In 1989, The World's Most Dangerous MC Ice Cube left the N.W.A due to pay differences with the group manager, Jerry Heller. The rapper walks into the dark towards his solo debut and ready to deny a crowd that expects his lonely and inexorable fall, while the group without him can go as strong as before.
For the production of his debut album, he still wants Dr. Dre, but Eazy-E's Ruthless blocks the producer and the NWA manager poses a veto: since there's no hip-hop producer up to the doctor in the West Coast scene of the early nineties, Jackson's choice therefore falls on Sir Jinx, Dr. Dre's cousin.
Ice Cube moved to New York and points on the Public Enemy production team, the Bomb Squad, to complete his album and most of his production comes from this galactic formation. The soundscape created by the The Bomb Squad is excellent, one of the best of the year, it makes this effort fantastic which presents a wealth of excellent samples layered to compose a hard and violent sound, epic East Coast.
The other immense strength of the album is, of course, the excellent lyricism of Ice Cube. His lyrics are fun and intelligent, he uses some of them from bars previously written and thought for Eazy-E, and he performs them with anger and in a direct, raw, bad, ruthlessly hardcore way. He builds cuts that are deep and kills them one by one with a very varied delivery, good vocabulary, internal rhymes, and a multi-syllabic flow, extraordinary, unstoppable and dope, in a mix of political, socio-conscious and gangsta that is superlative and prevails over the entire hip hop scene of 1990.
He chooses specific themes, deals with and tells about life in the poorest black communities, deepening the many problems they face and which are devastating them: the violence of street gangs, poverty, drug abuse, unemployment, racism and black-on-black violence. The MC also tackles gender relations in a brazenly sexist cut with rapper Yo-Yo, in an attempt to mend his previous deeply misogynist tracks: Ice Cube is pissed off at everyone, especially women, but also attacks radio stations, denounces the prejudices established by television towards African-Americans (in particular with the title track, which refers to the homonymous tv program), the same African-Americans who have negative white influences and institutional racism.
There are some appearances of Public Enemy, but this important social document marks the rise and final arrival of one of the best and angriest rappers ever: the album isn't a concept, it's wonderfully linked together by the music provided by the Bomb Squad, perfect for the rapper's flow and delivery, but it's the heaviest and most violent album ever until that moment. At 20 years old, Ice Cube is the MC of the year, he's at his best, kills everything and everyone here, shows skills that veterans have left at home, pulling out some of his greatest bars from whole notebooks of new rhymes and performing with a devastating powerful delivery, surpassing the same Chuck D.
Amazingly smoothness, original and timeless, this record undeniably proves the immense talent of Ice Cube, denies critics, and catapults the MC among the rap stars: without of weak points, it's easily one of the best debut albums ever in hip-hop, peak for the nineties and for the socio-political genre, and combined with his next album, it represents the pinnacle of the gangsta rap of the nineties and of the Ice Cube career. 10/10.
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