Ice Cube: Death Certificate : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Chuck D had his "Terrordome," Axl Rose is still eating crow for "One in a Million," and now gangsta mouth Ice Cube steps into it up to his ear lobes withDeath Certificate.Not that he was actually a soft touch on his last two solo outings. But for an album supposedly about boyz in the 'hood reborn through "economic self-sufficiency, community pride, education and self-knowledge" (according to one press release for the album),Death Certificateis rife with unrepentant racial slurs and a thirst for vengeance. In "Horny Lil' Devil" and "Black Korea," Ice Cube snickers at "white bitches" because they "have no butt and no chest," threatens to beat up a Japanese store owner and calls for a nationwide boycott of Korean markets – at least the ones that he hasn't already burned to the ground. In the closing invective, "No Vaseline," he rages that his estranged rap mates in N.W.A. "let a Jew break up my crew," a reference to the group's manager. And this is all in addition to his usual relentless sexism, which strongly suggests that black women have no share in Ice Cube's ideal of ghetto pride. If there is an agenda for social revolution inDeath Certificate,it's hard to hear it amid the bigotry. Ice Cube doesn't need white liberal rock critics hipping him to what's up and who's down in South Central L.A., but someone ought to tell him that you don't put out a fire with napalm.