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BACKSPIN
Backspin: Ice Cube — Death Certificate (1991)
Ice Cube delivered death to AmeriKKKa on the path to rebirth. (96/100)
Bald-headed Ice Cube was a man in transition.
Having shorn the processed pathologies of his trademark jheri curl, his creativity was at its most sprawling. It hadn’t quite coalesced into the meticulously calculated craftsmanship of the brush-cut Cube, who would become hip-hop’s first Hollywood mogul. Bald Ice Cube was a comet, illuminating the hip-hop skyline in a fleeting but explosive eruption of light. Death Certificate was the resulting meteor shower. Cube’s sophomore opus careened hot, fast, and relentlessly into the earth’s ill-equipped atmosphere in late 1991.
The treacherous streets of South Central Los Angeles were still fresh enough in Ice Cube’s consciousness to crackle through in every fiery couplet. Simultaneously, the Black empowerment ethos of The Five-Percent Nation, with whom he became affiliated during his post-N.W.A sojourn east, were actively expanding his perspective.
“N*ggas are in a state of emergency,” Cube flatly announces atop the album’s intro, “The Funeral,” en route to laying out Death Certificate’s deceptively simple structure.
