Earlier this year there was an odd moment when two very different movie stars passed each other going in opposite directions while, paradoxically, doing exactly the same thing. Baldie ex-bouncer Vin Diesel was rolling out The Pacifier, a family comedy about a Navy Seal guarding kids in suburbia, amid soccer moms and many stinky diapers. Meanwhile, in another part of the multiplex, snarling gangsta rapper Ice Cube was headlining Are We There Yet?, a family comedy about a single man driving his girlfriend’s bratty suburban kids cross-country. Both Diesel and Cube seemed to be chasing an unlikely cinematic dream — their own version of Kindergarten Cop. What this all portends, I dare not speculate.
As for going in opposite directions, well, Diesel was the star of xXx, before abandoning that newly minted faux-007 action franchise (just as he abandoned The Fast and the Furious brand) for the allegedly more solid rewards of the Riddick series. And the new xXx is the Cubular One himself. There he is, leaping over the jailyard wall, grabbing the skids of a chopper and fighting his two-fisted way to freedom and super-agent status. Hot rides, fly bitches, gats in every hand and pocket, and both his scowls – the ”fuck you” and the ”hug me” versions — cranked up to maxi-glower. James Bond? Meet Cube, Ice Cube.
Does CIA chief Porter Goss know about this? Now, either there’s something miraculously subversive about a man who once rapped, ”I wanna kill Sam cuz he’s not my muthafuckin’ uncle!” being cast as the first line of defence for an imperilled America, or this is a hugely successful example of what the Situationists called ”cultural assimilation” taming dissent by absorbing and co-opting it. At the very least, Cube has made a long and arduous journey from near-pariah to Big Whitey’s idea of a solid citizen.
The infamous Cube of yore had a lot of fangs to pull before he made the mainstream. Mainstream movies that is, because part of people’s problem with the old Ice Cube was that he brought his scatological tabloid-nightmare rhymes smack-dab into the mainstream of popular music almost from the moment he picked up a mic. Some of his song titles are the stuff of the Republicans’ sweatiest nightmares: The Wrong Nigga to Fuck With, Fuck tha Police!, We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up (about the Los Angeles riots), and AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. His album cover art was almost comically aggressive; on the cover for Death Certificate, Cube, barely out of his teens, stands over a white corpse on a slab, swathed in the stars and stripes and bearing a toe-tag reading ”Uncle Sam”. No wonder parents and Important White Folks were terrified of him.
But there were reasons their kids liked Cube: he was easily the smartest, fastest, funniest gangsta rapper who ever lived. And with regard to the time and the place that spawned him – South Central Los Angeles in the Bush Snr recession – he was eerily in tune with the moods of the city’s impoverished southern flatlands, virtually abandoned by the city since the Watts uprising 27 years earlier. Thirteen years after the LA riots, Death Certificate – ferocious, unapologetic, undoubtedly racist and anti-Semitic at times, almost utterly nihilistic at others — stands as one of those very rare, albeit deeply flawed, great albums that are essential to our understanding of a seismic sociopolitical moment.
I moved to LA a month before the riots of 1992, and better, I moved to Koreatown, one of the disturbance’s hot spots thanks to misplaced African-American resentment of Korean liquor stores in South Central (a resentment Cube brainlessly fanned with his nastiest song, Black Korea). In that month I read Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, and when I finished it I could only think: ”This town is gonna blow any minute.” And the city duly burned for four days, the flames jumping 20 blocks northwards every hour on the first night.
By 10pm that night I was able to count hundreds of fires all around me from the roof of my building. There were tanks on the street by morning. And the record you heard everywhere at the time was Death Certificate, perfectly encapsulating, warts and all, the spitting rage and frustration palpable in the flatlands.
Hearing it today, in a wildly different political context, it retains its shocking power. In the age of the Patriot Act it sounds almost (cover the children’s ears!) anti-American! Ice Cube later apologised to women, Jews and Korean-Americans and got down to the serious business of building a little island of black economic nationalism in movies and music, an admirable form of that dreaded endeavour, being a role model for your community.
Starring in the sequel to xXx may be small beer for grown-up movie-goers, and Cube is a pretty limited actor, but his determination to do it his way has been exemplary. And you have to love a guy who coined the lyric, ”A bird in the hand / Is worth more than a Bush” — and lived long enough to see it apply to two entirely different cracker-idiots in the same White Man’s House.
So let him be Secret Agent Man. Better a gangsta than a skinhead.
xXx II: The Next Level opens at cinemas on April 29