Can't Stop Won't Stop (55 page)

As prominent leaders like L.A. mayor Tom Bradley and assembly speaker Willie Brown were at the apex of their political power, many of California's African Americans felt that they were losing economic, political and social ground to the emerging Chicano, Latino and Asian-American communities. In strictly representational terms, they were correct. Seventy-five thousand middle-class Blacks had left South Central and Compton for San Bernardino and Riverside during the 1980s, and reverse migration to the New South, particularly the
shining Mecca of Atlanta, was under way. Waves of new immigrants replaced them in the inner city. In 1965, the area was 81 percent Black. By 1991, one in three living in South Central were foreign born, and Latinos were about to surpass Blacks as the numerical majority.

Whites, of course, had long abandoned the Bottoms—physically, economically and emotionally. When communities of color battled for jobs, education, and representation, it was like crumb-snatching. That these fights would flare into interracial violence was as predictable as it was tragic.

For the college-educated, middle-class, rainbow-embracing African-American elite, there was a painful ambivalence. This was not the world they had fought for. For the rest, there was a growing sense of a loss of control that fed into a siege mentality.

The title of one of Chuck D's favorite books, a collection of essays by Black-power generation poet and writer Haki Madhubuti, had posed a provocative question:
Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?
With Chuck's assistance, Cube had begun to respond with
Amerikkka's Most Wanted
's “Endangered Species.”
Death Certificate
was the fully elaborated answer. Underneath it all was the acute fear of being overwhelmed by change, a deep-seated fear of erasure.

For Ice Cube, these fears took the form of older Asian-American immigrant entrepreneurs. Here the lines of race and class and generation and difference all came together. In a gangstacentric view, South Central was becoming Black Korea.

Tension between African Americans and Asian Americans was a major sub-text running through
Death Certificate.
On “Us,” he called for racial solidarity to respond to “Japs grabbing every vacant lot in my ‘hood to build a store and sell they goods”—a sonic analogue to John Singleton's “Seoul to Seoul Realty” billboard in
Boyz N The Hood.
On “Horny Lil' Devil,” a track about Black male emasculation, he metaphorically wiped out the “devils”—white sexual harassers of black women, racists and “fags”—and finished up at the corner store beating down the “Jap” owner. “Black Korea” was the fiery climax.

In Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing
, Korean-American shopkeeper Sonny saves his store from being burned by arguing he, too, is Black. Cube's “Black Korea”
focuses instead on the beginning of that confrontation, creating a parallel between Radio Raheem attempting to purchase twenty batteries for his boombox (“D, motherfucker, D!”), and Cube attempting to purchase a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor. As the music bursts forth, Ice Cube confronts two prejudiced, “Oriental, one penny counting” proprietors who hawk him as he walks through their store. Cube turns and leers at the woman storekeeper, “Bitch, I got a job!” At the song's bridge, the shop erupts into argument when his friends raise their voices in his support.

By now, the original Spike Lee scene has been stripped of its humor, leaving only the raw racial conflict. Then the bass surges back and the song rushes to its conclusion. Cube issues a threat, “Don't follow me up and down your crazy little market, or your little chop-suey ass will be the target of a nationwide boycott.” In a final defiant gesture, he raises the prospect of a racially vengeful conflagration. “Pay respect to the Black fist,” he yells, “or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp! And then we'll see ya, ‘cause you can't turn the ghetto into Black Korea.” The store owner, Sonny, has the last word: “Mother fuck
you!
”

All of this happens in under a minute.

No rap album had ever been as controversial as
Death Certificate.
High-brow magazines that rarely felt compelled to comment on “low” culture seized on the album as an example of rap's depravity. An editorial in
The Economist
invoked Adorno's criticism of jazz as neo-fascistic, evoking “rhythmically obedient” hip-hoppers. “In rap as in rock, rebellion sells,” the editorial read. “Sadly, too few fans distinguish between the rebellious and the reactionary.”
²⁰
In
The New Republic
, David Samuels took this pretzel logic beyond all sense, confusing album-listening with murder. “This kind of consumption—of racist stereotypes, of brutality toward women or even of uplifting tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King—is of a particularly corrupting kind. The values it instills find their ultimate expression in the ease in which we watch young Black men killing each other: in movies, on records and on streets of cities and towns across the country.”
²¹

Three weeks after the album's release, the debate suddenly went supernova. In
Billboard
magazine, editor Timothy White called for record-store chains to boycott the record, writing, “His unabashed espousal of violence against Koreans, Jews and other whites crosses the line that divides art from the advocacy of
crime.”
²²
In a trade magazine that normally avoided controversies over artistic merit or lyrical content, the editorial was extraordinary.
Death Certificate
remains the only album ever singled out for such condemnation in
Billboard
history.

James Bernard, senior editor of
The Source,
defended Ice Cube against calls for boycotts, “Yes, Ice Cube is very angry, and he expresses that anger in harsh, blunt and unmistakable terms. But the source of his rage is very real. Many in the Black community, particularly Los Angeles, Cube's home, feel as if it's open season on Blacks with the Rodney King assault and the recent murder of a young Black girl by a Korean merchant.”
²³
Bernard and other African-American fans understood the fiery conclusion of “Black Korea” as a mythical resolution.

Ice Cube remarked that the song was

inspired by everyday life in the Black community with the Koreans. Blacks don't like them and it's vice versa. The Koreans have a lot of businesses in the Black community. The [Harlins] shooting is just proof of the problem, just another example of their disrespect for Black people. You go in their stores and they think you're going to steal something. They follow you around the store like you're a criminal. They say, “Buy something or get out.” If it hasn't happened to you, you can't know how bad it feels for somebody to make you feel like a criminal when you're in their store and you haven't done anything.
²⁴

He would also say, “ ‘Black Korea' holds the tone of the neighborhood and the feelings of the people.”
²⁵
A UCLA survey of racial attitudes in Los Angeles conducted before and just after the April uprising supported his contention: more than 41 percent of Blacks and 48 percent of Asians felt that it was difficult to get along with the other group. Blacks felt
worse
about Asians after the riots. Asians, too, saw Blacks more negatively.
²⁶

In all the ink spilled over “Black Korea” and
Death Certificate,
none was more measured and poignant than those of young Dong Suh, a hip-hop generation son of a Korean-American store owner. In an editorial for
Asian Week
, he said he was writing to “move away from the issue of censorship and the stereotyping of rap as violent and move toward addressing the core problem.”

Several years ago, a prominent radio personality in Philadelphia, where my family operates a small corner store in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, expressed a similar sentiment. I clearly remember his warning that if Koreans did not respect Blacks, firebombings were likely. . . . When compared to Korean Americans, African Americans are a numerical and political majority. Ice Cube does not realize that as a member of the majority, he wields real power against Koreans.
²⁷

Upon its release on October 31, 1991,
Death Certificate
had advance orders of more than a million copies, making it an instant hit. It was immediately greeted with boycotts.

On November 1, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called upon four major retail record chains to boycott the album, calling it a “a cultural Molotov cocktail” and “a real threat.”
²⁸
In particular, the center took three lines in “No Vaseline” directed specifically at Jerry Heller—”You let a Jew break up my crew,” “You can't be the Niggaz 4 Life crew with a white Jew telling you what to do” and “Get rid of that Devil real simple, put a bullet in his temple”—to be anti-Semitic.

Two days later, the Korean American Coalition (KAC) held its own press conference, issuing a statement jointly signed by a rainbow coalition of civil rights organizations: the Japanese American Citizens League, the Los Angeles Urban League, the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Guardian Angels began pickets in New York and Los Angeles at record stores carrying the album. Korean swap-meet vendors and the Camelot Music chain also joined the boycott.
²⁹

“In the minds of Korean Americans, this is all part of the oppression or unfairness we face. We're constantly trampled on, nobody listens to us, we're constantly seen through distorted images in the media,” said executive director Jerry Yu. “We're not really battling against Ice Cube, all we're trying to do is get him to understand our concerns, get him to respond to our issues.”

But the record went on to sell well over a million and a half records. Perhaps, as Ice Cube had bragged, he was the “wrong nigga to fuck with.” A month before, Soon Ja Du had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of
Latasha Harlins. As they awaited the Du sentencing, Korean-American leaders worried about the firebombings and the racial tensions. They decided that they needed to take a stand against “Black Korea.” Yumi Jhang-Park, the executive director of the Korean American Grocers' Association (KAGRO), said, “This is a life-and-death situation. What if someone listened to the song and set fire to a store?”
³⁰

But Korean-American activists were unable to reach the mainstream press with their message. When
Entertainment Tonight
interviewed Yu regarding the boycott, they videotaped him for over thirty minutes, yet the story only featured him briefly, reading lyric excerpts from “Black Korea.” Instead, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center was shown explaining the boycott for most of the segment. It was clear to Korean-American leaders that they would have to try a different tack. KAGRO decided to hit Cube where it hurt him the most.

In 1987, McKenzie River Corporation of San Francisco had introduced a new forty-ounce malt liquor product that it called St. Ides to compete with Pabst's Olde English 800 brand, better known as “8 Ball.” Soon McKenzie River and Pabst were scrumming like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, with the urban communities of Los Angeles as the key battleground.

No one had ever cared what malt liquor tasted like, just how fast they could get trashed after drinking it. St. Ides's main selling point was its 8 percent alcohol content, compared to 6 percent in a bottle of 8 Ball and 3.5 percent in an average can of beer. But how to get this message out?

In 1988, McKenzie River went to KDAY Music Director Greg Mack and DJ Pooh to recruit rappers to record sixty-second music commercials. For one of the first spots, Pooh called King Tee and they revived Mixmaster Spade's old street classic, “Do You Want to Go to the Liquor Store?” Rakim, EPMD, Yo-Yo, the Geto Boys and many others recorded “Crooked I” commercials. It was good money; King Tee says he made $50,000, and got all the St. Ides he wanted delivered right to his apartment door. When excited listeners began requesting the spots more than songs in KDAY's regular playlist, McKenzie River knew it had a winning marketing plan. In 1990, they landed pro–Black Muslim Ice Cube as
their primary endorser. By the time
Death Certificate
was released, St. Ides was the ‘hood's malt liquor of choice.

KAGRO alone represented 3,500 stores in Southern California alone, had over 20,000 members who generated $2 billion in annual sales, and controlled roughly 7 percent of the national market. They demanded that McKenzie River withdraw all promotional materials and commercials featuring Ice Cube and to sever its relationship with him. On November 7, they reached an impasse in negotiations. McKenzie River declined KAGRO's demands, saying it would financially damage their small company. KAGRO ordered its stores to return deliveries and cease orders. Yang II Kim, the national president of KAGRO, expressed sympathy in the
Korea Times
for McKenzie River's business worries, but pointedly mentioned that the company had chosen the wrong rapper to work with.
³¹

At its peak, between five thousand and six thousand stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond and Washington, D.C., honored the boycott.
³²
On November 16, McKenzie River finally conceded to KAGRO's demands, ending the use of all ads that featured Ice Cube and agreeing not to use him for new promotions until the issue was resolved to KAGRO's satisfaction. They also agreed to create a scholarship fund and a jobs program for Blacks with profits from the sales of St. Ides. KAGRO officially ended its boycott on November 20, three weeks after the release of
Death Certificate
.
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