MELT DOWN: The U.K.’s Island Records gave...

MELT DOWN: The U.K.’s Island Records gave Ice Cube two choices recently regarding the release of his controversial “Death Certificate” album in Britain: Delete two tracks from album or find another distributor.

Surprisingly, the defiant rapper--or at least his representatives--agreed to cut “Black Korea,” a diatribe against Korean merchants in Afro-American communities, and “No Vaseline,” a vicious attack on Cube’s former group N.W.A and its manager, Jerry Heller.

Brian Turner, president of Los Angeles-based Priority Records, which released the album in the United States and owns the foreign rights to it, said the concession was made primarily because Britain is such a large market.

“Our only option was to find another distributor, which would have taken too long and ruined the album’s momentum,” he said. “People in the U.K. buy a lot of records and commercially it doesn’t make sense to cut out all those people. . . . Five of the 56 minutes on the album are objectionable to some people. Why remove the entire album from circulation for five minutes?”

Apparently that’s the label’s view, not Ice Cube’s. “He didn’t like those tracks being removed,” Turner said. “He sees the album as a whole unit.”