DEATH CERTIFICATE
THE PREDATOR
LETHAL INJECTION
ALL EMI
After an acrimonious split from NWA in 1989, LA’s Ice Cube recruited East Coast pioneers The Bomb Squad to produce his solo debut, 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. This resulted in a brilliantly wound-up, pissed-off album that found Sadler and Shocklee’s hypertense kineticism pushed to new heights and an on-point Cube flinging hatred in all directions: It’s also indecently funny?the chorus of “Fuck You, Ice Cube!” on “The Nigga Ya Love To Hate” still raises a sardonic chuckle. Death Certificate (1991) was a time-marking exercise, albeit a bruising one which now includes the crucial “Kill At Will” EP (featuring ghetto lament “Dead Homiez”) but ’92’s classic The Predator marks Cube’s greatest achievement to date. A flawlessly paced and produced album which grudgingly acknowledges light (“It Was A Good Day”) as well as dark (“Now I Gotta Wet ‘Cha”), today it stands alongside Cypress Hill’s “Black Sunday” as a pinnacle of early ’90s gangstadelia. Lethal Injection (1993) unfortunately upped the misogyny quota?see “Cave Bitch”?and by this time Cube’s head had been turned by Hollywood and the music shifted into second place. Shame.