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Ice KKKube's Aesthetikkk Merit: Big Fukkking Deal
I wrote the first published report on the offensive content of Ice
Cube's Death Certificate, but not in the belief I was performing a
public service. I was just doing my job. I knew the most
politically divisive rap album ever was certain to incite immediate
outrage, and since the politics of rap is The Voice's beat, I
figured Rockbeat might as well break the story. The idea was to get
the facts in, dis the motherfucker, and get out; later--or better
yet, never--for hand-wringing debate. The claim that Cube "merits
extensive discussion in the press," as his public relations firm
puts it, seemed little more than a liberal piety in this case, and
that I remained a passionate supporter of the underlying
principle--not just that it's more fruitful to air conflicts than
to suppress them, but that it's a prime function of art (and
journalism) to violate the borders of received discourse by giving
offensive opinions and emotions a voice--didn't render it any less
toothless. Because whether Cube knows it or not, and I think he
does, his overarching message--at least to white people, an
increasingly inescapable qualifier in hard rap--is that our pieties
and/or principles don't mean shit.
Needless to say, Ice Cube soon turned into a GN'R/2 Live Crew
combo regardless--Ice KKKube, call this version, since if he
doesn't care what I write about him I'm not so sure I should spell
his name right. So here I am, doing my job and wringing my hands
simultaneously. The assignment depresses me mainly because I'm not
superhuman enough to follow up the hopeless commentary I've been
reading the way Mother Nature intends, with a clearly superior
alternative. Initially I was also bummed by the prospect of
listening to the music again, but that dissipated when I put Death
Certificate up against a talented field of current pretenders--ghetto
bastards Naughty by Nature, daisy-age bad boys Black Sheep,
Bronx hard Tim Dog, and Cube's Oaktown cousin Del tha Funkee
Homosapien.
I wasn't surprised when Cube smoked them--if he weren't a
serious talent, his offenses would barely signify. But I was
annoyed when pleasure and occasional amazement weakened my moral
resolve. Cube's voice is as muscular as Chuck D's without the
oratorical resonance and polish; his attack is fierce, his music
almost as nasty with his own Lench Mob working the mix as when the
Bomb Squad took him solo. Death Certificate is nowhere near as
patchy as Straight Outta Compton, and less pathological on the
whole than Amerikkka's Most Wanted, which dazzled many peace-loving
nonsexists into the kind of it's-the-ugly-truth rationalization
that's fallen out of favor this time. Though Cube takes pains to
repress the soft feelings of Kill at Will's "Dead Homiez," his
songs show new depth and spirit anyway.
For one thing, his misogyny has become less corrosive,
pathetic though the advance may seem. "Steady Mobbin'" reprises the
usual street-mackin', but for all "Givin' Up the Nappy Dug Out"'s
graphic caricature, its "slut"/"ho"/"hooker"/"nympho" is almost a
partner in sex crime, a reformed "nice girl" whose Catholic
schooling did her daddy no good. And though "Look Who's Burnin'"
promulgates the lethal sexist myth that blames women for VD, its
reality principle is also a woman--a nurse whose matter-of-fact
authority has no precedent in male rap. The gangsta stories on the
neatly labeled "Death Side"--check the hospital horror of "Alive on
Arrival"--go down in political contexts that could conceivably
counteract the allure of their tough boasts and pungent detail. And
on the so-called "Life Side," the antigang "Color Blind," the
indulgently cautionary "Doing Dumb Shit," and the
let's-get-our-dumb-shit-together "Us" are several steps up from the
self-destructive self-advertisement of such past rallying cries as
"Gangsta, Gangsta" and "Rollin' Wit' the Lench Mob."
So hubba hubba and big fucking deal. Death Certificate has
Aesthetic Merit. One could even grant it Redeeming Social
Importance. And hey--You Can Dance To It. Its Good Qualities still
don't come close to making up for its Offensive Content. As you've
probably read, the worst of it is slurs against Asians and Jews,
though its ingrained, ideological contempt for homosexuals isn't
really any better. But I'll also mention that I can't think of an
album, not even Professor Griff's Pawns in the Game, that talks
more shit about white people. The Nation of Islam clearly provides
cultural focus for alienated blacks whose needs are misunderstood
by outsiders (black and white) when they're addressed at all, but
that's no reason for anybody more centered, Afrocentrists included
(cf. Molefi Kete Asante or Chancellor Williams), to sit still for
"devil" shit, much less "Horny Lil' Devil"'s sampled epigraph: "You
are the prince of darkness, archenemy, father of evil, hellborn,
demonic, savage, fierce, vicious, wild, tameless [?], barbaric,
ungovernable, uncontrollable . . ." Is it just defensive for me to
suggest that demonization works against not only racial harmony, an
ideal many blacks have learned to distrust, but also the realistic
thinking that makes effective racial competition--and conflict--possible?
That none of the album's mostly white critics have come down
hard on this point exemplifies the bind we're in--the bind of
devising an effective rhetoric, of doing some good instead of just
decrying what we define as evil. It's relatively simple to
articulate one's objections. But making yourself understood in the
world is hard, and making yourself credible to Ice Cube and his
target audience is almost impossible. Hence the general compulsion
to simulate an objectivity few whites can really be feeling--not
when they're also feeling threatened, or insulted, or hurt, or
merely read out of the good fight. And since blacks know better
than to place much stock in white protestations of fairness, this
strategy naturally backfires.
Take James Bernard's reply to Billboard's sententious,
ill-expressed, but not totally wrong-headed anti-Cube editorial, which
stopped just short of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's call for a
retail boycott (a boycott the magazine specifically declined to
support) by suggesting that retailers "must decide" whether the
album is "fit to sell." Bernard wants to know why Billboard didn't
protest "when N.W.A talked about `taking niggers out in a flurry of
buckshot,'" or complain about the verse where Eazy-E gets lynched
as well as the death threat against his "Jew" manager and the torch
threat against disrespectful Korean storeowners. And indeed, the Eazy-E
point left Billboard hemming and hawing--the mag's
counterclaim that the lines weren't clearly literal made it appear
that the words just hadn't hit home, probably for the racial
reasons Bernard suspects. But Bernard is just as disingenuous to
pretend that all "fantasies" are equally fictional, even though
Cube's threats against Koreans are presented as political program
while N.W.A's against blacks (which Cube probably wrote, by the
way) are macho brags. And he makes no allowance for the tendency of
rap Afrocentrism to discourage white comment on intrablack
relations.
It's that tendency--the not unjustified yet finally disabling
belief that white pieties and/or principles don't mean shit--that
renders commentary on Death Certificate so hopeless. I oppose
censorship and have serious problems with boycotts--I like to
believe that if I were a retailer, I'd sell Death Certificate with
a written explanation of why it's inhumane to define groups or
individuals by racial label, which says all anybody need know about
why I'd make a shitty retailer. But practically speaking, the clear
and present response of white people to protest and hand-wringing
will almost always be attempts to censor and boycott--plus racist
panics like the one James Ledbetter reported, in which a Channel
Five newscaster referred to the slaying of a Korean storekeeper in
L.A. when in fact a Korean storekeeper had killed a black customer.
The clear and present responses of most black people, meanwhile,
will range from indignant demurral to cynical indifference to
embarrassed regret--a regret white outcry has a way of transmuting
into defensive solidarity. And if they care about rap they're going
to feel under internal and external pressure to be what Cube calls
"true to the game" rather than one of Chuck D's "sellout blacks."
Like I said, a bind.
What makes the bind even more uncomfortable is that the
futility of protest doesn't mean it's any more acceptable to act
like nothing's happening--to succumb to the attraction separatism
holds even for antiracist whites. During the black-power era--soon
we may call it the first black-power era--we experienced an
all but irresistible temptation to sit back in our parallel
universe and ignore whatever we couldn't uncritically support,
which often meant anything hard, be it the breakdown of the
Panthers or James Brown's "Mother Popcorn." In music, the
eventual result was a resurgent racism that harked back to the
segregated pop charts of the early '50s, so that less than a
decade ago we defined progress as getting "Beat It" on MTV.
Black-power rappers, who will need white dollars until economic
self-sufficiency is more than a slogan and will still want them
after that river is crossed, have convinced themselves that such
a blackout can't happen again--that the market, musical
necessity, and just plain history are all on their side. I wish I
was so sure. But even if I shared their confidence, I doubt I'd
ever disengage again.
It isn't just that I don't want to miss the next "Mother
Popcorn." It's that like any thinking biped with his head screwed
on straight I often believe I have an in on the truth, and
consider it possible that a portion of this faith will prove
justified. Since I'm a beneficiary of racism whether I like it or not,
it seems completely just to me that my judgments and values
don't carry much weight with the alienated artists and audiences
on rap's edge, and completely appropriate for their input to
influence the way my ideas evolve. I would never argue with the
African American impulse to create autonomous structures. And I
understand that "the human" is an idealist category, exploited by
whites to impose an illusory pseudo-equality whenever they fear
blacks may be gaining on them and meaningless to African
Americans who figure that if they're going to be defined by their
race they might as well make the most of it. But when I think
something sucks I'm not going to shut up about it.
Which is very heartfelt and all, but doesn't get me any
closer to effective rhetoric--except perhaps by suggesting that
with no such rhetoric available, my recourse has got to be
indirect communication. Only other African Americans have much
chance of making humanist arguments stick with blacks who believe
white pieties don't mean shit, and they won't have it easy. One
telling characteristic of rap's dialogue with admirers from
outside its milieu--which since rap began as rebel music from the
ghettos and projects, as a class as well as a racial expression,
means not just white pop intellectuals of all ages and alienated
young white rock fans of all classes but also most middle-class
blacks--is that the oppressed dominate the conversation. Blacks
whose political perspectives extend beyond simple racial
solidarity, if racial solidarity is ever simple, are obliged to
prove themselves by doing a lot of listening. And it's across the
souls of these usually middle-class African Americans--by which I
mean their minds, consciences, and emotional cores more than
their essential blackness, if there is such a thing--that the
most crucial battles over Death Certificate and its inevitable
successors will be waged. I don't envy them.
So the rest of this is for James Bernard, the Source editor
and law student who interviewed Cube for the rap mag before
reviewing Death Certificate for Entertainment Weekly, where he
wrote: "I'm not arrogant enough to wag my finger at someone for
stridency or incorrect language when many of his friends are dead
and many of the rest are either in prison or standing on the
corner surrounded by burned-out and dying dreams." This sentence
infuriated me--"moderate" Zionists offer the same specious
defense for Third Reich survivors turned Israeli rightwingers,
"He doesn't mean arrogant," I snorted. "He means brave." But as I
think about it I suspect that at the very worst he meant
"confident." Bernard loves "the breadth and emotional pitch" of
Death Certificate, which he says "puts often perplexing outbursts
of black rage in a larger context, making what often seems
irresponsible or wrong-headed into something we can understand."
But as an outspoken opponent of rap sexism, he also attacks the
album's "homophobic undertone," and calls such epithets as
"cracker" and "Jew" "truly alarming." For a guy walking point in
this battle, publishing those words took guts.
I'd like more, of course. I hope Bernard gets to write
sometime about the peculiar objectifying weight of the noun
"Jew"--not as derogatory as "kike" or "nigger," but more
derogatory than the adjective "Jewish," establishing a distance
that mixes contempt and awe in unpredictably combustible proportions.
Maybe he could even lay out the way Cube's standard
defense--"I respect Jewish people because they're unified; I wish
black people were as unified"--feeds off the myth of
conspiratorial power at the heart of anti-Semitism. And though
his review never mentions the 45-second "Black Korea," to me
Death Certificate's most disturbing song, I'd like him to ask
himself (not for the first time, I expect) whether Cube's assault
on "chop-suey-ass" "Oriental one-penny-counting motherfuckers"
isn't "black rage" as black hatred, the very hatred Cube's
panicky enemies get so much mileage out of condemning--that is,
whether Cube's jingoist, nativist rant isn't as worthy of the
triple-K as any other Amerikkkan outrage.
The damage is done, and well-meaning white lefties can't do
any more about it than self-righteous white liberals. No matter
how much we complain, this record will encourage black kids (and
not just in the so-called underclass) to blot out their perceived
race enemies--which means any nonblack in their field of vision
who pisses them off, including legions of racist operatives and
who knows how many relatively innocent bystanders--with the kind
of demeaning stereotypes that so rightly enrage these kids when
aimed at them, and that the well-meaning so rightly denounce when
they're launched by Axl Rose et al. Racist/sexist speech is an
effect of oppression far more than it's a cause. It won't be
eliminated until racism and sexism are eliminated. But it still
sucks--and human beings shouldn't shut up about it.
Village Voice, Dec. 17, 1991
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