people of their culture, religion, and god, you want to keep them as blind as you can.” Shorty believes that today’s hip-hop climate—“all about buffoonery and foolishness”—is proof that Farrakhan’s fears were realized.
Cube began speaking publicly on the Nation’s ideals and, on his twenty-second birthday, in 1991, Kam performed a symbolic baptism of sorts, exorcising Cube of the “toxins” in his hair, following in the advice of black pride advocates like Marcus Garvey. Aided by Nation captain Shaheed Muhammad, he cut off Cube’s Jheri curl.
Still, you never saw Cube in a bow tie. He never officially joined the Nation. Nor did J-Dee or T-Bone. Though Cube still professes love for Islam—Me and Allah go back like cronies / I don’t got to be fake, ’cause he is my homie, he rapped in 2008—religion is not his thing. “All I know is, it’s one God,” Cube told me. “Religion is man-made, it’s flawed. I don’t follow nobody. I follow my own conscience.”
Cube’s relationship with the Nation was nonetheless mutually beneficial. Spiritually, the Nation of Islam combines traditional Islam with mystical and biblical teachings, along with the ideals of self-reliance and racial separatism. Following Malcolm X’s murder in 1965 the organization reached its greatest heights—perhaps a half million followers. But after the death of Elijah Muhammad a decade later the Nation splintered and its popularity waned, only to be revived in the Farrakhan era. The Nation’s rebirth was highlighted by Spike Lee’s 1992 epic Malcolm X and 1995’s Farrakhan-led Million Man March in Washington, D.C. That event probably didn’t draw a million people, but it was the largest ever gathering of African-Americans. Bow-tied recruits, from coast to coast, raised money for the organization through the sale of bean pies and The Final Call newspaper.
Farrakhan’s teachings can be homophobic and misogynist, and his anti-Semitism would contribute to his decline in popularity. (Such sentiment would also tar the career of rapper Professor Griff, a Farrakhan admirer whose 1989 anti-Jewish remarks—while serving as Public Enemy’s “Minister of Information”—led to his exile from the group.) But Farrakhan and the Nation were nonetheless a substantial force for good in black America, inspiring thousands of men to give up gangs and drugs. Hip-hop was particularly receptive to such black empowerment messages, with artists including Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and the Wu-Tang Clan drawn to the teachings of Five-Percent Nation, which celebrates black self-knowledge and was founded by a former Nation of Islam member. (Its name references the small percentage of the population committed to the discipline’s teachings.)
Farrakhan didn’t distance himself from hardcore rap music like the majority of other public leaders. Having played violin as a child and later recorded as a Calypso singer called the Charmer, he was fond of show business. He’s long been drawn to celebrities, developing relationships with everyone from Michael Jackson to Mike Tyson and, more recently, Kanye West. Celebrity affiliation drew attention to the Nation, and the organization often provided security through its paramilitary Fruit of Islam wing to famous black performers and athletes who couldn’t necessarily trust traditional channels.
Many celebrities, in turn, were drawn to Nation of Islam minister Khalid Muhammad. He rose to prominence in the eighties and commissioned a multimillion-dollar mosque in South Central. Known for flashy cars and designer suits, he initiated community-building programs and fearlessly recruited from the most dangerous neighborhoods. Emphasizing that African-Americans had been historically mistreated but were now in control of their own destinies, he became Farrakhan’s right-hand man, and greatly inspired Public Enemy and Ice Cube. The latter featured him discoursing on his two-part 1991 sophomore solo album Death Certificate, whose cover has Cube standing next to a corpse with an “Uncle Sam” tag hanging off the toe. The inset pictures include Cube reading The Final Call with the headline “Unite or Perish,” flanked by Fruit of Islam members standing alert to his left, and by Lench Mob members in repose to his right. The album’s two halves—the “Death Side” and the “Life Side”—continued this theme of divide, the former “a mirror image of where we are today” and the latter “a vision of where we need to go.”
For Death Certificate Cube jettisoned the Bomb Squad and their pastiche approach in favor of more traditional slabs of chunky, midtempo funk, a production vision led by DJ Pooh, and also featuring contributions from Cube, Sir Jinx, Bobcat, and Rashad. The work was even more controversial than Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, absolutely unsparing in its critiques of Cube’s perceived foes, both personal and institutional. Most notorious is “No Vaseline,” directed at his former groupmates and one of the greatest diss tracks ever recorded. The song’s good-time bounce only heightens its lyrics’ venom, accusing the N.W.A members of being gay and moving to white neighborhoods. They were essentially slaves to the “Jew” Jerry Heller, the track insinuates, offering the suggestion, using the Nation’s preferred synonym for white men, the group should Get rid of that devil real simple / Put a bullet in his temple.
“[I]t probably hurt and affected me more than anything that’s ever been said or done to me,” Heller told an interviewer, adding that he faced anti-Semitism growing up. “I think he’s not anti-Semitic. I think he did it just because he thought it would sell records.”
“I’m pro-black. I’m not anti-anything but anti-poor,” Cube insisted when asked about the issue, adding that he worked with many Jewish people in the music industry.
“No Vaseline” was inspired by insult game the dozens, which Cube played growing up. He actually recorded the track much earlier and wasn’t sure he was going to release it at all, but after N.W.A fired at him on their EP he felt obliged, in the grand hip-hop tradition, to come back a hundred times harder.
For the former underdog Cube, it was a knockout blow. N.W.A never responded, but Ren in particular was pissed. “I was ready to mash,” he said, adding that when he showed up at a party where “No Vaseline” was playing he demanded they turn it off. As for Cube and Dre’s relationship? They never discussed the song, Cube said.
Another Death Certificate lightning rod was “Black Korea,” which highlighted tensions between Los Angeles blacks and Korean shop owners. The song came on the heels of the March 16, 1991, killing of Latasha Harlins, an unarmed, fifteen-year-old African-American girl. Harlins was shot to death at a South Central liquor store following a brief scuffle with owner Soon Ja Du, who falsely believed Harlins was shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Charged with murder, the ailing Du was convicted only of manslaughter, and did no prison time, creating widespread outrage in Los Angeles.
The city then had more than three thousand liquor and convenience shops owned by Korean immigrants, many of whom used an old-world system for pooling funds to raise capital. In 1990, nine different shop employees had been killed during armed assaults, and many owners lived in fear. At the same time, their black customers felt victimized by harassment and stereotyping. During the summer of 1991 numerous South Central stores owned by Koreans were firebombed, including three on the evening of August 17, 1991, among them Empire Liquor Market Deli, where Harlins was killed.
“Black Korea” is less than a minute long, but contains a multitude of epithets, blasting shop owners for assuming customers were shoplifting, and threatening: So pay respect to the black fist / Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp. In “Black Korea” Cube threatens to boycott the stores, but the song actually inspired a boycott of him. The target was the malt liquor he was endorsing, an upstart brand called St. Ides, which was eager to displace “8 Ball” as the favored cheap urban high-alcohol beer. DJ Pooh was in charge of crafting a series of commercials for the beer, and so he signed up gangsta stars including Cube, who urged viewers to Get your girl in the mood quicker / Get your jimmy thicker / With St. Ides malt liquor. All told St. Ides received endorsements from a who’s who of the early nineties hardcore rappers, including Geto Boys, Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg.
Following “Black Korea,” the Korean American Grocers Association (KAGRO), which represented thousands of Southern California stores, insisted the malt liquor brand’s owners, McKenzie River, remove Cube from their ads. The company refused, stores pulled the brand, and eventually McKenzie agreed to KAGRO’s demands. Cube soon apologized, met with KAGRO’s Southern California president, and worked to open a dialogue between blacks and Koreans. He eventually won back his endorsement deal, agreeing to donate money to charity.
There’s no doubt the controversy spurred sales. Death Certificate made it to number two on the Billboard 200, going platinum like Amerikkka. This despite the fact that Jewish activist organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center called on record store chains to remove it from their shelves, and many critics trashed it. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called Cube “a straight-up racist simple and plain, and of course a sex bigot too.” Billboard accused the album of “hate-mongering,” and the Guardian Angels, the group who left the toilet bowl in front of Sean Penn’s house, compared Cube to David Duke.
Speaking on these controversies many years later he lamented “not being as informed as I thought I was at the time.” One shouldn’t forget that Cube was barely old enough to drink while all this was going on. That doesn’t absolve him, but at least Cube faced his critics. In 1992 he was interviewed at his Street Knowledge office by Angela Davis, a former Black Panthers associate and radical feminist, who took him to task about his sexist lyrics, which are all over Death Certificate. (“Givin’ Up the Nappy Dug Out,” in addition to employing long-expired slang, kicks off, Your daughter was a nice girl, now she is a slut.) “How do you think black feminists like myself and younger women as well respond to the word ‘bitch’?” she asked. “The language of the streets is the only language I can use to communicate with the streets,” he responded.
This seems like Cube wanting to have his gangsta rap cake and eat it, too. He elaborated on his charged language further in Death Certificate’s liner notes: “The reason I say nigga is because we are mentally dead in 1991. We have limited knowledge of self, so it leads to a nigga mentality. The best place for a young black male or female is the Nation of Islam. Soon as we as people use our knowledge of self to our advantage we will then be able to be called blacks.”
As a work of art, Death Certificate is one of a kind: simultaneously bigoted and socially conscious, misogynistic and uplifting. The result is an extremely compelling listen that stands with Amerikkka’s Most Wanted among the top three or four dozen rap albums ever made.
Cube’s rapping is self-assured, hugging the beats, never seeming to strain. His storytelling is more evocative than ever, due both to his developing writing talents and his new company. Now that Eazy wasn’t around to share his street stories, Cube turned to his Da Lench Mob partners for material. “On tour nobody had cell phones, no satellite hookups, we’d hear these J-Dee and Shorty stories, because they’re real as a motherfucker,” Sir Jinx said, adding that thematically much of Death Certificate is “mourning” their tough lives.
This is especially evident on “My Summer Vacation,” about an L.A. drug-dealing crew that sets up shop in St. Louis when the police heat gets too strong. They take over a local block, killing its former proprietors and raking in profits before the St. Louis contingency fights back and the justice system catches up with them. It’s not nearly as gleeful as “The Boyz-N-the Hood,” and has greater attention to detail. It’s based in truth. In the eighties, Southern California dealers fanned out around the country, taking their gang allegiances with them. “It started spreading like a virus,” said “Freeway” Rick Ross. Some were driven out of their adopted territories, but others integrated successfully, leading to strange situations in which midwestern gangbangers were, as Cube puts it in the track, “dyin’ for a street that they never heard of.” DJ Quik’s 1992 song “Jus Lyke Compton” also explores this phenomenon.
The song came out of conversations between Cube, J-Dee, and Shorty. J-Dee, who had sold cocaine in cities all over the country, from Seattle to St. Paul to St. Louis, remembered a conversation they had on a layover in 1991, while Cube and Da Lench Mob walked through Dulles airport in khaki suits. “It looks like we about to take some dope out of town,” J-Dee remembered with a laugh. “Cube asked me, ‘Why did you stop selling out of state?’” He explained that he’d met with too much resistance, and Shorty added details of his own. By the time the plane landed, Cube had the song written.
Said J-Dee: “I was like, Cube, you a fuckin’ genius.”
Ice Cube toured regularly in the early nineties, and his shows from this era featured giant images of nooses, twirling electric chairs, and, at his Lollapalooza dates in 1992, pointed disses of then president George H. W. Bush. Members of the Nation of Islam’s paramilitary arm, Fruit of Islam, were often on hand to keep order. Cube already had a robust security team—guys with names like Big Tom, Zulu Ed, and Big Cal—but he couldn’t be too safe, considering that everyone from the federal government to his former labelmates had it in for him. T-Bone and Shorty both say their crew fielded death threats.
Tour stops would go something like this: Cube and his partners would arrive in town, and then head over to the local mosque, where they were treated like royalty. The city’s Nation of Islam members would arrange for them to get some food, either at a local restaurant or a nice home-cooked meal at one of the sisters’ homes.
A security detail would be organized, involving either plainclothes bodyguards or Fruit of Islam members wearing suits and steel-toe boots, or both. Starting at soundcheck the team would be on hand, and while the concert was going on the plainclothes team might be spread out secretly among the audience. “They would have the free run of the building,” said Sir Jinx. “They moved like the military—they were not playing.”
Afterward, while the performers went from the venue to the tour bus, the Fruit of Islam made a diamond shape around them; four men on each diagonal slant, with Cube, Da Lench Mob, and their associates in the middle. “That shit looked militant,” said J-Dee. “You might have thought they were escorting Farrakhan himself.”
While on tour, Cube also functioned as something of a disciplinarian and study group leader. During their free time he helmed sessions about Nation-endorsed texts like Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America and Carter Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, or listen to audio of Saviours’ Day speeches given by Farrakhan. Cube also had a strict rule: No drinking before shows, though afterward they might have some St. Ides and talk about how to improve the next concert.
As for the Muslim prohibition on drinking alcohol? The devout Shorty had a crisis of conscience after Da Lench Mob signed on for a St. Ides commercial, for the rate of $30,000. He opted not to do the spot, but his colleagues cut him in for $4,000 of the money anyway, which he gave to the Nation.
The idea of a corporation co-opting the cool new black art form to sell swill to the inner cities upset more than a few people. On Public Enemy’s 1991 song “1 Million Bottlebags” Chuck D rhymed: Watch shorty get sicker / Year after year, while he’s thinkin’ it’s beer / But it’s not he got it in his gut. That same year Chuck D filed a lawsuit against McKenzie River, after a St. Ides ad sampled his voice from the group’s song “Bring the Noise.” (In response the company—claiming they hadn’t realized Chuck D’s voice was being used, since the commercial was produced independently—promptly pulled it.)
That same spot featured Cube’s voice. He, more than anyone else, had become the face of the malt liquor; his character Doughboy gives it serious product placement in Boyz n the Hood, as well. As Cube told The Source in 1991, he spoke to Khalid Muhammad about the issue, who agreed that the whole enterprise was against their values. “But we gotta use them as a stepping-stone, we gotta use them to build our nation,” Cube said they concluded. It helped that McKenzie River agreed to donate $100,000 to community projects of his choosing. “How else could the black community come up with $100,000 to help an organization?”
This thinking represents Cube in a nutshell: always doing bad in order to do good. He would probably despise the comparison, but he resembles an adroit politician in his ability to speak sincerely to groups with opposing interests. Even if you don’t believe what he’s saying, his charm carries the day.
Da Lench Mob’s 1992 debut Guerillas in tha Mist took its title from Officer Laurence Powell’s racist “Gorillas in the Mist” comment on the day of the Rodney King beating. Its concept was largely Cube’s creation. “I wanted to do a gangsta rap album, like Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, but Cube wanted to take it in the direction of the Nation stuff we were learning,” said J-Dee.
Though J-Dee could spit, neither Shorty nor T-Bone were natural rappers. But as a rough-and-ready threesome they were formidable, and quickly mastered the approach Cube envisioned. I wish I was in Dixie (AK! AK!) / And shit wouldn’t have been bad in the sixties (No way! No Way!) the group sang on “Freedom Got an AK.” “You and Your Heroes” made the case that Babe Ruth couldn’t have hit Dwight Gooden, while “All on My Nut Sac” castigated black drug dealers for selling dope to other blacks. Use your mind black man / I can tell that you’re head strong, rapped J-Dee, to which Cube, playing the dealer, responded: So what should I do? Work for $3.22? “Welcome to McDonald’s may I please help you?” By the skit’s end J-Dee has shot him down.
It was a pretty striking turnaround for J-Dee, a man who until fairly recently had been doing dirt himself. “We were called hypocrites,” he said. “But at some point, aren’t you allowed to wake up?” As a militant black power artwork, Guerillas in tha Mist didn’t have much precedent in hip-hop, and helped pave the way for like-minded groups. As evidenced by its gold status, its appeal cut across race. My high school white friends and I didn’t think Da Lench Mob was coming for us. We thought they were coming for the racist assholes, who, frankly, deserved it.
But the group suffered setbacks. Not long after J-Dee’s 1993 arrest, his Lench Mob crewmate T-Bone was also charged with murder, following the shooting death of a man and wounding of a woman at a South Central bowling alley. T-Bone was exonerated, however, in a pretty clear case of mistaken identity. He had been at the bowling alley that night shortly before the murder, wearing a similar black hoodie as the perpetrator, who was never caught. T-Bone thought the sheriffs who came to his mother’s house three weeks later to arrest him for murder were kidding. Cube immediately sprang to his defense, putting down $1.5 million in cash for his bail, in addition to around $100,000 in lawyers’ fees.
J-Dee claimed that Cube didn’t financially support him for his trial, the way he did for T-Bone. But T-Bone says that Cube did, in fact, pay for J-Dee’s lawyer—and that T-Bone himself saw the carbon copy of Cube’s check. (He adds that J-Dee’s aunt, who was organizing his defense, told him that the lawyer said “the check got stuck in the mail.”) Whatever the case, J-Dee was further enraged when, having recorded a few songs for the next Lench Mob album before being sent to prison, he was scrubbed from the work, replaced by rapper Maulkie, formerly of Ruthless duo Yomo & Maulkie. Da Lench Mob’s 1994 follow-up Planet of da Apes did not have the impact of their debut, and the group split thereafter, amid disputes over money.
Decades have healed most of the group’s wounds. Today J-Dee, who was scheduled to come up for parole in 2016, maintains a vivid recollection of the years between 1990 and 1993, when he, Cube, and Da Lench Mob were on top. For every Ice Cube and Dr. Dre who made it out, there remain many, many others who weren’t so lucky. “While others keep stacking memories, I stopped making memories when I got to prison,” J-Dee says.
He remains glad Ice Cube took Da Lench Mob in the direction he did, making them into “street politicians” rather than just gangsta rappers. “Cube said, ‘This is gonna go down in history,’ and it did. That was the best thing that happened to me. I got ten to twenty thousand fan letters. I didn’t realize I touched so many people.”